When you launch a website you want to maximise your revenue opportunities. But how can you make the most of your chances? Combining insights from your marketing and sales strategies with a responsive web design gives you the best chance of success.
Web design is important because it determines your users’ experience every time they visit your site. If you make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for, they’re more likely to buy your products or services. And they’ll be happy to repeat the process again and again.
Aligning web design with sales and marketing has the potential to transform your users’ experience. Your marketing team understands the psychology, behaviours and habits of your customers; while sales understand your clients’ pains and motivations because they meet them face-to-face.
To make the most of your business opportunities, your strategic sales and marketing decisions must be aligned with your web design. With this approach, you’ll see higher revenues, more effective marketing campaigns, and shorter sales cycles.
The five cornerstones below explain how:
- A responsive website architecture
- Effective data analysis
- Content aligned with your users’ needs
- Effective calls to action
- Website development through Growth Driven Design (GDD)
can help your business thrive in the competitive digital world. Read on to find out more.
1. Responsive Website Architecture
When you start to plan your website, begin by working out your site’s architecture – that is, what pages you will include, and the journey your customers will take when they buy your products or services. Make moving from one page to the next as intuitive as possible.
Your user experience (UX) is paramount. If it’s easy for your users to find the information they need, they’ll stay on your site and explore. If it’s hard for them to find what they’re looking for, they’ll go somewhere else.
Include basic pages that give information about your company background, the products or services you offer, your contact details and (if appropriate) the people who work in your team. Your company blog is a great way for customers to find out further information about your products and services, so make sure it’s easy to find from your home page.
Think carefully about how your customers will move down the sales and marketing funnel as they browse your site, first looking for information, then searching for more in-depth facts, and finally committing to buying from you.
Make it obvious how users can find out more at each stage, with clear calls to action (CTAs) throughout your content (more on this later).
2. Effective Analysis of Data
Once your basic site architecture is in place, it’s important to set up data-gathering software to track how well your site converts interested visitors into buyers.
Google’s Keyword Planner Tool allows your marketing team to research keywords that users are using to find websites like yours. When you identify the keywords that are relevant to your business, you can tailor the content on your site to match what your customers are looking for (more on this in my next point).
Automated marketing software will provide data on how users arrive at your site, the most popular pages and content they read, and how they navigate from page to page as they move down the sales and marketing funnel.
This information enables you to tailor your website to your user’s needs. You can place popular content prominently on your home page, move you call to action buttons to get more conversions or troubleshoot pages where you have a high bounce rate.
Likewise, CRM software is an essential way to store and track the contact details that your users provide in exchange for your marketing content. The data shows which content is most effective at converting visitors into leads, and which customers go on to buy your products or services.
3. Content That Aligns with Your Users’ Needs
Armed with the insights provided by your data-tracking software, your strategic sales and marketing plan will produce easy-to-find content that includes the keywords most relevant to your users. This will ensure your content aligns with their needs.
Once visitors have arrived on your site, your web design should make it easy to explore different types of content as seamlessly as possible. Make sure your web pages are compatible with a range of browsers and they load quickly (use Google’s Page Speed Insights to check), especially on mobile, so users don’t click away.
You should start with a variety of easy-to-find informational content, including blogs, videos and infographics that match the interest level of your users. CTAs should move customers to subpages where they are encouraged to give their contact details in exchange for more in-depth information.
As you move down the marketing funnel to consideration and decision levels, content such as white papers, case studies and detailed product pages can be very effective at nurturing leads and driving users to contact your sales team or buy from your online shop.
4. Effective Calls to Action
As your users move through the buying journey they click on CTAs that are placed next to your website’s content. This means your CTAs are the most important part of any digital content you produce.
By aligning your teams’ sales and marketing insights with intuitive web design you can make your CTAs as effective as possible. Start by placing a CTA on the top right-hand corner of each page, where eyes naturally drift as you read.
Then, position CTAs regularly within the anchor text of your content. Research has shown that between 83% and 93% of leads generated from a post come from anchor text CTAs (hyperlinks positioned between paragraphs in the main text) or from internal link CTAs (hyperlinks that offer more information on an aspect of the post).
If you really want to stay ahead of the game, you could incorporate smart CTAs into your web design. Smart CTAs are changed depending on the person viewing the page, based on interests, location, pages viewed already, items or services bought before, and so on. Unsurprisingly, personalised CTAs actually convert 42% more visitors than basic calls-to-action.
The least effective CTAs are found at the end of an article, generating only 6% of leads. So the most effective design layout is to place CTAs in a variety of locations on your web pages and use automated marketing software to identify which locations convert most leads.
5. Website Development Through Growth Driven Design (GDD)
Once you have aligned your sales and marketing strategy with your website design you will need an effective design model to keep up with the ever-changing digital environment. The Growth Driven Design approach allows your developers to adjust your website’s design iteratively in response to your user’s behaviour.
Instead of major website redesigns every two years with little change in between, GDD enables you to develop your website bit by bit, using a series of Agile sprint cycles to improve features and content in response to user data.
GDD works gradually to allow you to test the insights from sales and marketing and incorporate evidence-based improvements into your web design, enabling you to continuously improve your UX.
Because this approach to website design is based on continual data analysis, it’s easier to make decisions about which changes provide the best return on investment (ROI). With a greater focus on UX, your design, sales and marketing will become more responsive to your users’ needs, delivering a greater number of qualified leads that convert into revenue.
If you’d like more information on how to incorporate your marketing and sales strategies with your website design, download this helpful Guide to Align Sales and Marketing.
