Is your website getting the job done?  Are you getting the results you want?  Do the results improve over time?

If you’re not able to answer that question with an unqualified yes, then it might be time to change your approach.

What is Growth-Driven Design?

Growth-Driven Design (GDD) is all about data. Instead of designing a website based on designer concepts or guess about what might work, it’s about continuously testing and evolving your site to maximize your results.

Instead of your website being a static site that changes products or content blocks or gets overhauled every few years, your site is living and continually being optimized for conversions.

How Growth-Driven Design Works

GDD significantly shortens the time to launch. It can even start with an MVP experience (Minimally Viable Product). As users interact with the site, data is collected. By analyzing what works and what doesn’t, the site can be improved over time.

Traditional Website Development

In a traditional setting, website design takes a significant time investment, up-front costs, and too often isn't ready on time. There’s a "set it and forget it" approach that can be a high-risk venture. If you’re relying on intuition,  user acceptance can be unpredictable.

A study of more than 6,000 brands showed that marketers typically redesign their website every 18 to 24 months. Do you think things have changed a bit in our world in the last 18-24 months?  

Even after all that time, when it’s done, a third of marketers are unhappy with the results.

Growth-Driven Design Development

GDD is a smarter approach. It allows you to launch quickly. This can reduce your upfront cost and spread your investment over time. As you gather more user data, the tweaks you make are based on facts so that each evolution improves your results. As markets and buyer tastes change, you can quickly iterate, launch, analyze, and optimize. You don’t have to wait another two years to change something that needs to be changed now.

GDD websites typically cut the time to launch by 50% or more. This time savings allows you more time to analyze and tweak. Before a traditional website has even been launched, you will already have more data and user interactions to guide decisions.

Brands incorporating Growth-Driven Design principles see measurable improvements month-by-month. By making data-driven decisions, your site continually performs better.

How Growth-Driven Design Is Changing Marketing Strategy (Not Just Website Design)

Growth-Driven Design is more than just a strategy to improve a brand’s website. It’s an integrated approach for marketing and sales. The data gathered impacts content development, marketing materials, and the way sales teams approach the customer journey.

Here’s an example of how the process might work. Let’s say you’re trying to get visitors to download a whitepaper. GDD impacts each step in the process from awareness to conversion. By testing versions of the marketing, the copy lines, the design, and the placement on your website, you get a better idea of what it takes to drive people to a landing page.

Tweaks to the landing page can be measured to see what leads to more people downloading the target content. The content can be measured to see which leads to conversions. Each step is designed with a test, tweak, and optimize mentality to maximize the results you want.

GDD delivers better-qualified leads. Sales teams know what converts visitors, which can help with their sales tactics. By understanding the content, style, and design that motivates action from site visitors, it takes the guesswork out of the process.

For example, if they know that a particular piece of content on the website seems to lead to more conversions, they can create a similar offline version to share with prospects when they are at the right place in the buyer journey.

Growth-Driven Design can create a roadmap for the sales team to optimize their inbound and outbound marketing efforts.

How to Get Started with Growth-Driven Design

GDD is typically a three-step process.

1. Analysis
2. Launch
3. Improve

It begins with an analysis of your user base, in conjunction with your sales and marketing teams. It may include tactics such as developing buyer personas and customer journey mapping to better understand how to target and drive prospects through the sales funnel. You need to understand customer needs, pain points, and what you need to do to solve their problems. This is a critical step in any digital marketing strategy.

During the launch phase, your website will likely outperform what you have right now. That’s because it will take advantage of the most recent search engine algorithm updates, such as speed, security, and mobility. However, it’s not your final design. It becomes the platform from which you can build and optimize.

As you collect data, you can start to identify high-impact actions that can be improved or evolved. There’s no waiting for the next redesign – which may be two years down the road – to fix underperforming areas.

Learn More About Growth-Driven Design With Rizen

Rizen is a GDD-certified Digital Marketing Agency that can help you build a Growth-Driven Design marketing strategy to optimize your website, marketing, and sales performance.

If you’d like to know more about Growth-Driven Design for measurable, steady brand growth, contact the experts at Rizen today.