Discover Growth-Driven Design for HubSpot websites

Conversely, a badly formulated goal would read something like this: 

You can also ask yourself the following questions when digging deep into what it is you really want from this redesign:

• What performance goals you are aiming to achieve through your website?
• What does your historical data tell you about how these goals are currently being achieved?
• Where would you like to improve?

How will your action now impact your goals later? We recommand thinking carefully about your company’s values during this part of the process.

This is an excellent way to help prevent the business from getting greedy or targeting goals that haven’t ever been in the makeup of your company: rooting everything in your mission statement will help you stay grounded through this time of evolution.

Step 2: Buyer persona review or creation

Hopefully, you’ve been putting your buyer personas – semi-fictional representations of your customers – at the core of your marketing, sales and service activity for a long time – but if you haven’t, don’t worry. We’ve written plenty of advice on how to build them and even offer a quick 5-Minute Persona Builder for free to help you get started.

Your website needs to feed your business objectives, but it needs to lead with the priorities of your customers, too. This is an essential step. Growth-driven design only works if you’re completely focused on your customers and their needs – indeed, this is the inbound way, full stop. You can’t expect to run effective campaigns, or launch a high-performing website if you aren’t willing to learn who your customers are, what their pain points are, and what they want. 

Step 3: Audit

Now that you’re equipped with your up-to-date buyer personas, it’s time to pay some closer attention to your data. You’ll have a wealth of this already available to you from your existing site – so use it:

Step 4: Fundamental assumptions

By now, you should be feeling pretty secure in your user knowledge, based on the research available to you. You need to use this information to help develop your fundamental assumptions. These are a closer look at your user and working out why they behave the way they do, what they need and how your products can help.

Here are a few examples of questions you can ask yourself to see what your fundamental assumptions are for your customers:

• What is the job the customer is trying to get done?
• What activity or event pushed them into searching for your solution?
• What different devices and locations will be used to access your site?
• How does your company solve the pain points or unmet needs of customers?
• What information are your users searching for on your site?

What is the unique value proposition for each product, service and offering that you can offer customers which other companies don’t?

You will use these assumptions to explain user behaviour, which will help with the global and page strategy step that comes next. 

Step 5: Global and page strategy

The final step in strategy development will see you put together a two-part strategy:

• Part one focuses on a site-wide “global” strategy for your entire site.
• Part two focuses on specific page-by-page strategy of your site.

Wishlist Development

Before you can create your launchpad website, you need to create a wishlist. This consists of all the requirements that your team can possibly think of to improve the existing website, all collected in one place.

HubSpot simply defines it as:

The kinds of ideas your team needs to produce include:

• Key impactful website sections and pages
• Marketing assets, tools and resources
• Specific features, modules and functionality
• Design elements
• Changes in experience based on devices, country and beyond.

It’s recommended to run this ideas session for between 3-6 hours to ensure everyone has their say, has the opportunity to question one another, and so a comprehensive list can be compiled. You might have in excess of 200 ideas for the website across your team, from additional products pages, to new functionalities, such as chatbots. But, in order for your launchpad to work effectively, not all of these fantastic new ideas can be implemented all in one go: you need to prioritise. The next step is to initiate the 80/20 method. Decide which 20% of these ideas are going to create 80% of the impact: how can you be time and effort savvy, to implement changes that can get up and running quickly? It’s up to your team to work out which elements will be in this final, slimmed down 20% list using fundamental assumptions, hypothesis statements and data-collection tools.

What is a launchpad site?

• It’s a method that builds a website in small incremental, yet constant, steps.
• It encourages the designers and marketers involved to empathise with the user, observing their behaviours and patterns, then tweaking the design accordingly.
• It focuses on providing users with a cogent, easy and persuasive user journey.
• The goal isn’t to produce a complete website tied up in a bow after six months, but to start showing progress much sooner with a constantly evolving, quick-start site – or a launch pad

As the name suggests, the launchpad is merely the first version of your website – the groundwork from which all the fantastic stuff to come will ‘launch’. GrowthDrivenDesign.com defines it as:

How does it make your business stand out from the rest?

A customer-focused business makes a better business. In the modern landscape, customer service is everything, and this doesn’t just include the way your team communicates and interacts with customers, but the experience users have when they visit your website.

A website is often the first ‘sales person’ a visitor will meet from your team – and it can be a make or break experience. If you’ve got an enjoyable, easy-to-use website that looks beautiful and predicts the kind of service the visitor might want, it’s far more likely they’ll consider your product over a competitor’s outdated, confusing site.

In a 2017 survey, 350 agencies from around the world reported the impact their clients have seen using Growth-Driven Design vs. traditional web design:

For most businesses, the speed with which a new website can be up and running is a huge draw for approaching a GDD redesign. This means your employees and users alike will benefit from minimum disruption. Once the most urgent elements are replaced, you can start monitoring their efficacy straight away, looking at how users are accessing the new content and start tweaking pages accordingly (while the more heavy-duty work still continues in the background).

Remember: Your launch pad website won’t be perfect when it’s launched – no website ever is – but the basis of this process is to make continuous improvements over time, rather than setting a complete site live and leaving it as it is – problems and all – until its next (possibly annual) review.

As mentioned in previous chapters, this is the time to monitor the changes you’ve decided to make initially, and build on these changes – adding more and more functions into your site from your wishlist – as the months go by. There are four parts to this process which you will repeat over and over. They are:

• Planning
• Developing
• Learning
• Transferring knowledge

The GDD cycle is really the simplest step: it’s a recurring process that you will soon get into a rhythm of repeating until you’ve got it down to a fine art. The most challenging parts – the strategy and launchpad stages – are done! Now it’s time to go forth and improve.

Step 1 - Plan

Aim: To identify the most impactful items for your website right now and plan to introduce the top ones into the current cycle.

Method:

Use the following points as a checklist, ticking off each one when you’ve achieved it on your pillar page.

1. Performance vs. goals

   How is your current site performing? How do these results contrast with the goals you set out to accomplish at the start? Taking a look at any discrepancies between where you are and where you want to be will be a great way to decipher where the opportunities are for you to make improvements.

2. Additional data and research

   By reviewing your performance vs. goals, you’ll learn a lot – but coming out of the last cycle, there’s likely to be additional data and research needed. This is to help you clarify the action items you should add to your wishlist next.

3. Learn from sales and marketing

   As you end an old cycle and plan to move into a new one, it’s important to speak to your marketing and sales teams. They will have key takeaways to share with the team that no-one else knows about – it’s likely these discussions will uncover gems of information that can be turned into meaningful actions in the next cycle.

4. Brainstorm and prioritise

   It’s time for another brainstorming session. To rinse the first cycle dry of all the valuable insights your team has learnt, it’s best to get everyone back together. Ask for research, evidence and results from everyone, and synthesise all this intelligence together to decide together if there are new action items you want to add to your wishlist.
   
   It’s likely, as a result of this meeting, that you will want to focus on one of the following:

5. Prioritise wishlist items

   Now you’ve got a fresh, updated list of action items, informed by real findings from your last cycle, you will organise them into priority order. Assign them with a high, medium or low grading based on what level of impact they will have on the user.

6. Plan GDD sprint cycle

   Using your newly prioritised list, it’s time to choose the most impactful items you will implement in your next sprint cycle. The number of items you pick will depend on how long the cycle is: it’s wise to pick fewer items and really focus on producing excellent results with them, than taking on too much and doing a mediocre job of them all.
   
   Top tip: If you feel you’ve completed all action points to a high standard ahead of your sprint finishing, select more items from your wishlist to get ahead.

Step 2 - Develop

Aim: Now it’s time for you and your team to get down to the business of implementing those key action items you’ve selected and setting them live on your site – this is where things get really exciting!

Method:

1. Responsibility

   Decide who in your team is going to be responsible for implementing each action point in this cycle, meaning time is used efficiently, toes aren’t stepped on and every item is given equal resources to help it succeed.

2. Treat each action point as an experiment

   To see the impact each point has on the performance of the website overall, each must be broken down and monitored individually. What is the actual outcome compared to the desired outcome? You can’t validate what you don’t track, so ensure your data tracking metrics are set in place before anything goes live.

3. Marketing support

   Once your experiments have gone live, it’s a good idea to support these changes to your website with a marketing campaign. Alerting users to your new features, showing that you listen and react to their feedback, is a surefire way to garner positive attention and engagement. Try using social media, pay per click, and blogging strategies to drive traffic to these new sections on the site – this will also help boost your data During the develop stage, work closely with your marketing team to develop these campaign strategies and any assets that might be needed to promote the new features you’re working on – it is their expertise that will really drive engagement with your evolving website.

Step 3 - Learn

Aim: To evaluate the performance of what you’ve implemented and learn what you can from the results – how are your visitors interacting with your website?

Method:

1. Allow time

   After your experiments have had enough time to run and collect data, you can then move to the learn phase. There’s no point drawing information about your users from two days’ worth of activity: set yourselves a realistic goal – a week or two weeks – to gather substantial data upon which you can base your data.

2. Accuracy of your hypothesis

   Go back to your hypothesis statements. Based on the information you have collected, you can now validate or disprove these hypotheses: did your changes have the impact you expected? Why so or why not? What other effects – maybe unforeseen – did the actions have? You can now learn more about your site visitors too, decipher the things you now know that you didn’t one-two weeks ago.

3. Sharing this information

   It’s no good only you knowing how accurate your hypothesis statements were and new information about your users – this is valuable stuff that needs sharing with your wider team. This is best done in a central location where everyone can access it: you need to make it as easy as possible for everyone across your organisation to find and use it regularly.
   
   Once you set up a structured system for results sharing post cycle, team members will get into a routine of using it, plus it becomes easier to compare cycle on cycle and search for trends.

4. Acting on your findings

   It’s now down to your team to search for patterns across the data you’ve accumulated – particularly in the behaviour of your users and how you might be able to innovate other aspects of your site to improve their experience.
   
   One of the tests you might have conducted could be two versions of your landing page: one which uses real quotes from you customers as testimonials, one which uses the logos of clients which you then have to click on to find out more.
   
   Your results might have illustrated that there was more activity on the page with the testimonials than the logos, meaning that your visitors are more moved by genuine feedback from previous customers than a who’s who of prior clients.

Step 4 - Transfer & Repeat

Aim: It’s time to review what you’ve learnt from each completed action item and brainstorm how this information might be useful to others across your team. You need to transfer your learning to other parts of the business in order to complete this stage in the cycle.

Method:

1. Learn & share

   If you discover social proof (testimonials and case studies) are influential for your visitors and encourage conversions, this isn’t only useful to your marketing team but across the business.
   
   As a result of this analysis, you wouldn’t only adapt your landing page accordingly, but you could advise your sales reps to build more testimonials and case studies into their time with customers as you know this is the valuable, persuasive input visitors are looking for.

2. Go back to the start

   Once you’ve completed the first cycle with one set of action items, go back to the beginning and start planning your next cycle. And so this format repeats itself over and over again until it becomes a natural, automatic part of your GDD process.
   
   The objective each time is to deliver a better end result, progressively learning more about your website visitors. The more you work through your wishlist, the more cycles you will complete and the more effectively targeted your website is going to become.