Increase Your ROI by Switching to GDD
If you are a business owner, you are most likely to agree that the polar vortex isn’t the only thing sending chills down your spine—a one-time web design cost is capable of achieving the same effect!
What’s the alternative, you ask? We’d be lying if we said there’s a way to spend less on web design, but what if there’s a hack that spreads out the cost over a period of time AND increases return on investment? It could be in the form of higher traffic, more leads, or even a higher closing rate, depending on your goals.
This hack is otherwise known as the growth-driven design (GDD) strategy and we preach its advantageousness over traditional web design through this blog series. As promised in our last blog, we continue to pick Luke Summerfield’s brain on GDD’s applicability to the B2B industry, and specifically, to manufacturers.
Getting straight to the point, Luke, how would B2B manufacturers relate to a strategy like GDD?
Luke: All manufacturers want their assembly line to be as efficient and optimized as possible, producing all components, parts, and assemblies in an effective manner. When the time comes to upgrade the production line, let’s say they purchase new equipment, such as CNC machinery. Delivery day comes and this beautiful, contemporary machine sits on the production floor. It looks fantastic and holds much promise. Ready to go, right? Not quite. Basic knowledge of CNC machining might enable you to turn it on and get the oil flowing, but will that machine work right away to its highest potential? Straight from the factory prior to programming it and calibrating it to the specifications you need—some of them shifting from job to job—it will be inefficient, and may cause bottlenecks. As a manufacturer, you know that you need to put a trained tech or engineer on it to optimize it, to tweak it, or to adjust it so that it works well for each specific production requirement to meet the needs of your customers.
And the same logic applies to the manufacturer’s website. Can you build a website that’s going to perform better, look better? Of course. But, is it going to be as optimized as possible right from the start? Probably not. Websites, as we’ve found from doing this for so many years, require their own type of perpetual recalibration. You may have a website that looks great, but GDD experts have the knowledge and strategy to replace it with one that looks and performs better. It will need to be continuously tweaked and optimized as well, just like your engineers and techs tend to your precise machinery to optimize efficiency and enhance overall customer satisfaction.
If implementing GDD costs about the same as traditional web design, or more, compared to an inbound marketing plan, why is GDD ultimately a more lucrative option?
Luke: Visualize two buckets in regards to GDD: one for the risks; the other for the benefits. The first bucket represents the risks associated with the traditional process. One element to understand is that even if the results remain unchanged (total visits, lead conversion rates, etc.), GDD website design (and redesign) moves along a lot faster. Because you progress in phases, you get an optimized, working website sooner, which reduces the time to value. You end up spending less money and resources up front, and the costs are spread out over time. Your web design project stays in scope, it gets launched on time, and you don’t have all those headaches associated with traditional design. Even if, at the end of the day, you end up getting the same results, you’ll have a contemporary new look and efficient user interface to enhance the user experience, making that GDD risk bucket not so risky, and worth your time and energy.
Beyond the risks, you have the second bucket of GDD benefits to consider. Continuous improvement is intrinsic to the GDD approach. One very important distinction between GDD and traditional web design is that we will not create a website and forget it for two years. With GDD, we design a “launchpad” site, getting your deliverable up and running with a quicker time to value. Obviously we want to get your company’s website (products, services, brand messaging) out in the user’s hands and drive value from it quickly, versus waiting around for the entire website to be complete for another six-plus months. What happens at this point is that while other aspects of the website continue to be built, we are also able to rely on current data from site visitors to inform us on the next steps. This continuous improvement provides the benchmarks and informs the processes we need to implement to meet the needs of your customers and prospects, garnering better results month over month.
Continue following this blog series to read more about:
- The most common pushback in adopting GDD
- Why marketing agencies and clients in the B2B manufacturing space are reluctant to pursue GDD
The simplest of tools can solve some of the most complex problems if the right strategy is used to carry out the operation. With growth-driven design, web design will cease to be the nightmare you constantly try to evade for as long as possible. Not sure if your website needs a design makeover? (And, by the way: if it is more than two years old—it’s already outdated.) Take our short growth-driven design assessment to find out.
