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CREATING YOUR GROWTH-LED WEBSITE: OUTSOURCING VS. DO IT YOURSELF

For most of us, building a website isn’t particularly easy. There’s the daunting prospect of fiddling around with code, picking images (be it organising custom illustrations or choosing stock images), building forms and ensuring the pages have tracking codes. Thankfully, modern website builders and CMS options mean everyone can build great websites without designers, developers or agencies.

With simple drag-and-drop editors and pre-built templates you would be surprised what you can achieve on your own. HubSpot’s CMS Hub even allows you to accept payments, create intranets, customer portals and more.

But there are other considerations. The following table outlines some of the advantages and disadvantages of each method and some of the things to think about when you make your decision. While most of the language used in this section relates to creating a growth-led website for the first time, the advice and considerations apply equally to website redesigns.

What is a CMS and why it helps you decide whether to outsource your website or go it alone?

A CMS is a content management system that helps you create a website without needing code. A CMS is more than just a website builder (WiX, Squarespace) as it gives you more freedom to create, manage and modify your website.

With a CMS you can completely customise your website with unlimited possibilities including rich multimedia, plugins and integrations. You simply upload your content and media to the back-end of the CMS and publish it to your live site. The back-end is super simple — just like using a drag and drop editor or Microsoft Word — and the front end is whatever you want it to be, but most websites use premade templates and themes.

The advanced functionality of a CMS makes it easy to choose over a standard website builder, and much easier to build and manage your own site. We prefer a CMS for ourselves and our clients because we can integrate the CMS with marketing automation tools to deliver a more personalised web experience for known visitors. All of the growth tactics outlined in the guide are possible with a CMS, but not with a website builder.

How a CMS makes building a website easier

CMS systems were built to simplify the process of building websites. Designed with marketers and business owners in mind (not developers), they’ve made it much simpler to create, update and tinker with websites than ever before — and without needing any internal technical talent or outsourced agencies.

Here’s how a CMS makes it easy for you to make and modify websites:

1. Easy Access and Collaboration

Anyone in your team can have access and you can all collaborate at the same time. You can give responsibility for specific pages or campaigns to others, upskill the entire team to reduce your workload and easily see what others are working on.

2. Simple Updates

No more emails, calls or tickets to your external developers or agencies, and no more waiting around for simple site changes. With a CMS you can fix errors, update copy, refresh images and deploy new pages quickly and easily.

3. Templates

With a CMS you can template every page on your website so it’s easy to add new pages when you need. You can have standard blog, industry, testimonial, campaign landing pages and so much more. It means you don’t need a designer and don’t need to start from scratch each time.

4. Blogs and Scheduling

As content marketing become more and more important to your overall growth strategy, you’ll need a system that helps you blog quickly. That means easy layouts, headlines, linking and SEO optimisation tips. Most CMS systems will feature inbuilt SEO tools or there will be plugins that you can add to the CMS that help improve the likelihood of your articles ranking well on Google.

THE ADVANCED WEBSITE ELEMENTS YOU NEED FOR MORE TRAFFIC AND MORE LEADS

A basic website is better than no website, but a growth-led website is better than any other website. When you prioritise bespoke customer journeys, valuable content and optimised lead capture, you get leads, not just traffic. But what’s the difference?

Basic websites are like catalogues or interactive brochures. Visitors browse your website and read the content you’ve written and get in touch with you if it appeals to them. Growth-led websites are like conversations. Visitors interact with calculators, guides, checklists and you (via live chat), they download content that helps them solve their pain points, they ask for consultations and they demo your product. They get in touch with you because you’ve built interactive tools and content that give them value.

In addition to high quality content, growth-led websites feature advanced marketing techniques that help you convert more leads. Here’s how you can get more leads from your website using growth-led website elements.

Using bespoke customer journeys and personalisation on your website

Everyone who visits your website is different. They’ll have different needs, different pain points and different motivations. Their business will be in a different industry, they’ll be of a different size and they’ll research products or services differently from others.

Therefore, it’s important that your website has multiple customer journeys to deliver an experience that is personalised for each of your visitors (or buyer personas). Your website content, downloadable resources and calls to action should change based on the website visitor. You can do that by using smart content in your website builder or CMS or by personalising the resources and calls to action on each industry or segment webpage you use to target key visitors.

The first step in personalising your customer journeys is to create buyer personas. A buyer persona is essentially a hypothetical website visitor that represents your most valuable customer. You give them a name, personality traits, pain point and buying behaviours and create content and website journeys that are likely to resonate.

If you haven’t created buyer personas for your business, our persona generator is the perfect place to start.

Here’s an example of how a personalised customer journey could generate more leads. In our example, the website is for an accountant who specialises in hospitality businesses.

1. Hospitality Industry Subpage

• • Unless you have strong brand awareness in your market, most website journeys start on an industry page or an industry specific blog.

  • On our industry page for hospitality businesses we’re going to include the services we can provide (but phrased as benefits for the website visitor). For example, “Optimise you menu’s profitability and eliminate waste with our costing consultation”

  • Within the page we’ll feature several offers in an attempt to capture the lead’s details. If we can capture the lead’s details, we can personalise the journey even more. For example, on our page we’ll offer a one-page guide on the Covid-19 relief options for hospitality businesses and an eBook on the best hospitality pivots around the world.

  • Once the visitor has downloaded a piece of content we can nurture them with relevant emails, and if they visit the website again we can swap out the resources for different resources that they haven’t seen (or downloaded yet) and include a bottom of the funnel offer of a free consultation. We can even use their name and company name in the calls to action. For example, “Why franchising is the smart play for Pete’s Pizza”.

  • Note, there’s a fine line between being clever and being creepy when you personalise calls to action. We recently wrote about how to strike the balance in this blog piece.

2. Homepage

• • For returning customers, we can completely redesign your homepage and remove the content that’s not relevant for hospitality businesses. We’ll still keep generic power statements and proof points, but we’ll look to focus on our hospitality propositions.

  • We’ll also pack our logo wall (i.e. the logos of existing customers that you use as social proof) with hospitality customers.

  • We’ll highlight hospitality case studies and video testimonials.

In addition to personalising our website experience, we’ll also use automated emails to help convert the visitor from lead to customer.

Using landing pages to generate more leads

Put simply, a landing page is a very specific page of your website that is built to address a particular campaign, offer, customer pain point or industry but it’s not included in your core website navigation. For example, you might need a landing page to giveaway a BBQ for one lucky website visitor who books a sales discovery call with your team. The promotion is time-bound, so it makes sense to host it on a landing page.

Landing pages work best as very specific destinations for ad campaigns and calls to action. Visitors expect seamless web experiences, so if they click on your ad or offer advertising a specific promotion or piece of content, they expect to see that promotion or content immediately. They don’t expect to arrive at your homepage and have to find the promotion or content themselves.

They’re effective too. Research from HubSpot suggests that the average conversion rate across all industries is 9.7% — significantly higher than most webpages.

Let’s look at some of the reasons why landing pages drive conversions better than standard webpages:

1. There’s nowhere else to go.

Landing pages do not typically have a navigation menu; removing the temptation for website visitors to venture too far away from the offer. We recommend removing most of your outbound links and highlighting the action you want your visitors to take (e.g. book a call, download a gated asset). Most landing pages will feature a form, so highlight the call to action, use directional queues to point your visitors to the call to action and set clear expectations as what your visitors will get if they click the CTA.

2. Videos fit more naturally.

We all know that videos are increasingly popular and on landing pages dedicated to specific campaigns or concepts, they’re a perfect fit. Instead of appealing to a range of different buyer personas, you can talk to the one person you’re targeting or the one promotion you’re featuring. The video is clear, concise and much more engaging than endless text blocks.

3. Simplicity sells.

With only a single page to convince your visitors to engage with your offer, content or campaign, you have to be focused on delivering your compelling value quickly. A well-designed and written website should tell the visitor exactly what’s on offer with transparent and comprehensive information, delivered quickly.

4. Supported by acquisition strategies.

Unlike your homepage, dedicated landing pages are often supported by acquisition strategies whether those are paid ads (on Google or social media), account-based marketing campaigns or other marketing efforts. That means they generally received highly qualified traffic. That is, website visitors that already know what to expect and have found your offer compelling enough to click through.

Using smart calls to action to improve your website conversion rate

We’ve already spoken at length about the importance of calls to action on your website. Without them, you won’t capture your visitor’s details and won’t have the opportunity to nurture them. Most websites will already have calls to action — usually a contact us form, but increasingly, gated assets too. Growth-led websites have multiple primary and secondary calls to action on each page and smart calls to action that change based on the visitor’s lifecycle stage, industry, size and previous behaviour on your site.

The more tailored a smart call to action is, the more likely it will spur your visitors into action. Let’s look at some examples:

The great thing about smart calls to action is that they also delight your existing customers. If your existing customers regularly come back to your website (to access training, to access an app or to research your other products or services), they don’t want to see the same calls to action that you’re serving to leads.

Instead use smart calls to action to improve your retention rates, delight your customers and upsell them. Examples include:

• Cross-selling additional products or services

• Upselling existing products or services (e.g. premium plans)

• Increasing product adoption with helpful training and resources

• Loyalty rewards and other offers.

Using video marketing to generate more leads

It’s no secret that video marketing is an essential part of every marketing strategy. Video is easy to digest, compelling and according to EyeWideDigital, highly effective. They suggest that having a video on your landing page can increase your conversion rate by 80%.

We’re advocates too. We believe that growth-led websites must feature videos, because video has the ability to convey emotion, convince and humanise like no other digital content.

Your marketing videos can take several different forms, for example.

• Piece to camera introducing your brand and benefits

• Explainer video or demo with product shots, animations or hosts

• Customer case studies

• How-to videos

• Expert interviews

Our recent blog article goes into even more details on how to use different videos in your marketing strategy. Note, one of the great things about video is that you can repurpose your content across multiple channels. For example, you can use the video assets in paid training courses, ad campaigns and on your social networks.

Together, they’ll help you:

• Stand out to visitors with memorable video messages

• Humanise your business and help visitors put faces to the values and people behind the brand

• Show off your personality to create warmth and help your visitors trust you

• Sharpen up your remarketing, nurture and sales efforts by knowing which leads have watched your videos.

With tools like Vidyard you can even add a call to action in the middle of a video, essentially gating the video content after a small preview.

TACTICS TO GENERATE MORE LEADS FROM YOUR WEBSITE

Now that you know the advanced website elements you’ll need to grow your conversions, it’s time to talk about specific techniques that are proven to increase website conversions. In this section we aim to give you actionable insights that you can implement immediately. Of course, some of them require a highly sophisticated CMS, marketing automation software or other apps — or an all in one solutions like HubSpot.

Add forms to your most popular webpages

Forms are still the most common way for websites to capture lead details. They’re used for demos, trials, contact us, downloads and more and almost always linked to a call to action. But often they’re on the pages that don’t see the most amount of traffic. For most websites with a content marketing strategy traffic usually comes to blog or pillar pages from search engine results pages. But it’s rare for a form to be on a blog page.

Our advice is to find out which of your pages receive the most amount of traffic (you can do this via Google Analytics) and review each page for new form opportunities. Note, the forms do not have to be disruptive or onerous. A simple download at the top of your funnel only requires name and email address.

On some pages there might be an opportunity to have multiple lead capture points. For example, you can add in-copy content offers in your blog and a form at the end of each article asking visitors if they want similar content sent directly to their inbox.

Add pop-ups to high traffic pages

Pop ups are another highly effective strategy to gain more leads from your existing website traffic. You’ve experienced them yourself whether they are discounts on eCommerce sites or content offers when you’ve viewed a B2B website for long enough or show some exit intent.

There are several different types of pop ups, use the below descriptions to work out which is best for your website:

1. Take over

A take-over pop-up as the name suggests takes over your entire browser, forcing you to either accept the offer or close the pop up down to continue viewing the website. They’re aggressive and disruptive but can work with clever copy and a compelling offer.

2. Pop-up

Unlike a take-over, a standard pop-up doesn’t take up your entire screen and instead uses a portion of the screen to present an offer. There’s room for both an image and plenty of copy, but again, you want to limit the number of form fields and make it easy for your visitors to submit their details.

3. Exit intent pop-up

These pop-ups are triggered when the visitor tries to go back or tries to close their browser. They’re often worded in a way that reference the exit intent of the visitor. For example, “before you go” and “wait don’t you want”.

4. Slide-ups

A slide up is a subtle pop-up that moves up from the bottom of the page and only takes up a small amount of browser space. They can be easily exited and are far less annoying than some of the other types of pop ups.

With all pop-ups you can set rules as to when they’re displayed. For example, you can trigger the pop-up after a certain amount of time, to certain visitors, on certain pages — and remove it for visitors who have seen it within the last 30 days.

It’s important to point out that Google doesn’t love pop-ups as they slow sites down and generally interrupt the visitors hunt for information. But we still believe there is space for pop-ups on growth-led websites. The key is to monitor your traffic, leads and submission rates to make sure your pop-up is performing well and not negatively influencing your other website metrics.

There’s a raft of tools that help you create pop-ups, our favourites include OptinMonster and HubSpot.

Use live chat to engage with your website visitors while they’re visiting

It’s rare to find a website these days that doesn’t have a live chat or chat bot on hand to give visitors immediate support. And while they can be challenging to staff, most website visitors expect them. According to CrazyEgg 38% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company if they offer live chat support. And it’s not just B2C companies that can benefit by offering live chat.

B2B companies too can appeal to the changing demographic of B2B buyers who grew up on the Internet and demand real-time availability. Moreover, B2B companies can engage with leads at the time they’re looking for information and advice (and not later over email or interruptive phone calls).

You’re much more likely to capture leads if you can offer immediate, friendly and personalised advice to your leads via a live chat. Without live chat, you’re ignoring website visitors and losing the opportunity to interact with a visitor before they bounce.

Conversational marketing comes in two forms. Live chat which is a manual instant messaging solution manned by your team members. Chatbots are automated workflows (usually involving a series of questions and one click answers) that you build in advance. You don’t need someone online all day to respond to customer queries, but the experience is more sterile than the live chat alternative. You can also use a hybrid and give your website visitors the chance to chat to a real person at any time during an automated flow.

Here’s how the best growth-led websites are using live chat to increase conversions:

1. Gated content and resources

Instead of using forms to capture a visitor’s details, many growth marketers are offering eBooks and other resources via conversation marketing. The live chat avatar will ask the visitor if they’d like to receive the company’s latest eBook. Once the conversation has kicked off, the company can ask follow up questions like, ‘is <eBook> topic a problem in your business?’ or ‘what else can I help with now that you’re here?’

2. Appointment setting

If your conversions involve demos, consultations or meetings you can use a chat bot to help set them up for you. To implement, you would simply ask visitors if they’d like to book a free demo on the chat bot’s welcome message, if they respond favourably, get the bot to send them directly to your meeting booking page.

3. Chatbots

You can use an automated chatflow to help visitors download assets, find the page they’re looking for or to book appointments (see above). They aren’t as personable as live chatting to a person, but they do free your team up to focus on other work.

Nurturing your leads after they convert

Okay. So this isn’t strictly a website tactic. It’s more of a marketing activity that you’re probably doing already. But there’s always room for improvement, and if you’re not nurturing your leads, you’re forgetting one of the most effective conversion tactics.

Lead nurturing simply means engaging with your leads after the initial lead capture to get them closer to a purchasing decision and closer to becoming a customer. Most growth companies do this via automatic email sequences, phone calls and remarketing ads. All of which can be streamlined with a good marketing automation tool and website CMS.

As with all marketing tactics, the trick is to balance the frequency of nurturing touches and the role that automation plays (versus human interactions).

Here’s how a growth-led website and company typically nurtures its MQLs.

• Lead downloads eBook

• Automated eBook delivery email and next steps (immediate)

• Automated personal email checking up on the download and seeking questions (three days later)

• Automated eBook delivery (next eBook in sequence) (seven days later)

• Sales team phone call (ten days later)

• Lead enrolled to ongoing MQL newsletter and campaign lists (monthly)

We recommend at a minimum the following nurture sequences:

• Lead > MQL Sequence

• MQL > SQL Sequence

• SQL > Customer Sequence

• Customer Upsell Sequence

• Customer Advocacy Sequence

Qualify and prioritise your leads with lead scoring

If you have limited sales and marketing resources it’s nice to know which leads are more likely to convert so that you can prioritise them or get them in the hands of your most effective sales rep. A growth-led website and marketing automation tools help you do that.

By storing and recording information on each website visitor in your marketing automation platform, you can build a picture of your most common conversion journeys; the key webpages, the key emails and the key signs of visitor intent. Then when new leads show similar intent you can give them a score. The better the score, the more likely they are to convert.

For example, If your pricing page is the most important sign of intent and a website visitor visits the page twice you could:

• Update the visitors lead score

• Add them to a list of ‘Highly Engaged Leads’

• Trigger an email to the visitor asking if they need additional help

• Trigger an email to the visitor’s contact owner telling them to call the visitor

HOW TO MEASURE THE PERFORMANCE OF YOUR WEBSITE

Switching to a growth-led website makes sense on every level, but you’ll need accurate website and lead reporting to prove it to your stakeholders and justify your investment. That’s where website traffic and conversion reporting comes in.

As the saying goes, you can’t manage what you’re not measuring, so it’s important to understand the impact your growth tactics are having on your overall traffic and conversion rates. You can ramp up the tactics that are working and strip back tactics that don’t.

Here’s how to measure your website performance.

The website metrics you should be measuring

If you’re just getting started with website reporting, Google Analytics and other tools can be a little overwhelming. Between the language, the filters, conversion goals and navigating to your various pages, it can be time consuming to learn and wieldy to run your reports regularly.

We won’t go into details about how to measure the metrics below within Google Analytics or HubSpot (or whatever else you’re using) — there are plenty of excellent resources from the platforms themselves and third party independent experts — we’ll simply provide an overview of the most important metrics to include in your reports and reviews. They are:

• Traffic

  Basic traffic numbers from Google Analytics give you the best top-level indication of the number of visitors who are finding your website, as well as giving you reliable segmentation-level analysis including location, device, returning visitor or new.

  By measuring your visitors (note, these are called users and their visits are called sessions in Google Analytics) and tracking them monthly you can determine if your audience is growing, how its growing, whether the growth is from new visitors or returning visitors and whether your growth campaigns are working as expected.

• Traffic Sources

  It’s one thing to get traffic to your website, it’s another to understand where they’re coming from. Are they coming from paid Google ads, are the coming from organic Google rankings? Social media?

  A business association website?

  Google Analytics can help you automatically group your website visitors into different categories based on their referral source (channel / medium). When you know the channels that are performing well you can optimise. For example, spend more on Google, continue your focus on content marketing or ramp up your partnership efforts.

• Session Time and Bounce Rate

  If your website visitors are bouncing (exiting) from your website after only a short amount of time, it means your website isn’t providing enough value to them or is delivering a poor experience — and your visitors will look to find the information they’re looking for elsewhere.

  You can find these metrics in Google Analytics, but how do you get your website visitors to stay longer? There’s no great secret. Simply ensure you’re setting expectations clearly before the visitor arrives and ensure your website is relevant, user-friendly, and easy to navigate.

• Conversion Rates

  It’s easy to calculate your website conversion rates. You simply divide the number of website (or page) conversions by the total traffic to the site (or page). It helps you assess whether your pages are successfully generating newsletter sign ups, downloading content, requesting quotes or booking consultations. You can do this at a site level or with HubSpot and other tools, you can also do it at page, form and campaign levels. And with the conversion rate at hand, you’ll be able to identify the areas of your website that aren’t converting and make necessary changes.

  You can use your marketing tools to track conversion rates, but also use Google Tag Manager to add conversion goals that will report conversions directly in Google Analytics.

The website reporting tools you need to track performance

• Google Analytics

• Google Search Console

• Hotjar

• HubSpot

• PageSpeed by Google

HOW TO SPLIT TEST AND OPTIMISE YOUR WEBSITE TO IMPROVE CONVERSIONS

Split testing or A/B testing is a method used to improve your website metrics and conversions. It involves making two different versions of a page, button, form or copy, publishing both to different visitors and seeing which performs better. When you have a clear winner, you remove the test and publish the best performing version for all visitors.

For example, you might notice that not many people book a chat with you via the contact us page. So you try a few split tests. You try changing the:

• Wording of the offer

• Design of the page

• Number of form fields (reducing the friction to book a chat)

• Colour of the call to action button

Note, you should only ever change one variable at a time. Otherwise you won’t know which change has driven the improvement.

What is split-testing and how does it help you generate leads?

Think about the last time you made a change to your website in order to improve your conversions. Did you make the change because a new staff member told you to? Or because you read about the best practices for improving conversion rates?

If you answered yes it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Most website ‘optimisations’ come about because of something someone read or did at a previous company. The trouble is those tactics might not work for your website and there’s no data behind to validate them.

That’s where split, A/B or multivariate testing comes in. The experiments help you go from gut-feel website changes to data-driven website decisions based on iterative testing. After testing two options to different (but similar) audiences, you’ll know the change that is preferred by website visitors and which version performs better. It is then that you can confidently roll it out permanently and to other pages on your website (if applicable).

Split testing allows you to experiment rapidly and most modern website and marketing automation tools help you do so easily, without complex tracking, controls and analysis.

What are the parts of your website you can split test?

The short answer is every element of every webpage can be split-tested. Headlines, body copy, images, form lengths, form calls to action, offers and more. But it’s not practical to spend hours tweaking every element on your website, nor would you have reliable data to use for future tests.

A more common approach to determining where you should focus your split test efforts on is to use the following questions to narrow down the pages and elements to iterate.

• Which pages get strong traffic but few conversions?

• What is the submission or conversion rate on those pages?

• Which elements on those pages are they currently interacting with the most?

• Which elements on those pages do they ignore?

• What are your website visitors expecting on those pages?

• What do you want your visitors to do on that page?

• What can you do differently to get them to do it?

The typical page elements that you can test include:

• Headline

• Body copy

• Feature image

• Call to action

• Submit button

• Form (length, fields, design)

• Testimonials, case studies and social proof

• Entire page design

With an advanced marketing automation and CRM solutions you can also split test email (subject lines, calls to action and copy), social media creative, ad campaigns, customer journeys and nurture flows. Improvement is the pathway to growth and split testing is the scientific approach to marketing craft that has previously relied on instinct. Review your own website today and see if there are changes you can make that could increase conversions.

Ready to take your website to the next level?

Growth- Led Web Design Service