A Match Made in Heaven: Inbound Marketing & Growth-Driven Design

The Sandwich Analogy You Never Knew You Needed

Think of the most renowned and desirable two-ingredient sandwich creation in the world–what’s the first thing that comes to mind? If you said peanut butter & jelly (*insert immediate craving here*), then you’re our kind of people. PB&J are two remarkable halves that, when combined, create pallet-dancing goodness which has withstood the test of time.

If you’ve been staying up to speed in the world of inbound and web design, it should come as no surprise that Growth-Driven Design & Inbound Marketing are the newly-concocted PB&J of inbound. These are two efforts for your business that are fairly strong on their own, but when working together, will elevate your growth to juggernaut status.

Growth No Longer Pertains to Just Inbound Marketing

Blogging, content offers, lead-nurturing campaigns, buyer persona development, SEO, etc. We all know by now that these efforts (and so much more) are the backbone of a well-planned inbound marketing campaign. Proper strategy and execution will spark tremendous brand awareness and generate waves of traffic to your website.

HOWEVER, this is precisely where you have to ask yourself a very honest and critical question: Are my visitors having the best experience possible with my site? “You only get one chance to make a first impression” this applies more than you can imagine when someone lands on your website for the first time.

Insert scarily eye-opening fact below:

“A 2006 study found that it only takes 50 milliseconds for a customer to form an opinion about your website. For contrast, a human eye blink takes between 100 and 400 milliseconds.”

-Checkfront

2006… 10 YEARS AGO. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that window of time for opinion-forming hasn’t gotten any larger. In fact, quite the opposite. We live in an era where visitor endurance has dwindled down to rubble. Immediate opinions of your business are formed, almost entirely, based on all facets of your online presence.

To take this one step further, how exactly are visitors interacting with your website when they get here? You may be thinking: “Are they sticking around and learning about my business, engaging with my blog, converting on offers I’ve worked so tirelessly to promote through inbound? Or, are they dropping like flies because my website has no form of consistent maintenance?”

Worry no more. Enter the gelatinous binding that holds the sandwich together — jelly (a.k.a. Growth-Driven Design)

The 5 Pillars of Web Design

It’s simple, really. Regardless of industry space or scale, there are 5 core elements/strategies your website absolutely MUST have in this day & age in order to make your inbound marketing efforts worthwhile. They are the following:

• Modernized Design & Navigation
  • It’s 2016 and patience of users across the board is almost non-existent online. Worry more about practicality for visitors, not what you think looks good.
• Mobile and Tablet Website Responsiveness
  • As of April 2015, this a ranking requirement for Google’s search algorithm. If your website isn’t responsive for a mobile/tablet experience, your SEO strategy is moot. In Google’s eyes, you’re invisible.
• Current/Optimized Messaging
  • This needs to be consistent throughout the entire site, but, most importantly, your homepage. Visitors need to know 3 key things instantly via your messaging:
    • (1) Your value proposition
    • (2) That you have the solution(s) to their biggest pain points
    • (3) A clear path for where to go next. This should be very easily digestible. If they have to seek it out, they’re as good as gone.
• Clear Conversion Paths
  • The right offers/CTAs + the right locations throughout your site + the right graphics = increased leads and customers.
• Heat Mapping
  • Software tool that enables watching visitor actions from the moment they land on your site. This allows you to study their experience or tendencies in order to make informed changes and updates.

Inbound & GDD Laid Bare

It’s hard truth o’clock. Can you achieve inbound marketing results without an additional service such as GDD in the mix? Yes. Will your results and ROI be notably limited without GDD tagging along for the ride? Yes.

Transparency is at the forefront of our core values here at Viral Element. We wouldn’t keep incessantly blogging about this stuff unless we wholeheartedly believed this 1-2 punch could maximize your business growth. Let’s just say if GDD was a stock, we’d be floating it with Texas-sized pontoons right now.

If there’s one thing to walk away with, it’s this–visitors on a remarkable site don’t want to encounter mediocre content any more than visitors who love your content want to have a poor website experience when trying to engage with it. The two simply have to be linear and work to support the other. We’re standing firm on this one. Sorry, but we’re just not peanut butter-less sandwich kind of people.

 

Source: Bluleadz