web design tips

Growth-Driven Web Design – Is It Right For Your Company?

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Most marketers have been through a website redesign in their careers. If so then they know that it takes considerable time and resources to build a website from the ground up. There are constant meetings and decisions to make at every stage of traditional website design. You work so hard to launch a website, only to repeat the process every few years to ensure your website maintains it’s quality. Sounds redundant, doesn’t it? In order to avoid most of the major obstacles that come with traditional web design renovations, I present you with an alternative choice: Growth-Driven Web Design.

What is Growth-Driven Web Design?

To explain Growth-Driven Web Design, we will simply look at its objective. Instead of undertaking the whole website design process at once, GDD’s aim is to launch and run your website in the shortest amount of time possible. Once the website is launched, any developments will be attended to as the website is running. The feedback gathered as the website is running can provide additional insight to your marketing team. Your marketing team then uses this live data to make informed marketing decisions in order to help you achieve your enterprise goals.

Read Our Article about: Growth Driven Web Design: A Website As Active As You

How does it work?

Properly implementing GDD into your design process depends on three important phases. These phases play a crucial role in running and maintaining your website:

Strategy

To come up with a brilliant strategy, you need to note the following: your client personas, assumptions, buyer’s process, wish lists, website audit information, etc. This information will help you decide what kind of content is most relevant to your clients and how well to maximize off of this content.

Launchpad

Once you have formulated a solid strategy, it’s time to launch your website. You will use a Launchpad website that includes all the information your customer needs about your company. Remember that the content you put on your Launchpad will determine the conversion rates your website will receive. The aesthetic and function of your Launchpad will attract the customers, while the information provided will give them a reason to stay.

Improvements

As I previously stated, once your Launchpad website is running successfully, you will make improvements as you go. This way, you get to provide tailor-made solutions for any issues that come up.

Should you use GDD?

Below are some instances in which GDD can be of assistance to you:

  • Your business has the capacity to increase incoming website traffic.
  • You need a large rate of conversion. This can be improved by maximizing relevant pages and usable interface,
  • You need to know more about your website visitors’ activities
  • You have an outdated website that still receives a considerable amount of traffic. GDD will help maximize these basic interactions.

Benefits of Growth-Driven Web Design

If your company chooses to use GDD, here are some of the benefits you stand to gain:

Uncomplicated updates

Since you are optimizing the basic content in your Launchpad website, you skip the repetitive process of frequently taking down and rebuilding your website. Instead, you can easily update and improve your website while it continues running.

Pocket friendly

Building a website the traditional way costs a pretty penny. The upfront costs on the GDD are lower as well as flexible over periods of time, depending on the demand.

Shorter timelines

It can take months or even years for a traditional website to be designed and launched. With the GDD, you can easily have your website up and running in a few weeks.

Tailor-made solutions

Since the GDD is designed for on-the-go use, your sales and marketing teams will be able to adjust their strategies accordingly. If problems arise, the solutions can be made accordingly.

Brand Marketing Strategy: Community and Advocacy

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Most companies will have a brand marketing strategy. A great way to use a strategy is to work with the community and advocacy. Having advocates and engaging with community will help your brand grow. Advocates are customers, employees, fans, and influencers. Brand advocates are dedicated fans whom the company should build closer relationships with. The best way to advertise is through word of mouth and advocates in the community will do that.

Community and Social Media

When it comes to social media, it is important to engage, grow and leverage the audience. Some ways to grow your social media audience include providing an incentive (gift card), reaching out to the offline community, asking the right questions, and finding people who are advocating your brand already. Engaging your social media community can include having a welcoming environment, timely responses, and reciprocity. Make sure to monitor your community space.

How Brands Market To the Different Generations 

Engagement with Influencers and Advocates

Engaging with influencers and advocates can bring value. The influencers are bloggers, speakers, and authors. A good idea is to invite these people to an event. Influencers and advocates are the ones spreading information about your company through word of mouth. When building a brand advocacy program, it is important to have program goals, criteria for selection, a plan for onboarding and a continued engagement plan. With an advocacy program, it is important to remember the 3 R’s: relevance, reach and resonance. With an employee advocacy program, it is important that both employees and high up exec people post and share company content on social media.

Growing Community Across Social Media

Social media platforms include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Snap Chat.

  • Twitter is for using hash tags, monitoring keywords, hosting events and having chats.
  • Facebook is for having interactions (comments), and using events to create buzz.
  • LinkedIn is for creating groups, and posting content related to business.
  • Instagram is for visuals, finding community, engagement, and boosting brand visibility.
  • YouTube is for collaboration, anonymous comments, healthy debates and connecting with viewers.
  • Snap Chat is for having a unique snap code, ghost codes and direct engagement (reaction snaps to followers).

Each social media platform is unique and has its own purpose.

Measuring ROI

Metrics for ROI are community growth, engagement and brand love. Quality over quantity. You can use the spot check method and randomly select a few followers and look at their profiles to see what kinds of people are following your company. Engagement can include the number of likes for a post. Brand love is positive testimonials from third party blog posts.

Paying attention to your community is important. By reaching out and engaging with advocates, will help your brand. Reaching out and engaging in all the social media platforms will help as well. The more you put into getting your brand out there, the more your brand will grow. You can have a very successful brand marketing strategy. Community and advocacy are two ways to help your strategy.

Using the Buyer's Journey To Create Great Content

Using the Buyer’s Journey to Create Great Content

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Today, great content is so important because it is the actual message you are delivering to potential customers. It should capture the attention of your target audience and stand out within the huge sea of content that surrounds us every day. This can be very difficult to do because marketing content is everywhere you look. But using the right techniques will help make sure the target is reached in the best way.

Inbound Marketing is about offering the right content to the right audience based on where they are within the Buyer’s Journey and developing buyer personas to help target the correct people in the most effective way possible. What makes good, even great content? Constantly thinking about the mind of your buyer and where they are at in their decision process. This way all of your choices center around their needs and you will create content of value.

Using Your Audience

The content you create should help your reader solve their problems and help with whatever it is they are trying to accomplish. Be sure that the content you produce is something that your audience will want to read, share with their friends, and return to your company for further information. The ultimate goal is to be helpful to the consumer!

The best way to understand which format to use for your content is through your buyer personas. A buyer persona is a theoretical person within your target audience that is comprised of analyzed research. Buyer personas are the key to creating ideal content because through them you are able to understand what they want to see, and when they want to see it. Thinking in this way, in the mind of your buyer personas, is extremely helpful in reaching your target because now you have entirely put yourself in their shoes.

Why Are Buyer Persona’s So Important

Using The Buyer’s Journey To Create Great Content

Another aspect of your buyer persona is how they will be moving through the Buyer’s Journey. Not only do we need to understand how to help our audience with their goals and challenges, but also what the buyer persona is looking for in each stage of their journey. Creating content for each stage in the Buyer’s Journey will help your visitors find the resources they need in order to solve their problems. The Buyer’s Journey has 3 stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. 

The Buyers Journey Explained Stage By Stage

The content made for the awareness stage of the journey must help the buyer persona define their problem and learn about it. This means simply educating the consumer about the problem they have. When the buyer persona is in the consideration stage, the content should help them discover possible solutions to their problem. Hold off on discussing your own products and services be discussed, the focus is still on providing useful information regarding what steps they can take next. Finally, in the decision stage you help the buyer persona choose the best solution to their problem, and therefore offer your services.

Focus on tailoring content to your buyer personas and where they are within the Buyer’s Journey to ensure that it will capture your audience’s attention, help your target with what they are searching for, and fuel your campaign.

senior living marketing strategy

How To Use Buyer Personas For Senior Living Marketing

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The number of seniors continues to grow every year as the Baby Boomers are hitting their golden years. This demographic shift has put more emphasis on businesses serving older adults, including senior living facilities. Your business should know about senior living marketing to help present itself to potential clients.

Buyer personas can help you when it comes to senior living marketing.

What Buyer Personas Do You Need for Your Senior Living Business?

On the surface of it, the buyer persona for a senior living business seems obvious. The older adult. However, individual seniors have different needs. And senior living communities provide different levels of service depending on those needs.

Seniors who want to maintain their independence without the worry of home maintenance have different needs than seniors who have advanced medical needs which require 24-hour-nursing care. Facilities which offer different levels of care need to have personas for each level offered.

Another persona to consider is the spouse of an ailing senior. The spouse may no longer be able to handle the advancing medical needs of his or her partner. The healthy spouse’s concerns must be considered along with the needs of the ailing senior.

Adult children also play a significant role in many older adults’ lives. Seniors often need assistance with financial and living decisions. Effective marketing in the senior living industry must consider the needs and desires of these adult children.

Find Out: How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business

How To Use Buyer Personas for Your Senior Living Business

Effective marketing to the senior living market means building trust. That is where you start leveraging your buyer personas. Here is how you do it:

  • Create content that addresses each persona’s needs or questions. For example, do a series of blog posts addressing common questions asked by adult children looking for information on senior living options.
  • Provide longer content which offers more detailed information. An eBook focused on helping adult children assist parents with housing decisions is an example of this. This is the point where you can gather their contact information.
  • Send personalized emails. Once you have a contact’s name, it is important to address them in a personal way. If you have more information, like what level of care the adult child’s parent needs, you can focus the marketing even more.
  • Use the persona’s personal communication preference to your advantage. One detail you should capture for each persona is the preferred method of communication. Many older adults know how to use email, but prefer phone calls.
  • Remember to track each of your marketing efforts closely. Some of your senior living marketing efforts will not be successful. When you see something is not working, stop and move to the next.

Senior living marketing is more effective if you have detailed buyer personas in place. It helps you be more conscientious of the needs your clients have. That helps you build trust and makes your marketing speak in ways it did not before.
growth driven design process

Discovering The Growth-Driven Design Process

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Building a new website is a big under taking for any sized business. You want to make sure that your website looks and feels the way that you imagined it would, while also having incredible content that attracts customers and keeps them coming back for more. There is no magic, one-size fits all approach to web design, but the Growth Driven Design process is a new development method that may benefit you. Read more

consumer journey

The Importance of Understanding and Mapping the Consumer Journey

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Every consumer will go through different steps of consideration and purchase throughout the life cycle of a brand or service. In the past, the consumer buying cycle was explained by four stages: awareness, interest, evaluation, and purchase.

Modern marketing strategies put more emphasis on the emotional relationship brands have with their customers and how this relationship is developed throughout time. This new approach raises the importance of understanding how consumers move through different stages that will influence their behavior. As such, consumer journey mapping is a vital part of your marketing strategy.

Why is Consumer Journey Mapping Important?

Journey Mapping is a technique used to map out the journey of an average consumer throughout their buying cycle. It can help you uncover your UX gaps, identify weaknesses in your strategy, or even find ways of improving customer retention.

Journey mapping is an opportunity to think critically about how your customers discover, experience, and interact with your brand. Consumer journey maps can be complex, but the basic premise behind them is simple: visualize the entire customer journey through each user touchpoint (channel) imaginable.

What are the Stages of the Consumer Journey?

The following are the five stages of the consumer journey and the strategies you should implement to engage and nurture consumers through each stage: consumer journey mapping

1. Awareness Stage

The awareness stage is where consumers learn of your existence. There are multiple strategies that you can employ to generate awareness of your brand. Running TV commercials, publishing print ads, maintaining a social media presence, optimizing your website for SEO, and building relationships with influencers can all help to generate awareness.

The entire point of the awareness stage is to introduce your brand and what you do to those who aren’t familiar with it, whether they’re looking for a specific solution right now or not. Either way, it helps set consumers up for the next stage.

2. Interest Stage

It’s during the interest stage that consumers begin doing research into the problems or challenges that they have. At this point, they are simply looking to educate themselves. They may not be aware of what the solution to their problem looks like. In fact, they may not be completely clear about the challenge that they have.

To address consumers in this stage of their journey, you need to have information available that can help educate them. It’s why many businesses host a website blog and regularly publish content that educates and advises potential leads. By creating such content, you not only help nurture consumers through this stage, but you also help establish your brand authority, thereby building trust in your business.

3. Evaluation Stage

During the evaluation stage, the consumer will start thinking about what solution best fits their needs. The decision at this point is still up in the air and they’re weighing their options. At this stage, consumers may be more open to hearing about your products and services, which they may be comparing with those of your competitors.

To reach consumers during the evaluation stage of their journey, you need to showcase your unique value proposition. You can do this through content creation (by publishing white papers and ebooks, or by filming product demonstrations) or through offers (such as free trials or discounts on products).

It’s crucial that you establish a stellar reputation at this stage as well since consumers will be looking at reviews. As such, encourage past customers to leave reviews on Google, Yelp, and other review sites. Additionally, set up a testimonial page on your site.

4. Purchase Stage

purchase stageAt this stage, the consumer is close to buying your product. You’ll want to make it as easy for them as possible to make a purchasing decision. If you have an e-commerce page, make the checkout process as easy and streamlined as possible. Use an online chat feature that allows them to get in touch with a salesperson as soon as possible. Send automated email reminders to consumers who have abandoned their carts without checking out.

You should make it as easy as possible for consumers to make a purchase — and remove any roadblocks that can prevent the purchase.

5. Post-Purchase Stage

The consumer journey doesn’t end with a purchase. In fact, it will never end. You’ll want to make sure that they become long-term customers, which is why you’ll want to continue to nurture them using an email marketing campaign to build brand loyalty. You can even set up a brand ambassador program to help strengthen your relationship with consumers post-purchase.

Mapping the Consumer Journey is Crucial to Your Success

Mapping the consumer journey is important because it gives you a better understanding of how consumers act and how you can help nurture them towards a purchasing decision. By mapping out your consumer journey, you’ll be able to personalize your engagement with them more effectively and identify vital touchpoints that can help improve your conversions.

Why Your Website Redesign Would Benefit From An Inbound Marketing Strategy

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A website redesign is the perfect time to integrate your inbound marketing strategy into the site’s very fabric. In fact, your entire website needs to be optimized and focused on furthering your inbound marketing efforts. It is an investment that will pay off in higher conversions and increased sales.

Is Your Current Website Giving You What You Need?

You are in business to make money. Your website exists to market your business. Its design needs to further your need to make money. If your current website design is not doing that, it isn’t giving you what you need.

Here are some things to expect from your website:

  • The design should remain up to date.
  • You should be able to measure ROI easily.
  • You should have updated metrics available at all time.
  • The website should totally support your marketing efforts.
  • The website should drive conversions and build your lead database.

If your current design isn’t giving you these benefits, it’s time to invest in a new design, one that will give you these benefits and many more.

20 Tips To Improve Your Website Redesign Process

Every aspect of your website redesign should feed into your inbound marketing strategy. The strategy and marketing funnel needs to be integrated into the site’s very fabric. To make this type of design work, you need a platform that is growth-driven and you need a web team that can make updates on a regular basis.

What are the Advantages of an Inbound Marketing Website?

Your business will benefit in many ways when your inbound marketing strategy becomes what drives your website design.

  1. The website will be the basis of your 24/7 marketing funnel. Your website is where you drive traffic to, host your content, convert visitors to leads, and gather marketing data. That is why your inbound marketing strategy must drive your website design.
  2. Your website will educate leads early in their buyer’s journey. Buyers these days do a lot of research before making purchases. You want your website to be a rich source of information so the buyer will continuously visit during their journey.
  3. You will see every increasing improvement in design and performance. Why wait for your next website redesign to update your website? It should happen at least once a month as you make changes to meet marketing goals and fix problems.
  4. You can prove ROI with incremental improvements. Website updates cannot just involve aesthetics. They must include and revolve around marketing changes. With each change, you can measure your ROI quite easily.
  5. Your website can help nurture leads. The more you educate a lead, the more likely that person is to make a purchase. Your website must offer clear pathways through the buyer’s journey to help him or her reach a decision point.

If you want to take your marketing to the next level, it is time to integrate your inbound marketing strategy with your website design. Once you have the basics in place, you will see steady improvements in your marketing efforts. And that makes it all worth it.

This article is on Data Captive as well.

Want more resources on how to redesign your website? Click here!

marketing senior living

Telling Your Brand Story To Baby Boomers

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The only thing in the world that is constant is change, and not many changes in recent history can compare to the way baby boomers have redefined how we approach everything in life, marketing and spending included. The baby boomer generation controls 70% of disposable income in the United States, and represent 44% of the US population. That is a considerable market share and one that you can tap into by telling your brand story in a way that appeals specifically to this generation.

The Importance of Experience

How your customers think is influenced by their unique life story, current circumstances, environment, and worldview. It is also influenced by their experience and the wisdom they have gained as they have progressed through life. Your brand story needs to take these elements into account and reflect the knowledge, experience, and interests of this age group. Your brand story needs to use language in a way that celebrates this wealth of life experience.

However, just as importantly, your brand storytelling must reflect on the role that this wealth of experience plays in the changing buying habits of the Baby Boomer generation. Worldviews change as you age and gain new information and perspectives. These changing views reflect in how this customer segment process information, and how they make decisions about products and services.

Life becomes more about relationships, developing positive relationships in particular, rather than categories. Family, friends, and nostalgia, play a significant role in the decision-making process. Choices are not black and white and are more likely to be emotionally led.

Check out this similar article about Brand Storytelling

Changes in Storytelling Style

When considering how to tell your brand story to Baby Boomers, you also need to recognize that the changes are not just emotional, but also physical. As the brain ages and its functions change, you must adapt your storytelling to communicate efficiently with this generation. While the younger brain wants unambiguous, precise details and facts, the brain of this generation is more intuitive and emotionally led. It is also more attuned to sensory images, meaning that your storytelling needs to use words in a multi-sensory manner to create these pictures.

Metaphors are an essential part of this creative process. They aid in the brain’s comprehension of a subject and help to make it more vivid. If you cannot paint pictures with words and metaphors, you risk losing the customer’s focus and interest in your story.

Luckily for you as the storyteller, the Baby Boomer generation as a whole loves stories. So, the stronger the story, the more likely you are to attract Baby Boomers to your brand. However, your stories need to be emotionally charged. If it just contains line after line of facts and statistics, it will quickly lose its appeal. As with any customer segment, good writing, detailed characters, and engaging content also remain essential to reaching the Baby Boomer generation.

website redesign process

Growth Driven Web Design: A Website As Active As You

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No company is stagnant. If you are a business owner, you understand this better than anyone. Revenues and sales change from month to month, goals shift and adapt as deadlines draw near, and new employees bring fresh perspective and energy to the company. So why do so many websites stay idle as the company they represent continues to change? Growth driven web design is a new approach that many companies, large and small, are benefiting from. Regarding attraction marketing, a good website design will help to attract customers.

What Is Growth Driven Web Design

With traditional web design, it is typical for a website to remain unchanged for over a year. This could spell trouble if your website does not satisfy the needs of your visitors. If visitors find that your website does offer a solution to their needs, they will move on to your competitors website without a second thought. With growth-driven web design, you are able to adapt your website to better fit your visitor’s needs as you begin to understand them.

Read More About Discovering the Growth Driven Design Process

As customers come to visit your website, what would you like to know about them? Things like how long do they stay on my website, what are their favorite pages, and how many of them actually are interested in my product are probably some of the first things that come to mind, right? With traditional website design, these questions cannot be answered until the website is completed, but by then it’s too late. With this new style of website design, these questions are not only answered, but addressed. By seeing where potential customers are looking, small changes to the website can help lead them where you want them to go.

Why Growth Driven Design Works

So how does one decide which changes to make? Obviously, every website and every industry is going to be different. With growth-driven web design, you are able to determine which aspects within the website should be given the biggest priority based on the characteristics of your website’s visitors. For some, the best way to increase conversion rates will be focusing on the landing page. Others may notice that the blog should be given the highest priority because that’s where most of their online traffic is coming from. In either case, this new approach to web design focuses on making necessary changes to these pages to meet the marketing goals we’d like to see you achieve.

A website should be as active as the person who owns it. A good sales associate would never stick to a single sales approach for each of their clients. They understand that constantly changing and adapting leads to their desired outcome. So why not let your website behave in the same way you would? By constantly and consistently improving your website, you are taking steps to optimize your customers online experience. As more traffic flows into your website and more of those people find what they are looking for, your business will see a significant increase in sales and customer satisfaction. We know this because growth-driven web design gathers information from your website’s visitors and uses that data to drive the decisions that will make your website stand out.

What about you? Do you think your business can benefit from a growth-driven web design? What would you like to learn about your website’s visitors? To learn more, click the link below for more information.

brand development process

The Brand Development Process Demystified

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“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company. You can’t control the process but you can influence it.” Marty Neumeier- Brand Gap

Grandeur, class, and opulence are what come to your mind at the mention of a Rolls-Royce. This is because Rolls-Royce has defined and positioned itself as such. A good brand should be a culture associated with something irreplaceable.

Brand development process is being able to influence your audience to believe that they are buying into an adventure, an identity. It needs careful formulation to represent your business properly. Based on recognizable brands, here is the development process solved:

Discovery

As you think of a way to create your brand, think of it as a person. Can you define your personality? Your analysis should be able to answer the WHY question- why a customer should buy from you and not somebody else.

SWOT analysis has been commonly used to give a clear picture of company characteristics. Identify favorable and unfavorable internal and external factors of your company. It stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Other analytic tools include PESTEL and Porter’s Five Forces which measure influence and competitive intensity in the outside environment respectively.

Read more on Discovering Your True Brand Story and Bringing It To Life

Positioning

“Differentiation is one of the most important strategic and tactical activities in which companies must constantly engage.” Theodore Levitt-Professor, Harvard Business School

Once you have discovered where you stand, develop your product promise. You must position yourself as provider of such to your audience. What is your unique selling proposition (USP)? Make your brand appeal different and focus on developing a unique USP applicable to your product/ service. Let your target market know that whatever you offer them is a solution to their problems.

Learn How To Strengthen Your Brand Through These Competitive Advantage Examples.

Visual expression

First impressions are the most lasting. Many customers are guilty of buying the packaging rather than the product. Think of all the people through centuries that have given their lives for a flag to appreciate the power of visual expression. Your brand development process should harness this visual reaction in people. Make them believe that your product stands for something, is different, and comes as authentic. Verbal expressions, design, packaging, sales and marketing are aids of powerful product impression.

Constant evolution

You can either change or let the change change you. Just like in football or any game, you have to stay relevant or face the bench. Your brand should be perceived as you want it to be long after you have launched your product. Constant evolution saves you from being obsolete and is vital in brand development process because it never stops. In order to be considered a brand, you should make your presence felt at all times by sustaining it. A good company always has ongoing research or audits to find out how to appraise their image, products, and services.