7min
A website is a big deal in your business marketing plan. Its main job is to keep all interested parties up to date on news, offers, and other info that you think they should know about.
For example, most of the people who visit travel blogs are those who want to plan their next holiday and need more info so that they can make an informed decision, perhaps through their booking process right up until their holiday begins.
Studies have proven that it takes as little as 4 seconds for someone to lose interest or move on. To ensure that your sales funnel remains effective, it's important to create engaging content.
This means that your best opportunity for persuading customers to book your product or hire you for a project is by having a website that boasts the same desirable qualities as your product or service.
If your website doesn't give potential customers a taste of what makes you different and why they should hire/book you, then we have some bad news and some good news for you: You’re victim to brochure website syndrome--a deadly disease wherein your business’ marketing material falls victim to being non-useful when not viewed on the physical printed page.
What is a brochure website?
In the early 2000s, having a website became necessary for any business that wished to be taken seriously. As the functionality of websites became more commonplace with each passing year, the value of a website shifted from its ability to provide information to the ease of interaction it provided. The brochure website was born out of this environment and became wildly popular across the world. These websites were easily recognisable by their lack of distinct features, minimal engagement, and overwhelming focus on aesthetics. The focus on aesthetics was used to drive traffic and draw in as many consumers as possible. Nowadays, the brochure website is an outdated relic left in the dust by newer, more sophisticated forms of online marketing.
You might think a website is going to be enough to win, or that your competitors are bad at their jobs and they’re the reason why you don’t have any business. We want you to know that the landscape has changed; businesses with basic websites aren’t good enough anymore. A lead generation website is more than just a pretty face: it should look great but also provide an interactive experience for your potential leads to build trust and offer features that will make them engaged (e.g., blog, opt-in forms/widgets, etc.). Your business might be suffering because of your competition, but it might not always be their fault - sometimes it’s just because you need a new marketing tactic!
Why Brochure Websites Are Dead or Dying
Unfortunately, brochure sites are out of fashion. These old-fashioned kinds of websites that were once so relevant for SMBs (small businesses) simply won’t cut it any longer if you aim to win customers in today's highly competitive market.
The kinds of websites that bring in the likes of customers and convert them into leads understand this and make sure that they offer much more than a basic website design with an attractive interface as there is now so much variety on the market with simple readymade solutions which offer people huge benefits like reduced costs if they opt for a customisable ready-made template which can be used to create their very own lead generation site.
In this article, we will examine some of the reasons your website (and possibly your entire website) fails to work as hard as it should. Next, we'll talk about how to build a website that drives business value across an organisation.
- Brochure Websites FAIL To Convert Visitors into Leads and Leads into Customers
People who use brochure-style websites are missing out on a huge opportunity to capture leads, improve customer engagement, and create website content that's optimised for SEO. But there are plenty of companies, even large ones, that are doing this. Some don't have a clue about the science behind marketing. Others have a team of professional marketers and simply haven't heard the news.
Your website should be a well-oiled machine of immense power, able to convert visitors into leads, and eventually customers. It takes many factors and features to come together in the building of a website to achieve this. A brochure website’s design, on the other hand, is generally static and devoid of features, which won't engage potential customers - sometimes even boring them away with its lack of customer engagement.
2. Brochure Sites Do Not Include Essential Features and Functions
You wouldn’t serve your guests the same bland food over and over again, would you? It’s surprising how many brochure websites are still out there because it’s not good for business! To engage with people who visit your website, there need to be features and content suitable to keep them interested. You must be able to give them something that is tailored to suit their preferences. The only way this can happen is if you have a dynamic website.
3. Brochure Website Provide No Way to Measure Your Return on Investment
You can't measure your performance without proper functionality and a well-considered conversion path. Calls-to-action is designed to proactively bring in more business for your website-but without such features, a company website has its hands tied from the beginning. However, a brochure website or something that is essentially just headshots of your team members and facts about them may do nothing for your sales but at least you can give it an educated guess on ROI—most likely it's zero—but what can you expect when there aren't any engaging elements and people feel like they've fallen down the rabbit hole?
How To Fix Brochure Websites?
For these reasons and more, brochure sites are becoming obsolete. They’re no longer a good investment. A better investment is to jump on the GDD highway – where customers benefit from better experiences and companies grow from enhanced bookings, higher online revenue, and brand loyalty.
Firstly, you need to recognise that your website is one of your most valuable and versatile employees - meeting and even exceeding your marketing, sales, and service goals.
As such, you must redefine what it means to build and grow your company's website.
Here, we are going to talk about Growth-Driven Design (or GDD) because this is a smarter approach to building and growing your website.
How Does Growth-Driven Design Work?
The Growth-Driven Design Methodology combines Lean principles of documentation and Agile techniques of flexibility as they relate to web development, and is essentially based on a series of tests that determine how an online presence can be marketed most successfully. Listed below are the three stages of Growth-Driven Design, allowing you to see how this approach to implementing a professional web presence could save you from many costly pitfalls that generally occur with some regularity with what we call "brochure websites."
Strategy
The first stage of developing a growth-driven website is the strategy. This involves creating business objectives for the website and defining its goals. Again, these are unique to each organisation and can be tailored to their specific needs. The first thing that you need to figure out when doing this is what particular niche your website will be supporting.
We want to gain an empathetic understanding of their lives as they are today and what issues they're facing at this moment in time. How can we best design an interactive and informative website that meets the needs of our target users? There are several tools we use to collect data that can help us achieve this empathetic understanding throughout the Strategy stage which will later be used during the other stages: Needs Analysis, User Personas, Content Audit, Information Architecture, and Business objectives.
Ensure that you tailor a strategy according to your business needs, and create a web experience that provides a practical solution. After you've gotten all of your questions answered, why don't you get all fired up to make a website...here's where you can start:
The steps are:
- User journey mapping
- Website goals and business strategy
- User experience research
- Fundamental assumptions
- Review of current tools (CRM, CMS, etc.)
- Brainstorm Wishlist
- Website strategy workshop
- Competitive analysis & positioning
- Buyer personas
- Website audit
- Site strategy
Launch Pad
The second stage is the Launch Pad website. The goal of this stage is to get a website up and running that will serve as a midpoint, as well as provide you with information to make further improvements to your web presence forevermore. At this point, one of the most important things to remember is that your website’s goals are all very realistic tasks that need to be completed, but they might not all be easy ones right away. We know it can seem overwhelming at times because we all have different things going on in our lives and some days, we have trouble focusing. Stick with us though because after dealing with us for a bit you’ll learn how great it feels when you see what you created.
Methods for accelerating launchpads
In terms of building your launchpad website, there are four options based on your business type and your goals.
Refresh – Identify areas for high-impact improvements to your existing website based on the insights from the strategy stage.
Kick-start – Building a new website using pre-built assets, such as images and content, can speed up the creation of content and design.
Launch & Expand – Constructs phases for the launch pad website that can be executed over time. During Phase 1, all global elements are updated; Phase 2 focuses on the most impactful pages and sections and relaunches them. Continually update and redesign until the website is completed.
80/20 – Use the 20% of the Wishlist items that will have the most impact during the strategy stage to build the launchpad website.
With the website now live, you can then implement whatever acceleration method is most appropriate for the launch pad.
Continuous Improvement
The last of the three stages in the Growth-Driven Design methodology is the Continuous Improvement stage. After launching your new website, you'll want to monitor usage. One way to do this is by using a tool like Google Analytics. Google Analytics will allow you to determine how well your site is converting visitors into customers, as well as where most of your web traffic is coming from and what keywords are driving those results.
With this feedback, you can ensure that the parts of your site that need more attention receive it and know whether specific changes and optimisations are effective so you can roll out improvements through future releases or else use other tactics until something proves to work better than others.
At any stage of your GDD, it’s crucial to know what your users are interested in, what they aren't, and where their interests lie over time. So, you can develop your site in ways that will have the greatest impact on your organisation's goals and also provide value to users.
After going through all 3 stages of Growth-driven design, you can safely say that you have avoided the brochure website syndrome!!
When you think about redesigning your website it's very easy to feel frustrated because not so long ago you were a tiny company, had a much smaller audience that wasn't so quick to forget and although you had to put a lot less thought into things such as ongoing development, you also had to put a lot more thinking to keep them coming back.
As we built up the business, having a responsive and inclusive design was crucial and now we have come full circle - being able to adapt or change our present site is of huge importance and thus for us to do this we have created a new website (just for this launch) which works on mobiles as well as your computer/tablet.
Growth-Driven Design is the Way Forward!
Website improvements are always being sought after. Businesses are always looking for ways to improve their user experience and better address the needs of their clientele. Growth-Driven Design is a great way to address these issues. There are several methods of employing this method. One of them is using a website map and making sure it is continuously maintained and that your content is always bringing value to your clients. Another way to use this method is to make sure that your website calls to action are relevant to your users and the content they are viewing. The best way to do this is to consistently gather feedback from your users and use that feedback to reshape your website to be more effective.
