Your Website has a Best-Before Date: Keep it Fresh
The New Inbound Marketing Website Rollout Methodology
Change management within the marketing industry is reaching lightning speed. Your website, one of the cornerstones of marketing, is dramatically different today than it was even 12 months ago.
Focus on continous improvement to your website
Instead of viewing your website as a big project to take on every three years, you should be thinking about how to break it up into smaller chunks and work on it every 30 days – without an end date in sight.
That’s right: You should be working on making enhancements, adding new pages and improving the visitor experience on your website every single month.
This more active inbound marketing approach to the design and build of your website brings with it major advantages to your organization.
Get New Webpages published faster
We know that clients don’t like waiting four months for their website. (Any marketing firm doesn’t like waiting four months either). We'd prefer to put up new pages sooner so that we can see how the new messaging, content, design and marketing assets work. We want to be rolling out new pages every month just as much as you want them rolled out. It’s always about focusing on continuous improvement.
The more regularly you update and add fresh website pages to your site, the higher you will rank on Google.
And the quicker we get those site pages up, the more data we get on their performance. That data contributes to the design and development of future pages. This site development process actually delivers a website that outperforms the more traditional waterfall approach.
Prioritize New Website Work Every 30 Days
It’s not really that difficult to come up with a plan to build your new site in 30-day blocks.
We simply create a site map and a plan for the full website (which we call the Website Blueprint). We then work collaboratively with our clients to decide which pages are the most important. Those get done first. The second set of pages go next, and so forth until the site is complete.
In this process, we view the site as a virtual work in progress, meaning it's actually never complete. We work with the client to look at upgrades, adjustments and additions we're considering each month. We prioritize these upgrades based on the value they bring and the time it takes to do the work. You want to start with the items that take the least amount of time but add the most value, and work back from there.
Each month, you reprioritize and execute. This way, you’re always doing work that contributes maximum value, and you’re always working efficiently to optimize your website’s performance.
Optimize Conversions Based On Live Data
Some of these monthly upgrades do not involve adding new pages, but rather adjusting current pages based on actual data. This is huge.
No matter what we say, what our clients say or what any of their expert advisors say, no one really knows how visitors will respond to a site until they actually get to interact with it.
So, when we have live visitor data to work with, we're basing our changes on that instead of opinions.
The website’s dominant function is to turn anonymous visitors into leads. Therefore, when we see a page that has a lot of visitors and only a few conversions, we need to prioritize it and make the necessary adjustments to improve performance. Do this on three or so pages every single month, and you’re going to see massive improvements in lead flow from this type of website rollout plan.