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Live @ Inbound2020 Using Your Website to Grow Your Business

Live @ Inbound2020 Using Your Website to Grow Your Business

In the latest session recap from INBOUND2020 I took notes on Luke Summerfield’s webinar about ‘Using your website to grow your business.’ Luke is a member of the HubSpot Product team as well as the founder of Growth Driven Design.

In this session he highlighted how the world of web-design is shifting, as is business’ use of their website.

Luke started by saying that website software used to be distributed on CD Roms but today we are in the era of SaaS. The technology, processes and culture of how we build a website is evolving and is giving us an opportunity to make our websites reflect your customers and help grow your business.

The three tenets of website design that we need to improve are:

Culture

Why do businesses have websites? Traditionally it’s a business expense, a necessary evil that you have to have. But there is now a shift to a modern business culture where websites are a growth investment.

Your website used to be a digital brochure but now it can be a product with a wide impact. Modern companies think about their website as a sort of free product which is part of their product line.

There are always new and unique ways to leverage your website to achieve your goals as well as open the door for your customer to smoothly move further along in their customer journey.

Luke stated that you should start your culture shift with data. Inform your website decisions with programs that do behavioural research on your users such as Hotjar or Luckyorange. These tools can undertake heatmapping and user recordings to see interactions with your website. They can help identify areas of friction but also where to improve on your website. If you have HubSpot these tools are already integrated.

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Process

Traditionally a website was a business-focused strategy with it being all about ‘me’ and a hefty ‘about page’ but the modern website process should be a customer-focussed strategy. Put yourselves in the shoes of your customer and weave the website around the customer’s journey. It is all about the subtle mindset shift to the inbound methodology.

When you get to the point when you are building the actual site, the traditional process is where the process is a set-and-forget activity, where we never go back in to improve the website.

Modern companies build a website that they know is just a starting point. A website can never be perfect from the beginning. Luke highlighted how it is a launch pad for continuous improvement guided through data analysis.

Luke shockingly said that 42% of marketers only make impactful improvements to the website once a year. He strongly suggested that you shouldn’t wait around for the cracks to show to go back into it and fix things. Get into a rhythm of every quarter making improvements based on your goals for the website and the data you have gathered about user interactions.

Luke also kindly pointed people to the HubSpot course about Growth Driven Design.

Technology

The more advanced the technology of your website the bulkier it gets. In the 21st century, websites are extremely advanced and therefore bulky and complex. High maintenance Content Management Systems (CMS) make you run updates, plugins etc. and run you into the ground with maintenance.

Funnily, Luke highlighted how almost every single technological thing today runs on SaaS, except CMS’. Modern business’ CMS’ are built on a SaaS infrastructure where everything is taken care of for you such as security and updates.

Traditional CMS’ also have many gatekeepers who stand in the way, such as developers who are the ones holding all the cards. They have the control and you can do no customisations without paying for it additionally and waiting 6 weeks for it to happen.

Modern CMSs, such as the HubSpot CMS, empowers your team to create the solutions you want, making complex problems easy.

The traditional one-size-fit-none website is also something that we need to move past. A website that isn’t tailored for visitors, whether existing customers or potential prospects, isn’t how you leverage your website to grow your business. Using a modern CMS you can personalise your site pages to who is viewing it and deliver the perfect message to them that is more likely to get them to convert.

Conclusion

In order to make sure your website reflects your goals and grows your business its important to think of it as an investment that you can leverage. You need to be making data-backed decisions and improving your site quarterly to really be getting the most out of it.

I hope this blog has given you a new perspective on your business website and I hope you have learned something from Luke’s amazing insights.

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About Insynth

Insynth Marketing is a leading UK construction marketing agency based in Shifnal in the West Midlands. 

They use the latest inbound marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to support building product companies to grow their business by proactively driving sales lead generation activity. 

As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website designSEOcontent marketingemail marketingsales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.