Why Do You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy Before Redesigning Your Website?
Digital marketing is extremely important for every business, especially during these unprecedented times. It’s constantly evolving, so in order to use relevant tools, you need to keep up with marketing trends. One of the most important marketing tools for your business is your website. It serves as a digital representation of what you have to offer to your potential clients. It is good to know that 75% of the website visitors judge your business by the website experience, so you need to make sure your website is functional, easy to navigate, and has a pleasant design. And if your website is outdated or not accessible, you definitely need to consider a website redesign.
Before actually starting the redesigning process, it is better to create a good plan and marketing strategy to stick with to make your redesign effective and well-performing. The process of redesigning can be long and tricky. Many website redesigns fail, because of poor strategy and planning. To set your business to success, you need to make time to create a well-thought marketing strategy and define specific goals that you want to achieve with a redesign.
Here are some of the questions you need to ask yourself before starting this process. They will help you get the best results.
Why do you need your website to be redesigned in the first place?
There are many benefits of redesigning your website. It is an amazing investment for the future success of your business. Here are why the redesign will be helpful for your business:
- You can improve your conversion rate
- Make your website rank higher in Google
- Adjust your website to the current trends
- Make your website more professional
- Improve brand reputation
What are the signs that should make you consider redesigning your website?
- The website design doesn’t look up to date
- The website doesn’t meet the goals and expectations you set
- The bounce rate is high, which means that people leave your website right away
- Your visitors have difficulties finding certain information they are looking for
- The content is outdated and not SEO optimized
- Website is not responsive and accessible
Also, it is good to mention that the personalization of user experience is getting more and more common. Making your website more personalized to your target audience is a great way to make your redesign effective. Personalization focuses on the customer’s preferences and interests. It is not only a great way to increase opportunities for conversions, but also to build trust and great interest among your audience. However, before starting your website redesign process you need to set specific personalization goals and choose the right content management system to support it.
Why your marketing strategy and website redesign are related?
A digital marketing strategy helps you to describe certain actions need to be taken in order to achieve different business goals. That’s why it is so important to have a strategy before starting the process of redesigning your website. With a marketing strategy, you will know exactly what goals you are trying to achieve with your website, which is one of the main marketing channels.
As mentioned before, website redesigning can become a very exhausting and lengthy process. Having a strategy can help you save some time. You will have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish, focusing on short or long-term goals.
There is a well-known approach, that perfectly describes the characteristics your goals should have in order to be reachable. It is called SMART, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. You need to have SMART goals so that you can create a good plan and have successful results in the future.
A marketing strategy will also set up the right expectations and outcomes of the redesign project. It helps you to determine what you want a new website to produce (more conversions, more traffic, etc)
Before redesigning you need to analyze your current website, the best performing and worst pages, traffic and the quality, how long the visitors stay, and if they engaged with the content. This step will help you figure out all the missing opportunities and pitfalls.
After defining your website goals, you will need to align them to your marketing goals, so you can get the maximum benefit possible.
What should you focus on when creating a marketing strategy?
While developing a marketing strategy, a good idea is to look into why your visitors don’t stay on the website. You need to make sure your new website is accessible, functional, easy to navigate and user-friendly.
The content on your website is another important factor, which plays a great role in website success. Going through your existing content, analyzing it will help you discover some issues that influence your visitor experience. Updating old and creating new informative content will make your website look better in the eyes of the visitors.
With a content marketing plan, you have many different possibilities, which you can use towards your website redesign. It will allow you to create a user-centric website, with content that stands out and accessible to the new visitors.
What do you need to include in your website strategy?
After you have analyzed the current situation and set up the goals, you can now create a plan for your website. To have a good plan for the new website some items need to be included:
- Website Map
Having a website map will help you understand how the website will look like in the future and how users can navigate it. It’s good to have a list of all pages that need to be added or deleted. The map also helps search engines like Google crawl all your website pages.
● Design
A good idea is to have a list of a few websites you like, from design to user experience perspective. It will help you choose colors, images, fonts, layout, etc. To make sure your new website has an optimized design, the specifics should be clearly defined and discussed for a designer to follow.
Having the right content might be one of the crucial parts of the website components. Always think from your visitor’s perspective – do you provide enough value for them to stay on your website. And do not forget about your goals. This part can take up some time, as content creation can be one of the reasons why your new website launch gets delayed.
- Technology
You need to think of the features you would like to have on the new website, to make it look modern and appealing to potential clients.
The website is the face of your company, make sure it presents your brand values the way you want your customers to perceive your brand. It is one of the most important marketing channels. If you feel your website attracts fewer visitors, has lower KPIs and higher bounce rates, you should consider redesigning. Use the points above to guide you in making the decision about your website. Having the marketing strategy in place will provide you with a clear picture of the goals you want to achieve, improvements you want to make, and the overall purpose of the website redesign project. This project is not simple, but very well worth it.
Tali is a results-driven digital marketer with a track record of growing her clients’ businesses and driving revenue.
As the business owner at WSI Digital Path, Vaughan, she takes great pride in delivering powerful but cost-effective solutions for her clients.
Innovative and revolutionary digital marketing trends set the pace for the digital marketing industry. Don’t make the mistake of falling behind! Contact WSI Digital Path today and trust your digital marketing to the industry’s leading professionals.