What is Growth-Driven Design and How Does it Work?

In today’s competitive business landscape, your website needs to support all of your digital marketing efforts and generate high-quality leads. In developing an effective brand website, taking a growth-driven design approach ensures it can be easily adapted and optimised, but what is growth-driven design?

Organisations must understand that their website is never ‘finished’. Maintaining a high-performing website requires testing and analysis to understand what attracts and converts your ideal customers (buyer personas). In this article, we offer an overview of growth-driven design and the key benefits, why businesses are gravitating towards the approach and how the methodology works.

What is growth-driven design?

So, let’s begin by answering the question, “what is growth-driven design?” Traditional web design processes can be slow, inefficient and costly while lacking the flexibility to adapt to changing technologies and consumer needs. Growth-driven design prioritises data-driven, insight-led web design (and redesign) that allows for a fast launch, phased approach and continuous improvement mindset to maximise long-term ROI and performance.

Pioneered by HubSpot, growth-driven design is a smarter approach to website development that enables you to launch your website quickly and improve the investment, spread out over time. Continuously optimising content and improving performance, helps your website to drive more conversions, increase revenue and drive business growth.

Why are businesses gravitating towards a growth-driven design approach?

In a customer-centric landscape that’s always changing, your website needs to be agile and flexible to meet changing customer needs and preferences. In the competitive FinTech and Financial sector, for example, your website must be optimised to attract, nurture and convert leads during a long sales cycle. That’s why businesses, especially B2B companies, are increasingly embracing the growth-driven design approach to web builds. 

A recent Forbes article highlighted that data-driven organisations are 23 times more likely to attract customers than those who are not. This emphasises the importance of improving your website over time based on data-driven insights. 

Whether you aim to increase traffic, boost engagement, build trust or increase your sales, using growth-driven design will enable you to accelerate revenues whilst continually improving the user experience. In addition, the approach will enable you to launch a website in a much shorter timescale than a traditionally-managed website project, and at a fraction of the cost.

Key benefits of growth-driven design

1. Data-driven decision making

With the use of growth-driven design, your website will be effectively optimised with data and analytics. Through A/B testing and trial and error, you’ll be able to determine which aspects of your content strategy are working and which areas are not. Analytics empower decision-making, showing you the elements of your site that your target customers are responding to, and then adjusting your website as you go. By taking the growth-driven design approach, all action is data-driven, not based on assumptions. 

2. Agility

With ever-changing customer needs and preferences, alongside technological advancements (especially in the Financial Services industry), adopting a growth-driven design approach for your website ensures your website never grows outdated. You can improve and adapt your site month-over-month, based on data so that it enables prospects and customers to address their problems and challenges and find solutions to help them to achieve their goals. 

3. Customer centricity

As your customers are at the heart of what you do, you must be meeting their needs and solving their issues through your content. As your website should be the knowledge base and portal for leads and customers, it must be engaging, informative and easy to navigate. By utilising a growth-driven design approach to develop your website, decision-making is simplified and based on insights to deliver delightful experiences. 

4. Speed to launch

Under the growth-driven design methodology, your launchpad website can be developed and published much faster than traditional website builds, due to the agile nature and accelerated build and launch process. With this methodology, the quicker your website is launched the sooner you’ll be able to analyse results and begin improving its performance. 

5. Cost-effectiveness

Unlike the traditional method of paying for the entire website to be developed, using a growth-driven design approach focuses on getting a cheaper launchpad website ready first, then undertaking additional improvements and adjustments according to your data. And by optimising your website according to real, hard data and analytics, you won’t waste money on features in the website development phase that are unnecessary and unlikely to deliver results. 

How can you implement the growth-driven design methodology in your organisation?

So, we’ve answered what is growth-driven design and outlined the benefits. But how do you go about implementing it? Firstly, you need to know the fundamentals of the approach, which are:

• Strategy - A focused growth strategy is the vital first step when building a successful website. It’s important to have a deep understanding of your users to accurately target customers and grow conversion rates. Understanding your customers’ goals and challenges is key to creating content that helps them to solve their problems, convince them of the suitability of your solutions and boost engagement. Creating an in-depth Financial Services marketing strategy will set the parameters for future steps when creating your growth-driven designed website. 
• Launchpad - Once you’re happy with your research and you’ve developed your growth strategy, the next phase of the methodology is to get a basic working prototype of your new website up and running - known as the launchpad. This prototype is used to give you an idea of the layout and functionality of your new site. After the launchpad is live, the focus turns to data and discovering what’s working well and what can be improved.
• Continuous Improvement - After your launchpad site is live, you should focus on the metrics for continuous improvement. This will enable you to be proactively in charge of your online presence and effectively grow your organisation. To ensure your content is engaging and converting your buyer personas, it’s vital to regularly analyse your website user behaviour, identify patterns, assess its effectiveness and take actions accordingly.
  
  

Focusing on the key factors that have the highest impact on conversions will enable you to develop and maintain an agile, growth-driven website that engages visitors and delights customers. To learn more about the methodology’s fundamentals, read our blog: Turn Your Website into a Lead Generation Machine by Using the Growth-Driven Design Methodology.

Summary

We hope you found our blog on “what is growth-driven design?” useful. As you can see, there are endless advantages to embracing the approach. Through increased agility, customer centricity and data-backed optimisation, growth-driven design can turn your business website into the powerful asset and marketing resource it should be, leading to ongoing performance improvements, a healthy lead pipeline and accelerated business growth.

To find out more about how growth-driven design can turn your website into a lead-generation machine, talk to our expert team or learn how our website design and development services can help you.

Inbound FinTech is an award-winning digital growth agency and elite HubSpot solutions partner for the Financial Services industry. We help businesses to build high-performing websites using the proven growth-driven design methodology. Explore our website development and design services or contact our friendly team to chat about a potential project.