Redesign Your Website to Increase Marketing-Influenced Wins

Plan and execute a successful website redesign.

Executive Brief

Analyst Perspective

Aligning the business goals with customer needs is essential to a successful website redesign.

Digital marketers are well aware that the success of a website redesign is a moving target that isn't easily managed. Clunky API integrations and a legacy tech stack often mean that a modern-day redesign will be highly technical. To make matters even worse, hiring quality technical staff has become increasingly difficult. Even if the marketing team can hurdle the technical obstacles, they still must face a leadership team that doesn't adequately understand and prioritize the buyer. Not prioritizing and aligning the buyers’ needs is the number one reason that website redesigns fail to deliver the number of marketing-influenced wins that Sales demands.

Marketers have a lot to manage to ensure that a modern website redesign will be successful. Planning is the most critical part of a redesign, yet one that is often skipped due to a lack of a good and proven methodology.

In this blueprint, marketers will learn how to properly plan and execute a best-in-class website redesign focusing on the sweet spot where the needs align between the business and the customer. Risks will be identified and mitigated early to ensure a realistic timeline and budget.

SoftwareReviews’ Website Design Methodology and Toolkit gives digital marketing leaders a reliable way to increase marketing-influenced wins, brand image, and competitive differentiation with a website redesign.

Terra Higginson

Marketing Research Director
SoftwareReviews

Executive Summary

SoftwareReviews Insight

Digital marketing leaders must focus on identifying the sweet spot where the needs of the business and buyer align in the planning stage of a website redesign. This ensures that disjointed needs are identified, lack of resources are accounted for, and high-impact needs are prioritized. Alignment ensures the redesign will increase marketing-influenced wins, brand image, and competitive differentiation.

Why is this important?

A modern B2B website is a critical channel for SaaS sales.

Despite its importance, up to 80% of website redesigns fail to deliver value due to lack of alignment of business and buyer needs.

What happens when a website redesign fails?

SaaS companies that fail to modernize and align their corporate website will spend an extra $113k yearly on sales salaries to compensate for the lack of marketing-influenced wins from this critical digital channel.

Benefits of a good website redesign

A B2B SaaS website delivers the following:

• Responsive and quick: A redesign should deliver a website experience that is responsive across all formats. The time that it takes to load should be optimized, ideally between 0-2 seconds, and absolutely less than 4 seconds.
• Business value: A redesign should deliver value to all stakeholders, but above all to the customers and prospects.
• Modern design: Bespoke graphic design and usage of templating is a key visual indicator to a successful website redesign, with first impressions taking just seconds to judge the brand image.
• User-focused content and navigation: A website redesign should support the buyer journey with content and lead magnets that bring them through the funnel, ready to become an SQL or opportunity.
• Updated MarTech: A website redesign is a good opportunity to identify and update the best solution for your MarTech stack.

A Good website redesign is critical to the business

Decreasing mobile site load times by just 1/10 of a second increases conversion rates by up to 10%.

Source: Deloitte, 2019

94% of first impressions are related to design.

Source: Researchgate.com, 2004

Your challenge

This research is designed to help digital marketing leaders who are facing these challenges:

• Current website doesn't deliver the quantity of sales that Sales demands: Marketers miss the mark when a website redesign focuses only on internal stakeholders. This lack of alignment between customer and company creates websites that focus on the CEO's and the product's needs, leaving website visitors disinterested.
• The website suffers from low conversions: Many websites do not have a well-planned buyer journey that develops a relationship with a prospect based on the company's competitive advantage and how it meets their needs. This leads to low website engagement and low conversions.
• Competitor has a superior website: Many website redesigns do not adequately increase brand value and marketing-influenced wins, leaving the sites condemned to subpar performance compared to the competition. This ensures their underdog status for marketing-influenced wins, revenues, and brand value.

The time it takes a user to form an opinion of a website

Just .5 seconds

Source: UK Web Host Reviews

Symptoms of a low-performing website

Does your website suffer from any of these issues? If so, it is time for a redesign. Use the diagnostic tool to understand if a website redesign is necessary.

• No clear journey for ICP and key buyer personas from the homepage
• Content that focuses on the product and the company, not the buyer
• Poor graphic design
• No landing pages
• Content is not competitively differentiated
• CMS cannot be easily updated without a developer
• Pages take more than four seconds to load
• The design is not responsive across all screen sizes
• High bounce rates and low engagement
• Poor conversion rates, coupled with little to no A/B testing
• Lack of a single view of the customer throughout the marketing and sales funnel
• Manual data entry and missed opportunities
• No chat or easy contact method is available
• No online scheduling is available

“A bad website is like a grumpy salesperson.”

– Jakob Nielsen, a pioneer in the study of user experience (UX) research

Source: Quotefancy

Common obstacles

These barriers make this challenge difficult to address for many organizations:

• Lack of technical expertise: Digital technology changes rapidly, leaving many teams without the internal knowledge to easily execute a website redesign.
• Lack of alignment: Internal stakeholders often hold opposing views regarding website purpose and design. Many fail to let buyer needs prevail.
• Inadequate budget: Lack of executive-level buy-in due to poor ROI on past redesigns.
• The redesign is not a priority: The marketing department is overwhelmed with a long list of things that need to be done, coupled with a lack of staff.
• Lack of experience with UX testing: The last website redesign led to a lot of bugs and issues once it went live.

Elements of a good website redesign

What does a good website redesign include? Ensure your finished redesign delivers these essential elements to the buyer, the business, and below the fold.

For the Buyer:

• The buyer’s needs are understood and met. Value is proof-point supported.
• The website redesign delivers a seamless buyer-journey experience.
• Content is relevant to the buyer and is competitively differentiated.

For the Business:

• Increasing MQLs, SQLs, time on site, pages viewed, and conversion rates.
• Abandon rates decrease and marketing-influenced wins and ROI increase.
• Brand image increases. Customer advocacy is enabled.

Below the Fold Best Practices:

1. The messaging and buyer journey are based upon a strong understanding of the buyer
2. Competitively relevant content constructed for ICP and 2+ buyers
3. Legacy tech stack is replaced with a functional and easily updated CMS (or DXP)
4. Users are involved in UX testing, and their feedback is incorporated
5. Buyer’s needs are prioritized at 2 or 3 times the weight of internal stakeholders
6. Responsive design
7. Professional graphic design
8. Conversion points are optimized
9. Regular A/B testing schedule
10. Improved speed
11. MarTech integration
12. CRM integration
13. Landing pages
14. Chat
15. Online scheduling
16. Online search tool

SoftwareReviews Methodology for How to Redesign Your Website to Increase Marketing-Influenced Wins

1. Plan a successful website redesign

Steps

• Diagnose whether a website redesign is necessary
• Identify the working team and steering committee
• Document business needs for a website redesign
• Document the buyers’ needs for a website redesign
• Align the business objectives with the buyers’ needs
• Build journey for ICP + 2 personas
• Build competitive message maps for ICP + 2 personas
• Audit existing content
• Design new sitemap
• Create a budget and timeline
• Create lo-fi wireframes, including for mobile devices=
• Work with graphic design on imaging and graphic design elements for protypes
• Gain steering committee approval for website redesign execution

Outcomes

• Documented business objectives for the website
• Website content review
• Buyer journey and message map for ideal client profile (ICP)
• Buyer journey and message map for additional two buyer personas
• Website and mobile wireframes
• Steering committee approval for website redesign execution

Benefits of our methodology

By following our proprietary methodology and easy-to-use toolkit you will:

• Understand staffing and budget requirements: Develop a complete picture of the staff and budget required for a website redesign. Identify risks and prioritize resources.
• Improve engagement: Create website messaging, a buyer journey for your ICP (ideal client profile), and two other personas built upon the aligned needs of the customer and the internal stakeholders.
• Gain a competitive edge: Outperform the competition by building a website that prioritizes the sweet spot where buyers' needs align with company needs, and highlights the company's competitive differentiation.
• Increase marketing-influenced wins: Align the needs of internal stakeholders and the customer during the planning phase to ensure the redesign results in a website that nurtures prospects, enhances brand image, and delivers the onsite conversions that sales demands.

“The only reason to build a website is to change someone. If you can’t tell me the change and you can’t tell me the someone, then you’re wasting your time.”

– Seth’s Blog

Insight Summary

Increase marketing-influenced wins

Digital marketing leaders must focus on identifying the sweet spot where the needs of the business and buyer align in the planning stage of a website redesign. This ensures that disjointed needs are identified, lack of resources are accounted for, and high-impact needs are prioritized. Alignment ensures the redesign will increase marketing-influenced wins, brand image, and competitive differentiation.

Understand stakeholders

The website redesign must identify the needs, challenges, and goals of internal stakeholder groups such as product, development, sales, marketing, and the executive to be successful.

Prioritize buyers

To succeed, the website redesign must prioritize and highlight the needs of the buyer, alleviating their pains and delivering the gains they need. This should be informed by buyer persona discovery and delivered via the buyer journey.

Understand resource constraints

To succeed, the website redesign must identify lack of resources and disjointed needs during the planning phase of a website redesign.

Identify risks

Primary risks to a successful website redesign can be identified through disjointed needs and a lack of resources.

Measure success

Measure current metrics and goals, allows marketers to track and report website redesign value and success.

Redesign your website to increase marketing-influenced wins

Design to create image

Key Insight: Digital marketing leaders must focus on identifying the sweet spot where the needs of the business and buyer align in the planning stage of a website redesign. This ensures that disjointed needs are identified, lack of resources are accounted for, and high-impact needs are prioritized. Alignment ensures the redesign will increase marketing-influenced wins, brand image, and competitive differentiation.

Are you feeling any of these pains?

• Current website doesn't deliver the quantity of SQLs that Sales demands
• The website suffers from low conversions and engagement
• Competitor has a superior website

Implications of sub-optimized website:

$115K in added csts

SaaS companies that fail to modernize and align their corporate website will spend an extra $115L yearly on sales salaries to compensate for the lack of marketing-influenced wins from this critical channel.

SoftwareReviews website redesign methodology gives marketers the tools to:

• Discover, align, and prioritize stakeholder needs for the redesign
• Identify areas of competitive differentiation that should be highlighted in the buyer journey and messaging
• Optimize marketing-influenced wins, brand image, and competitive differentiation with the website redesign

Plan for website redesign success

1. Take website diagnostic and determine if a redesign is necessary
2. Identify the working team and steering committee
3. Document business needs for a website redesign
4. Document the buyer’s needs for a website redesign
5. Align the business objectives with the buyers’ needs
6. Build message maps for ICP + 2 personas
7. Build journey for ICP + 2 personas
8. Audit existing content
9. Design the new sitemap
10. Create a budget and timeline
11. Create prototype wireframes, including for mobile devices
12. Work with graphic design on imaging and graphic design elements
13. Gain steering committee approval for website redesign execution

Results

Reap key benefits with a business and buyer-aligned website redesign:

• Understand staffing and budget requirements
• Improve engagement
• Gain a competitive edge
• Increase marketing-influenced wins

Blueprint deliverables

Key deliverable

Business and Buyer Goals Alignment Worksheet

This worksheet serves as the toolkit to align the buyer’s needs to the business needs, ensuring the website redesign will increase marketing-influenced wins.

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

Website Content Audit Worksheet

Use this worksheet to audit the existing website content.

Website Redesign Executive Presentation

Use this presentation to present your findings to the steering committee.

Website Diagnostic Tool

Use this worksheet to diagnose the need for a website redesign.

Website Redesign Budget Worksheet

Use this worksheet to budget for your website redesign.

Guided implementation

What does a typical GI look like on Website Redesign?

Phase 1

• Call #1: Review the blueprint and the website diagnostic tool. Discuss the objectives of starting on the blueprint.
• Call #2: Review the results of the website diagnostic.
• Call #3: Identify the steering committee and working team. Discuss documenting business needs.
• Call #4: Review the business findings on the business needs for a website redesign.
• Call #5: Review the findings for the buyers’ needs for a website redesign. Provide guidance on the next step of alignment.
• Call #6: Review the alignment of the business and buyers’ needs. Review risks identified and plan for resolution.
• Call #7: Review how to create message maps and buyer journeys.
• Call #8: Review the messages maps and journeys for the ICP + 2 personas.
• Call #19: Discuss how to audit website content.
• Call #10: Review the content audit and discuss tips for designing the new sitemap.
• Call #11: Review the new sitemap.
• Call #12: Check that risks have been resolved. Discuss how to create the budget and timeline for the redesign.
• Call #13: Review the budget and timeline. Discuss how to create prototype wireframes.
• Call #14: Review prototypes. Answer any questions about working with graphic design and selecting images.
• Call #15: Finalize website redesign plan for steering committee approval

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is between 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.