Sauce Agency | Growth-Driven Design: A Better Way to Business Growth

How often do you make impactful changes to your website? More importantly, how essential is your website to business growth? A website is your most valuable employee. Just like your team, a website needs active and steady direction. This is where Growth-Driven Design, or GDD, helps the most. GDD is a design methodology that aims at providing an exceptional experience to site users. This is done by formulating a data-driven strategy on the front end, followed by continuously assessing real-user-data and addressing opportunities for improvement. Here's the difference between the traditional approach and GDD:

Traditional: Remember the era of dial-up internet? During that time period, websites were billboards that presented a simple message without guidance on what to do next. Just like a forgotten billboard, websites sat idle for years, aging poorly amongst a rapidly modernizing landscape. The traditional ‘If you build it, they will come’ mentality is gone. Websites must adapt with the modern consumer’s needs or risk failure. The solution to keeping up? Growth-Driven Design.

Growth-Driven Design: GDD produces websites that foster amazing customer experiences. How? By applying real user data to user experience improvements, GDD empowers you to optimize your site for conversion. Businesses that invest in GDD consistently see an increase in revenue and customer retention. Additionally, they're also able to use their tech stack more effectively, making their team more efficient without adding headcount. Simply put, GDD helps you and your team just as much as it helps your customer — especially if you’re working to scale your business.

Growth-Driven Design helps you and your team just as much as it helps your customer.

Is Growth-Driven Design Right for You?

GDD is right for your website if you’re looking for more leads, steady engagement, and higher revenue. Be mindful of your existing business, its strengths, areas of improvement, and where you want to go. Just like any great marketing strategy, GDD provides tools and perspective on unique problems facing your business.

We’re here to help you find how and why GDD helps you solve those problems.

Your website is beautiful, but your sales pipeline is running dry.

You’ve put in the time, money, and effort to build the website of your dreams, but your ideal customers aren’t biting. What gives? Businesses who utilized GDD saw 6.9% more leads after 6-months because GDD pokes holes in your current website to make a solid version later.

You want to spread out the cost.

Website redesigns are expensive. Using a Growth-Driven Design methodology helps you focus on what’s important for your online presence instead of constantly worrying about the budget.

You need to minimize risk yet still see results.

A website built through Growth-Driven Design minimizes risk. Traditional design demands required information up front. By the time the website’s finished, your customers have new problems that the new website doesn’t solve. That’s money left on the table. GDD produces a better website faster while introducing collaborative steps to identify and solve emerging problems as they happen. That’s more money in your pocket.

It’s time to grow and expand.

It’s challenging for businesses to grow and improve. GDD scales proactive growth methods to any business size and budget. You’ll have a clear, manageable strategy from the start to best understand not just why you’re growing, but where to grow.

Your website is visitor-focused.

If your website is a dictionary or phonebook, GDD isn’t for you. But if your goal is to take your visitors on a purposeful journey, learn more about them, or ever add them to your contacts, Growth-Driven Design is the answer.

You’re a numbers person.

The most important aspect of most web designs is how it affects your bottom line. What’s the return on investment? User-driven metrics guide GDD through your business goals. Track progress and see firsthand how active change and focus improves the return on investment.

A traditional website redesign is nerve-racking, costly, and risky. Depending on the scope and complexity of the build, your new website built with traditional design methodology costs anywhere from $15,000 to $80,000. Ultimately, the traditional methodology:

Leaves your company with a large financial burden
Causes confusion — for your customers and your team
Creates more problems than solutions

Traditional web design says you build a site, launch it, and for the most part, leave it alone for a few years. Then, when enough time passes, do it all over again. That is a risky proposition. What's happening to the experience your potential customers are having on your website in that time? Is it making your digital marketing efforts less effective, ultimately costing you sales?

Markets evolve. New opportunities emerge. Customers move on. So do the best websites. Growth-Drive Design is not change for the sake of change — GDD is change for the sake of success.

GDD is not change for the sake of change — it is change for the sake of success.

Traditional web design fails to leverage growth opportunities for your business. To achieve total conversion rate optimization, friction between users and the information they seek needs to be reduced as much as possible. With GDD, instead of setting and forgetting, you assess and address. Instead of questions, you have answers. GDD is the best website design methodology available for long-lasting, positive returns on your business.

As we shared at the open of this page, Growth-Driven Design is a strategic methodology that uses real user data to inform website design and development. The real magic of GDD is the active improvement of your website based on the changing needs and wants of an ideal customer. By breaking the development cycle into small chunks, both business and designer deliberate about the user experience. GDD puts the user front and center at every step of the design process. It’s faster, cheaper, and better than traditional design methods.

The real magic of GDD is the active improvement of your website based on the changing needs and wants of an ideal customer.

A great user experience is the difference between a lost customer or a delighted one. Think about it: if you have trouble navigating a new website for a problem you really need solved, do you stick around or shop elsewhere? GDD streamlines the navigation process, identifies the user’s problem, and done well, allows you to answer the users next question before they even have to ask. You have more control over the user’s journey from awareness to decision.

Growth-Driven Design: The Numbers

GDD offers a quicker time to value than traditional web design methods.

• On average, GDD yields a new website in just 60 days.

• Traditional web design can take up to 108 days from start to finish.

Longer development time means lost leads and less return on investment.

The Sustainable Spike

Traffic and leads spike with every new website launch, but what happens when the competition catches up to, or even surpasses, your aging site? Traditional design says you stand firm, wait, and plan improvements a few years later. As leads pass your website by, your company struggles.

Enter the sustainable spike. GDD pulls active, user-driven data to change your website for the better. If you know what your customers want, GDD helps you deliver and delight. Instead of an isolated spike in traffic or leads, GDD brings consistent, sustainable growth and customers to your business.

With GDD, businesses report 16.9% more leads, 14.1% more traffic, and 11.2% more revenue after just six months after implementation. The results speak for themselves. Ultimately, Growth-Driven Design is about more than just building a website; it’s about providing an unforgettable experience for your customers in the digital world.

Ultimately, Growth-Driven Design is about more than just building a website; it’s about providing an unforgettable experience for your customers in the digital world.

The Three Phases of Growth-Driven Design

Phase 1: Plan

Develop your strategy to include an empathetic understanding of your customer’s problem and how you can help them solve it.

The plan phase is the foundation of Growth-Driven Design. Building a clear, focused strategy is key in developing a website that addresses the needs of your users. Skipping the strategy stage means lost revenue, time wasted, and higher costs. Invest in the strategy stage to ensure your future activities are aligned with driving real user value.

• Outline and future-proof your company-wide growth goals
• Leverage new or hidden digital pathways to your goals

Buyer Personas: Every strategy begins with a deep understanding of your customers. By knowing your customers and what solutions they need, you can map out a journey to solve their problem.

Buyer's Journey: Every buyer follows a journey to solve their problem. GDD identifies which stage of the journey a buyer is on and offers tools and solutions for buyers to decide and delight. You need to determine what type and which stage of the journey your persona is on.

Consult the Data: Look at how users are interacting with your website. Make observations. Take notes. Be an investigator. How are users interacting with your website? What is the value proposition they receive? How are they accessing it (i.e. from their desk at work or from a mobile device, while sitting in traffic or at the mall?).

Phase 2: MVP

Build a foundational website that looks and performs better than your current website.

An MVP (or Minimum Viable Product, also call launch pad website) is a fully built website that looks and performs better than the one you currently have — but it’s just the starting point. Starting with an MVP is how you can achieve quick-wins and improve your current website twice as fast as traditional web design.

Phase 3: Iterative Improvements

Collect live user data from your MVP to identify opportunities for improvement.

The Fortify Phase is a repeatable, agile process to collect real-user data, build high-impact items, and generate momentum. Your website is an asset built to drive company-wide growth, allowing both you and your team to discover new opportunities and help other departments accelerate.

• Think lean
• Eliminate waste
• Reduce risk
• Maximize customer value

By instilling an agile process, you administer an interactive and collaborative strategy to deconstruct complex projects into bite-sized chunks. The result is a perpetually evolving machine that is your website, able to pivot and adapt as needed.

Ensuring your technology and tools are compatible with the Growth-Driven Design methodology is key. Instead of constantly finding and learning new tools, your technology needs to grow the same way your customers do.

What you need is an effective tech stack: an integrated combination of software with the right programs and services to remove bottlenecks and empower your team to take action.

A tech stack works in tandem with each other and your business goals. It allows you to:

• Pull all of your data into a single, unified place.
• Understand the bigger picture and greater possibilities.
• Have more time to focus on other important areas of your business.

Building a Growth-Driven Tool Stack

Start by looking at the goals you are trying to achieve, then assess the functionality required to achieve those goals. Always select the tools with features that best align with the functions necessary to reach your goals.

Don’t download and buy a bunch of apps and tools. Instead, ask yourself these two questions:

What are the goals or outcomes you are seeking to achieve with your website?
What functionality do you require to reach your goals?

At Sauce, we use a handful of technology to help us make informed decisions based on real-user-data, such as:

• Heat mapping
• Analytics & reporting tools
• Keyword research tools
• Site health assessments
• Cookie tracking

Collaborate

Gathering internal feedback through a questionnaire or active discussion helps businesses identify friction, generate transparent solutions, and achieve a greater understanding of each department’s user experience. Remember: user-driven data includes your own team’s website needs, too.

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a supercharged suite of sales, marketing, and service software. It allows HubSpot marketing agencies to:

Build your software foundation.
Track your user’s digital body language.
Gain real-time insights to inform active campaign tactics.
Help prospects at every step of the buyer’s journey.

Sauce Marketing is a proudly certified Hubspot Gold Partner Agency. Our team teaches you how to use, integrate, and delight customers through the most powerful CRM available. Ensure remarkable customer experience, smoother handoffs between teams, and the highest available standards of inbound marketing.

HubSpot Tools

Partnering with a Hubspot agency offers access to insightful software filled with features and functions to help businesses grow. Just a few of these include:

A/B and adaptive testing
Automated task management
Attribution reporting
Blog & content creation tools
Live chat and conversational bots

HubSpot's CRM platform is powered by the same database, so everyone in your organization — marketing, sales, and operations — works off the same system of record.

Ultimately, HubSpot is used for marketing to gather insightful data to help spend your marketing dollars more wisely. HubSpot is used by sales to build relationships and speak to the customers' needs earlier in the process. It's able to be utilized by customers and internal users to report issues in a trackable way so that they receive the attention they need as quickly as possible. Few softwares are able to equip businesses in being this proactive in guiding their customers.

Growth-Driven Design:
A Smarter Way To Build Your Website

Is Growth-Driven Design Right for You?

Table of Contents

Traditional Web Design

Growth-Driven Design

Technology

HubSpot

01
The Problem with Traditional Web Design

02
What is Growth-Driven Design?

Growth-Driven Design: The Numbers

The Sustainable Spike

Ultimately, Growth-Driven Design is about more than just building a website; it’s about providing an unforgettable experience for your customers in the digital world.