So, you’ve decided that your website isn’t working and it’s time to build a new site.
Why?
Don’t feel bad if you don’t have an answer at the ready. You’d be surprised at how often prospective clients we meet with can provide only vague ideas in response to that question. Sometimes they aren’t really even sure if it’s a design issue, a matter of technical performance, or messaging that needs to be addressed. 
While gut feeling is often an excellent barometer, it’s also an awfully risky foundation on which to lay as big a bet as investing in – and relying on – a new website. You should have more than a vague sense that there’s a problem to be fixed, especially if that vague sense is coming from someone who may be a few steps removed from the website and the marketing work it is meant to do.
Even worse, an instinctive response almost never helps you determine how you should build your new site so that it addresses your existing site’s shortcomings.
Marketing Metrics to the Rescue
The solution isn’t to spend more time or bring in a larger team. It’s to examine the information you have and, if you don’t have information you can build on, to find a way to gather that information.
Most people agree with this in principle but shy away from it in practice because of how they perceive risk. Anything but the most direct path to a new website is a risk in their thinking, which typically boils down to something along the lines of:
- The website isn’t working
- Therefore, we need a new website
- Therefore, we should build a new website as quickly as possible
There’s nothing wrong with tackling a problem as soon as you recognize it, and with speed comes the comfort of knowing that you have minimized the opportunity costs that accrue every day you don’t address the problem. Of course, they’re also overlooking the fact that the new site may not improve the situation, but hey, at least they’re doing something.
That bias towards action isn’t misguided, just misapplied. Running tests and experimenting with message can feel like you’re treading water rather than solving a problem. But there are ways to make forward progress and learn enough about how your marketing is and isn’t working in the process.
One way we’ve found that is effective relies on a few simple steps.
- Evaluate the website and the marketing that supports it qualitatively and quantitatively.
- Examine the data you are using to do your evaluation.
- Determine the fastest path to improved marketing performance – adjusting the existing site, building a new site, or researching and iterating.
There’s a lot packed into those three bullets, particularly the last one – which I’ll dive into next month – but first, let’s dive into what direction this evaluation work could take.
Possible Paths to Marketing Success
Building A New Site
The idea of building a new website to improve marketing performance is nearly as popular as it is dangerously vague. Unless you dig deeper to define where the problem is rooted, you may wind up investing much more than you have to. And you may be investing in the wrong solution if you’re changing everything but the root cause.
This is our least favorite path since it’s the riskiest. You’re changing too many variables at once to know for sure which is still holding you back. (And even when you succeed, you’ll have difficulty expanding on that success since you won’t know what has triggered it.
At the very least a website rebuild must include an in-depth discovery phase where you develop solid, detailed answers to the “why” questions long before you consider the “how” of visual design and technology.
Adjusting an Existing Website
If we dig deeper, we find that there may be a single aspect of the site that needs attention – whether it is the message, the design, site navigation, or technology. Identifying that one thing may take as much or more time and effort than fixing it, but your fix is more likely to lead to improved marketing performance.
The key here is that you’ve identified and are addressing one element. Assuming you’re correct, you’ll see improved performance quickly. And if your assessment – or your solution – was wrong, you’ll have invested as little time as possible, and can either try a different solution or focus on a different root cause.
The problem is that it takes time to iterate and test, all the while your opportunity costs grow. This is generally a far better approach than simply diving into a website redesign – we’ll cover that in a moment – but still not the approach most likely to lead to sustained marketing improvement.
Adjusting Marketing That Supports Your Website
Maybe it’s not your website at all. It could be the case that the marketing you are doing to drive people to your website isn’t working. You could be targeting the wrong audience. You could be sharing the wrong message.
The way to test the effectiveness of your marketing will depend on what kind of marketing you’re doing, so rather than make this article any longer, we’ll leave that for another day. Safe to say that it is worth the effort — which can be considerable — to create an attribution model that helps you identify what content / marketing your prospects have consumed and what action they have taken. Patterns should emerge that tell you where prospects are finding value and continuing their journey.
Research and Iterate
Finally, we have our preferred approach: using the metrics data you have and adding in more data that you gather from highly targeted tools like a lead magnet, a landing page, and possibly a lead product. In many ways, this approach includes all the best attributes of other possible paths while eliminating or minimizing their downsides.
As I mentioned above, I’ll dive into this in more detail next month. In the meantime, you may want to take a look at your marketing to see what is working, what is not, and areas you might investigate for improvement.
Occasional large-scale changes can re-invigorate a marketing plan that’s beginning to falter and can provide a blast of inspiration that ripples out through the rest of your marketing.
By the way, if you’re interested in hearing some of my podcast and radio appearances, you’ll find a few of them listed on the Andigo website.
Photo by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash
