Kulture Konnect Blog

Stop. 

Before you even start thinking about web layout or text boxes, color schemes or follow-through links, there are more important things than looks and design to consider when implementing a website redesign.

In fact, one of the most crucial decisions to make during a web redesign isn’t the layout itself, but rather determining your goals to get measurable results. After all, a good-looking website that doesn’t bring in traffic, make accessibility easy for all your customers, or convert visits into action isn’t truly successful. 

We’ve already previously covered the basics of benchmarking your website’s metrics, and exactly why that’s so important (but if you missed it, be sure to check out all of the must-know tips, here). Once you’ve got that key background, then it’s time to start on the next step towards success—planning your goals. 

When thinking about a website redesign, it’s essential to clearly determine what you want to accomplish ahead of time, and the ways in which success will be measured. How do you want to effectively bring in new customers? Will you focus more on conversation rates, email sign-ups, or an entirely different metric? It’s important to remember that, as a business owner, your website goals might be different from what your customers want from a website. While business owners' goals normally involve conversation rates, email sign-ups or downloads, your users will probably be more interested in finding a specific piece of information that is relevant to what they need at any given point in their lives. Hence the importance of building a website that achieves both your goals as a business owner and provides value to the user, either through a desirable service or information received. 

By figuring out what your goals are, it’s infinitely easier to tie those goals to clear metrics and measures of success. During this part of the redesign process, every type of business model and company should have goals unique to their niche, their brand, and their market and should be clear on how those goals will affect their overall business operation. For example, some businesses might be more interested in marketing goals, such as driving traffic, engaging prospects or generating leads, while other businesses might be more interested in sales support and communication, customer satisfaction, recruitment, etc. 

Setting goals before a website redesign can assist in streamlining the rest of the marketing process that follows. Establishing goals not only provides significant clarification for the exact type of target persona you want to reach, It also helps establish what type of content will appeal to your target audience, and have the impact you desire. That in turn helps improve the overall organization of the website – for example, a “sign up to our newsletter here” call to action should ensure that all the content leading up to that moment supports it. A call to action is only effective if it’s accompanied with a compelling argument for why you should take that action. This leads to a final product that is highly targeted towards–and highly capable of–achieving specific goals. 

Throughout this process, tracking and measuring data can give in-depth insight into your website’s performance. Just a single glance can help you check if your website is failing to meet goals–or if it’s completely surpassing the expectations you set. There are countless different ways that online success can be measured, and the methods of measuring success will differ depending on the company. 

For starters, there’s a huge difference between visits vs leads vs customer acquisition, and while all of these factors are important separately, knowing what your company wants to target is crucial. If you’re wondering how to differentiate between visits and leads, it’s actually quite simple—visits are anyone who comes to your website, while leads are visitors who have expressed interest—possibly by signing up for a newsletter or sharing their information—while visiting your site. After that, knowing how to differentiate between leads and customer acquisition is easy as well—while leads have merely expressed interest, customer acquisitions are visitors who have committed to your services. When it comes to setting goals, focus mainly on the factors that are most important to your business.

Here are a few more pointers to make sure you put your website redesign on a success track: 

• Keep a clear vision: When thinking about a website redesign, it’s essential to clearly determine what you want to accomplish ahead of time, and the ways in which success will be measured. This is where setting goals before a website redesign can assist in streamlining the rest of the marketing process that follows.
• Be SMART about it: It is also important to mention that we normally suggest to our prospects and clients to keep a SMART approach. With a SMART strategy, you can set Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely goals that will make your life easier. Let’s break these down: 
  • Specific: Many business owners fall in the trap of saying that their main goal is to “get more people on to my website.” This is not a specific goal and it doesn't help you in figuring out how you’re going to achieve it. But, if you say something like “my goal is to increase website traffic by 25% in the next 6 month,” it will help you to figure out how you’re going to achieve that goal and how to measure it
  • Measurable: If you don't track your progress, there is no way you will know whether you're successful. It is important to quantify your goals, for example, if you push live a whitepaper, you should know how many downloads you’re shooting for and by when so you can compare results, figure out success and make adjustments. 
  • Attainable: You should set realistic goals, otherwise it will feel just like a task that never ends and you will most likely give up after a short while. However, you need to be clear that having “realistic” goals doesn't mean having “easy” goals. Goals need to challenge your business in order to grow. If you think you have a goal that is too big, break it down into smaller goals. For example, if the structure of your website is too big, you may consider implementing growth driven design so have a website that grows with you and not a website that takes 6-12 months to launch.
  • Relevant: Your goals are directly related with the growth of your businesses, so they need to be relevant and bring value, which in turn would make it relevant to your customers and bring them value. This also has to do with the structure of your website, for example, most business owners believe that the  main entry point of a website is the home page, but that is not necessarily true anymore. With this in mind, the of your home page might differ from the goals of other landing or internal pages.  
  • Time-Based: Any type of goal needs to implement a timescale, and website goals are not the exception. Establishing the “increase of website traffic by 25% in the next 6 month” as a goal will provide you with an accurate way to track success and will keep you accountable to make sure your goal is achievable.

• Communication is Key: Once those internal goals are determined, then it is highly important to communicate precisely what you want to achieve with your design team or design agency. Never assume that just because goals are clear to you, they’re clear to every member involved in the creation of your company’s website. You’ll get the best results on your new website design by making sure everyone knows what you want your website to accomplish, and how you want to measure that success.

• Beyond website goals: Website goals are not a bubble where it’s all about the website ONLY. Website goals directly affect other marketing aspects in a more holistic way. As you move along in the process you’ll need to consider questions such as “how organic SEO vs PPC increases traffic to my website,” “how social media drives leads to my website,” “how content marketing can increase my conversion rate,” and learn all about the importance of nurturing your leads. 

All this might feel like a lot of information, but don’t worry—we’ll be covering all of that in more detail in the weeks to come.

Conclusion:

Remember that when it comes to setting goals for your website there are no shortcuts. Only you, as the business owner or marketing director, can determine the right goals for your website and what success means for you. If you skip this step your website may still look awesome, but it won't help your business grow.

After getting a full grasp on everything to do with defining the goals of a website redesign, the next step towards success is identifying which marketing channels will bring in more of the right type of customers to your company’s website—which is exactly what we’ll be covering in the next article. 

Stay tuned next week for more essential tips and insights on how to build the most effective website to suit your brand, drive up engagement, and keep your customers coming.