How Growth-Driven Design Impacts Your Sales Process (And Why You Shouldn't Ignore It)

By Artash Arakelyan

When I first got into digital marketing as a career change a few years back (I had previously worked as a financial advisor and had a brief stint starting a study-abroad program for a Chinese government contracted company) I thought the term ‘growth driven design’ was a bit haughty.

It reminded me of an interview I once read with a favorite musician of mine, who was labeled in the music press as an IDM artist, the acronym standing for ‘intelligent dance music’.

The artist’s response, and of course I need to paraphrase here, was: “Intelligent dance music? It makes it sound like other types of dance music aren’t as intelligent as this kind. A bit nasty, innit?” (He was English, and “innit” was the only part I didn’t need to paraphrase, as it’s humorous to read it online when one is a guy born and raised in the US.)

I agreed with his perspective, and felt the same way when ‘growth driven design’ and ‘GDD’ first began exploding on marketing blogs left and right, bandied about like free candy. Does the term imply that other web design methodologies were somehow not aimed at growing the organization? That these companies NOT using GDD were suckers, and we select few were privy to a pot of marketing gold? Should I feel guilty for knowing how to do this?

Well, yes. I should feel guilty, but only if I refuse to share this knowledge with others. Hence - here we are now.

Before we get into how GDD impacts your sales process, we should clear the air beforehand, and this is not something that every marketing professional will let you know from the get-go…but I will because I’m still a rebel at heart.

Growth driven design is not practical for every organization.

If you are Nike or Coca-Cola, you probably don’t need to be a GDD devotee to the degree that the rest of us do. Until my company attains the market salience and multi-billion revenue of a Bloomberg or Macy’s, I am a convert one hundred percent to the value of GDD.

Also, if you run an organization in certain industries (i.e. legal services, construction work) where your online presence needs to be as consistent and predictable as your personal communications, delivery of services, what-have-you, then GDD might not the best way to approach your web design efforts.

Yet, emphasis on might…

However, if you run a dynamic company, breaking ground with your products or services, trying to edge out the competition as one of the new guys, or any other situation where online customer conversions via your website are vital for your sustainability - welcome, friends. Time to dive in.

So, why doesn’t Mercedes-Benz need GDD?

Once your company has been globally recognized as an industry leader for about 100 years, well, you gained market salience during the entire time that many of your customers were birthed and passed on, all before the internet existed.

Yes, admittedly this is a bit grim, but it’s a fact. Rolex doesn’t need GDD for their web presence. Not to say it can’t be a bit of fun to try it out for those guys, but it could very well plainly be a waste of time and (ahem, negligible degree) of resources. 

So, why does your company need GDD?

Because traditional web design approaches are robbing you of potential customers for a crazy number of reasons. I don’t use the word ‘crazy’ as an adjective often, so here’s why it’s warranted:

• You started to grow your company after the dawn of the internet which, for practical purposes, demands that your web presence is your primary line of contact with customers or
• You work in an industry for which a web presence is impossibly valuable for your sales
• The traditional approach of design - a complete overhaul of your website every two years - alienates customers who have not yet had the opportunity to develop brand loyalty to your company

Before I get into the stats (they’re going to happen eventually - this is a blog post about marketing after all), here’s another quick story that illustrates the impact of GDD:

When I was 23 I was department manager at a major domestic chain store outside of NYC. I had retail experience for the preceding five years at four other retail outlets. The one I’m talking about now confused the hell out of me - our merchandisers and designers were spending every single day going over fresh plans from corporate to redesign the entire store bit by bit, and here’s the kicker, during retail hours.

I found the idea ludicrous. Who would want to shop at a store that is always a work in progress? But...it worked. The target audience were Millennials and Generation X’rs, and this redesign perpetuity brought us in measurably greater foot traffic (and thus sales) than any other competing stores in each and every American college town we had property in.

Yes, we did the analytics.

What this retailer was doing was the physical equivalent of web GDD. It didn’t make sense to me as a kid, but it makes tremendous marketing sense to me now as an adult - give the customers what they want deep down from your by testing it out on them while they’re already in your store.

I swear I’ll get into the numbers soon, but here’s the thing - the core audience didn’t mind the sawdust or awkward positioning of fixtures while things were shuffled around; the value of the product was already established. However, the customers kind of on the fence, that walk in once or twice to survey what the brand feels like, are much more enticed to walk in again a few days or weeks later just to see how the store had changed.

And this was all analyzed by corporate…

Color choices for seasons were not simply chosen at random - they had be tested over several years. In tandem, trends were analyzed and incorporated into the store’s design along with what had learned to be the company’s target audience preferences.

Ladies and gentlemen - this was growth driven design in actual physical practice.

The numbers you’ve been waiting for…

You are probably making your own assumptions for why when it comes to web design GDD is a godsend for countless organizations, why it works, and how crucial it is to grow sales. To reference my earlier point, ‘growth driven’ isn’t implying that GDD is what simply grows a company’s sales, but instead that it drives sales when sales need to be driven through your website experience.

If you’re like my agency and in charge of turning SMEs and enterprise-level technology companies into industry dominators through digital marketing, or are one yourself, this is why you need to incorporate GDD or suffer miserable profit margins:

• Across the board, human attention spans have shrunk down to 8 seconds. Yes, shorter than a goldfish’s, not a whimsical exaggeration
• Consumers (almost 40%) are exceedingly likely to leave your company’s website if the load time is longer than they are used to, which is now no more than two seconds
• Tablet use for web browsing has increased 30% from 2013-2015
• Smartphone use for web browsing increased 78% during the same period of time
• Mobile devices now account for two out of three minutes that the internet is accessed

What does this mean for your web design? It means that your potential customers are expecting to know how your product or service is going to solve their pain points, but with less text and prettier pictures.

Remember, your core audience will still be loyal to your brand, because the content that worked in the first place is still there. However, the traffic that is walking through your doors is going to need to know why your brand is the right choice for them.

This is where GDD gives you greater opportunity to convert them than traditional web design. The sales and marketing teams work in conjunction with your designers in testing out what works for the customer, instead of what your brand assumes works for the customer.

In this sense, GDD allows you the freedom to optimize your site to cater only to the customer’s expectations and desires. Through continually redesigning your site, while analyzing what changes are providing the greatest ROI, you are building a site design that speaks exactly to both your core customer base and to those unfamiliar with your brand yet. 

How does this impact your sales process?

When continuously optimizing your website for your target audience, your sales risks are substantially mitigated against consumer preferences and trends. This means that not only are you saving money on an extremely costly overhaul of your site, in at least the tens of thousands, but you are delivering a site that is based not on assumptions, but actual customer behavior regarding their preferences and expectations.

This means that your sales team can now communicate with customers that are already prepped to be closed. Sales staff are kept in the loop month after month of what is working to convert visitors to leads. Your team may already know of your product and its value, but know they are also aware of how informed the leads are via your design; the content and visuals that have spoken to the buyer at that moment in time.

For example, buyer preferences change over time, such as what color car is in fashion and which have fallen out. With an informed sales team, one which knows exactly what pain points are relevant to customers at a given moment in time and how preferences have shifted from one month to the next, well, think of the possibilities.

The Goldfish Conundrum: How to Create Content for Short Attention Spans

By Sophia Bernazzani

The creation of mobile devices has made multitasking close to ubiquitous in the modern world. Between social media, live streaming, and digital news, it’s hard to imagine a time of day when we aren’t tempted to look at a screen while we’re doing something else at the same time.

Because of this phenomenon, it should come to no surprise that the average human attention span has fallen to just eight seconds -- shorter than that of a goldfish.

What’s more, 59% of people share articles on Twitter without even reading them, and more than half of all pageviews are under a minute in length. It’s clear that people aren’t reading as much as they used to, and content creators need to adapt their strategy to that reality.

In this post, we’ll discuss strategies and resources marketers can use to create content that will generate clicks, shares, and most importantly, more readers.

The Current State of Content Marketing

Back in September, Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs released their annual B2B content marketing survey results, revealing that 70% of respondents plan to produce more content in 2017 than in 2016. However, while content production continues to rise year over year, content engagement saw a 17% drop in 2016, according to TrackMaven.

This dip could be a reflection of decreased content quality, as proper planning and research tend to fall by the wayside when marketers ramp up their output. But it could also be attributed to that attention span shrinkage we mentioned earlier. After all, today's readers are more likely to skim blogs, long-form written content, and podcasts rather than thoroughly consume them, according to data from HubSpot Research.

What's a marketer to do? Let's dive into our strategies for defying the goldfish attention span, without sacrificing the quality of your content.

How to Create Content That Gets Consumed

You already know that content creation is an integral part of the inbound marketing methodology. It attracts visitors to your blog, cultivates brand awareness, and helps you generate leads for your organization. But what about page views? Here are our strategies for making sure you’re not just creating into the void, but are actually producing content that gets consumed and shared.

Write quality content

We know, this one seems like a no brainer. But with 30% of marketers reporting that they don't have clarity around what content marketing success looks like, it's an important issue to stress.

It’s estimated that bad writing costs businesses close to $400 billion per year in inefficiency and productivity loss. And it could also be costing your organization if you’re generating content that isn’t driving any results. So before you start putting fingers to keyboard, implement a few processes to make sure you’re writing quality content that’s also useful to your audience.

Here are a few ideas:

• Validate your blog post ideas before writing them by doing industry and persona research and selecting keywords to target.
• Conduct a competitor analysis to see what content drives engagement across a variety of channels.
• Create a style guide and rely on an editorial checklist so each piece of content is held to the same high standard.

One of the easiest ways to create content that your audience will read? Ask your audience what they want to read about. Conduct social media polls and surveys to find out what topics and content types your subscribers are interested in, and brainstorm ideas based on their feedback.

For example, The Muse publishes content for job seekers about career growth, and they ran a poll asking their Twitter followers what would improve their workday.

 Follow

The Muse 

✔@dailymuse

We're curious: What would make your workday a whole lot better? #career #poll

6:52 PM - 4 Oct 2016

35%A Better Boss

14%Fewer Emails

31%A Private Office

20%Free Snacks

234 votes•Final results

 
•  77 Retweets
 
•  44 likes

Sure enough, shortly after the poll closed on Twitter, they published this article based on the results:

Clever, right? Experiment with social media polls and ask for engagement from your followers. Encourage your audience to engage with the poll to generate content ideas and more participation on social media, and see what ideas you come up with based on the results.

Invest in thought leadership

When setting your blog editorial calendar for the months ahead, ask yourself: Are there any topics that someone in the organization, such as a founder or executive, is uniquely qualified to write about?

That’s thought leadership -- and it's not as difficult to incorporate into your strategy as you might think it is. In fact, there are a lot of small steps you can take to incorporate more thought leadership into your current editorial.

Here are a few ideas:

• Write a guest post on another organization’s blog. Check out this post for tips on how to become a guest writer on 11 popular sites.
• Publish long-form content that contains original research.
• Speak at conferences in your industry. (Intimidated by public speaking? HubSpot's CMO Kipp Bodnar suggests starting with improv.)
• Interview an influential industry professional outside of your organization.

At HubSpot, we frequently partner with influential organizations -- like Trello -- to create content that reflects our combined expertise. By collaborating with the folks behind Trello to put together a comprehensive guide for using the project management tool in your marketing campaigns, we demonstrated our ability to provide credible, helpful tips -- straight from the source:

Brainstorm other organizations in your industry and determine a mutually beneficial way you could collaborate. Whether that’s guest posting, cross-promotion, or working together as in the example above, keep bringing new ideas to the table that your audience can’t help but read.

Create visual content

Your audience wants to see more visual content, and it performs better, too: readers spend more time looking at images than words on a web page, and images promote greater memory recall than text alone.

There are a variety of different types of visual content that you can create to draw attention and promote greater readership, and our blog has a number of step-by-step guides to creating eye-catching infographics, videos, and more.

Vox does a great job of providing written and visual content for its readers. On any given day, it might publish a data visualization, a long-form article, and a video featuring different angles on the same topic -- in this case, the Women’s March on Washington -- to match different people’s content preferences and to keep things fresh for its audience.

Data Visualization

Long-Form Article

Video

The lesson? Don’t automatically default to writing a blog post simply because it’s a medium you’re comfortable with. Experiment with creating visual content to tell data-driven stories your audience will click, and hopefully share, too.

Meet the reader halfway

Follow the Golden Rule: Treat your reader as you’d like to be treated. Most of us are busy people, and busy people on the internet like to skim-read content. Luckily, you can make it easier for readers to consume your content all the way through with different formatting, layout, and coding choices.

Here are a few ideas:

• Use headers and bolded text to break up sections and paragraphs so readers can maintain focus.
• Use bullet points and numbered lists to draw the eye to a new format and pay closer attention. (See what we did there?)
• Include summary and takeaway sections in your written content to help readers remember what they’ve been reading about and maintain their interest.

Even better, help the reader understand how quickly they’ll be able to read a piece before they get started. Check out how Medium does this in an example from ThinkGrowth.org, HubSpot’s Medium publication:

(For more examples of publications that produce easily consumable content, try reading this blog post for inspiration.)

Publish on a variety of channels

Another challenge to getting people to thoroughly consume your content is they just may not have found it yet, and that’s where off-site content can come in handy. Audiences vary across different platforms, and it’s easier for your content to get discovered, and then read, if it’s published in more places than just your blog.

Medium is one example of where you can publish different content to attract a broader audience. You could create original content for a Medium publication, or repurpose old content by turning text into an infographic or video. As HubSpot Vice President of Marketing Meghan Keaney Anderson notes:

On the open web, people are searching, but on Medium, people come to spend time reading. This leads to much higher engagement on Medium and it’s this engagement, not search behavior, that fuels further discovery.”

Social media platforms also offer a variety of features for publishing original content. For example, you can publish live video on Facebook, ephemeral messages on Snapchat, photos on Instagram, and blog posts on LinkedIn. To ensure you're publishing on these channels at the most optimal time, check out this guide from ClearVoice on when to publish content on social media for different industries.

Getting Started

We know this is a lot of information, but competition is getting stiff, so experimenting with how you create content now will pay off in the future. If you need help getting started, here’s our list of free tools to make awesome content.

How to Run LinkedIn Ad Campaigns: A Beginner's Guide

By Amanda Sibley

LinkedIn is a highly valuable tool to network with like-minded professionals. But here's something we don't talk about as much as we should -- it's also a highly useful marketing platform.

It might seem a little bit intimidating. You have enough on your plate -- do you really need to be figuring out yet another way to create targeted content? Actually, yes. You have more power at your disposal with LinkedIn than you might realize.

That's because LinkedIn has a powerful ads platform. If you're already using pay-per-click (PPC) techniques to power your presence on Facebook, Twitter, or Google, consider yourself lucky -- you can add LinkedIn to that list, too. 

Download our free two-week planner on running LinkedIn Sponsored Content campaigns with ease. 

But if you're new to LinkedIn ads, fear not -- we've put together a step-by-step guide to setting up your first LinkedIn ad campaign. Bookmark this post, and refer to it when you're ready to get started.

How to Run LinkedIn Ad Campaigns

1) Create a New Ad Campaign

To start, go to https://www.linkedin.com/ads/. Once in the ads platform, select "Create Ad."

From there, you'll be taken to your member dashboard, where you'll be prompted to add billing information to your account, if you haven't already. Don't worry -- you won't be charged until your campaign is live, and from there, you'll be charged periodically for ad clicks and other engagements.

On your dashboard -- or "Campaign Manager," as it's formally called -- you'll see a call-to-action (CTA) to create a campaign. Click that button, and you'll be redirected to a site where you select what kind of ad you want to create.

As you'll see, there are two types of campaigns that you can create:

1. Sponsored Content, which is used to "attract new followers to your company or showcase page" and "drives engagement with company-specific content."
2. Text Ads, which are said to be the budget-friendlier option, but are still "highly targeted."

The differences between the two are largely visual -- Giovanni Perri of Rebel Hack likens them to the visuals that might appear in your Facebook News Feed. And while that can lead to a higher clickthrough rate (CTR), his own data shows that Text Ads can often yield a higher conversion rate. 

In this post, we'll be walking you through how to create a Text Ad. That said, Sponsored Content is still highly valuable -- to learn more about it, check out this page. If you're first starting out, decided between the two might come down to budget. Outline your priorities, and then you can decide which type works best for you.

2) Set Your Ad's Basic Parameters

Once you've selected your campaign type, you'll be asked to answer a few basic questions, like the language in which you'd like your ad to appear. You'll also be asked to choose a name for your campaign. These are only visible internally, so the more informative the name, the better.

For example, if I was doing a test to determine the best type of demographic targeting, I might use the title, "Unicorn Food Ad Test-North America 18 to 24-female." That name describes exactly who I'm targeting, without having to view its details -- as opposed to something like "Unicorn food test 1," which doesn't indicate anything about who the ad is targeting.

When selecting a language, keep in mind that LinkedIn won't translate your ad into other languages -- but it can be written in any of the languages LinkedIn supports, including Spanish, French, and German.

Hit "Next," and then, the fun begins.

3) Establish the Ad's Media and Format

Once you establish the basic parameters for your ad, you'll be prompted to start building it. Decide where you want visitors to be directed when they click on your ad -- either to a specific LinkedIn page, or to a website. You'll want to create the copy for your ad, pair it with an image, and preview the different layout options. Of course, there are a few guidelines around the copy that we would suggest.

Ad Headline

The headline of your ad cannot be more than 25 characters.

Ad Body

The body of a LinkedIn ad can be up to 75 characters long. The copy should be relevant both to the person viewing the ad, and the offer or page to which you're sending them.

For best results, create a different ad for each of your buyer personas, and tweak the copy accordingly. For example, when promoting a book to college professors, leading the title with the words, "College Professor's Guide to" may generate a higher CTR than generic, un-targeted copy.

Call-to-Action (CTA)

Having an actionable CTA within your ad copy will also help you improve your ad's clickthrough rate. Consider asking people to "Download your ebook now," or "Click now for free samples," instead of writing copy that's devoid of actionable next steps.

Value

Incorporate your value proposition into your ad copy -- that can make people more likely to click on your ad. By boasting something like, "20% off your first purchase," or "Clearance sale ends today, shop now," you're sending a clear signal of what someone will specifically gain when he or she clicks your ad.

Testing

Don't be afraid to test your ad copy, either. You can create multiple variations of your ad in each campaign, which allow you to test different images and copy within ads, to find what works best for your audience.

5) Target Your Ad

Targeting who sees your ad can help increase conversions -- the more specific and relevant it is to your audience, the more clicks it's likely to get. LinkedIn allows you to target according to a few different categories, which we've outlined below. Even better? This process is the same for both text ads and sponsored content.

Note: You don't have to use all of these options, but the more specific your targeting criteria, the more relevant it's likely to be to the audience you select -- and, therefore, the more likely you are to have a better ROI.

Location

You must select at least one location for your ads. Depending on your business, more specific targeting may be helpful. You can select a location as broad as North America, or as specific as the San Francisco Bay Area. If you're trying to expand franchise sales in Hartford, Connecticut, for example, it won't be a very good use of advertising dollars to target people in, say, Los Angeles.

You can also tailor your ad copy to specific locations. For instance, hardware stores trying to sell snow shovels might target Massachusetts, whereas hurricane protection might be best targeted to audiences in states like Florida.

Company

If your target audience has a certain employer, you can target it directly -- even by name. You don't need to have specific names in mind, though; LinkedIn allows you to also target companies based on industry -- like Legal, Non-Profit, or Finance -- and company size.

Job Title

If your product or service is best for CFOs, targeting only people with "CFO" in their titles will increase your conversions, and ultimately save you money. You can choose specific job titles, or chose from job functions, seniority, and years of experience. From the CEO of manufacturing companies, to the entry-level associates at an accounting firm, you can target a specific group of people for your ads.

Member Schools

If you are looking to target people who have a particular educational background, you can target your ads based on schools. For example, perhaps you're trying to target a certain alumni association -- you can reach out to it through a LinkedIn ad. You can also customize the targeting according to field of study and degree,

Member Skills

Your target audience may have a certain skill set -- email marketing, financial planning, risk management. Think about what your target audience does well, or where it aspires to excel. Then, use the ad to target people with similar capabilities.

Member Groups

One of LinkedIn's best attributes is the ability to join groups with like-minded professionals, where you can discuss industry trends and topics. If your audience is very vocal on a topic, or you're trying to gain thought leadership in a certain area, this type of targeting might be a good option for you.

Gender and Age

If your audience is heavily skewed toward one gender and/or age group, target your ad toward them.

Once you establish your ad targeting criteria, you can save it as a template for future campaigns.

5) Choose Your Bidding Options

After selecting your targeting options, you can set up the bidding options that work best for you. The two options you have for any pay-per-click advertising are:

1. Cost Per Click (CPC). You'll be charged each time someone clicks on your ad. LinkedIn will suggest a bid range depending on your budget and the competition for your ads -- the more advertisers bidding on a similar campaign, the higher your bid will need to be. This bid is the maximum you will be charged. If the current rate is lower than your max bid, you will only be charged the current rate.
2. Pay Per 1,000 Impressions (CPM). You will be charged a certain amount each time your ad is viewed by 1,000 people on LinkedIn.

Deciding on the best maximum bid can be tricky. When deciding between CPC and CPM, think about your end goal. Are you trying to get as many people as possible to see your ad to help with something like a branding campaign? If so, CPM might be your best option.

On the other hand, if you want more people to click on your ads to drive traffic to your website or generate new leads, CPC might be better for you.

As for your optimal maximum bid, some trial and error might be necessary. LinkedIn will give you a suggested bid, which is a good place to start. Then, think about when your audience is most likely online. You'll want to bid higher during that particular time, to be sure that your ads are the ones being seen. And make sure LinkedIn is actually the best place to reach them, too -- different populations use different types of social media. Play around with your bids, and see when you get the most return for your dollars spent.

6) Set a Daily Budget

Set a daily budget for what works best for your company's marketing spending. Before investing a lot into one campaign, test and measure the success of each campaign and ad variation. You don't want to put thousands of dollars, for example, into an ad that doesn't end up resonating with your target audience.

Let's say you're the VP of Marketing at a high-end floral company. You might assume that the majority of your target market is made up of soon-to-be brides, for example -- so you direct your ads on LinkedIn to bridal groups. But after spending thousands of dollars, you only generated 10% of the leads you were hoping for, which your subsequent research shows was the wrong move, and you later learn that people near your store who are on LinkedIn are actually looking for flowers for corporate events. It would have been nice to know that before spending a large amount of your budget on LinkedIn ads.

That said, LinkedIn ads can successfully target niche markets, because of its extensive targeting opportunities. But the cautionary experimentation is crucial to do early on -- if you observe a campaign performing well, then you can put a larger budget toward it.

Finally, you can choose if you want your campaign to be shown continuously, or until a certain date.

LinkedIn Ad Reporting

Congratulations -- you've launched your LinkedIn Ad campaign. Now, you can track your progress in the Campaign Manager dashboard, where you'll see various charts that measure things like clicks, expenditures, and CTR, over certain periods of time. You can also keep track of conversions in the graphs toward the bottom of the dashboard. And to automatically track conversions and the ROI of your ads, HubSpot Ads allows you to create and manage your LinkedIn spend.

When you finish setting up your first campaign, you'll see a lot of "0"s -- that's because it's new, obviously, and because LinkedIn usually has to approve your ad before it goes live.

What's Next?

If Your Campaigns Are Under-Performing

There are things you can do to optimize campaigns that aren't performing as well as you'd hope, especially if you have multiple ads. Look at the CTR of each one -- is one out-performing the other(s)? If so, you may want to pause the less successful campaign. LinkedIn will automatically display less successful campaigns with lower frequency, so it makes sense to minimize any resources spent on them. Instead, putting more resources into successful ad variations and campaigns is more likely to accomplish your marketing goals.

Post-Click Reporting

Once your ads are running and people begin clicking on them, it's time to determine if they're actually driving qualified traffic to your website. That isn't something LinkedIn can tell you -- you need to do some closed-loop reporting on these campaigns to get more details on the makeup of this traffic.

How can you figure that out? It's all about "gated" offers and forms -- when someone clicks on your ad and lands on your website, putting the content you are offering behind a form will help you collect the data that qualifies that person as a good lead, or not. Connect that lead capture form to your customer relationship management (CRM) software, so that once the information is imported, your sales team can act upon them.

But pay close attention to your ad campaigns, alongside the landing page form data in your CRM. Is the traffic to your website generated by LinkedIn ads qualified? Is it generating customers? If not, you might need to further optimize your campaigns.

For example, if your LinkedIn ads are targeting people in companies sized 1-10, but you find that the majority of your closed deals are from leads with companies sized 100-200 -- stop targeting those smaller companies on LinkedIn.

The targeting options we covered above allow you to change any of your criteria, so use it to your advantage. With the right amount of patience and strategy, LinkedIn Ads can be a huge factor in your brand's success.