Smart Marketing Blog

4 Crucial Elements to a Website Redesign

Your website serves many roles. It has the unique ability to serve as both an outbound and inbound marketing tool, as a way to communicate your brand image to your audiences, and as a response mechanism for prospects interested in learning more about your company, products and services. You can think of your website as a valuable, 24-hour-a-day employee in your marketing organization. It’s always on, always ready to communicate your brand value and always focused on generating leads.

B2B Website Checklist: 6 Steps to Generate Leads

Your website serves many roles in your organization, from your company storefront, to a customer support resource, to a recruiting center, to name a few. From a marketing standpoint, it is the hub of all your activities and the main vehicle for generating leads and creating your online branding experience. It has the unique ability to serve as both an outbound and inbound marketing tool; as a way to communicate your brand image to your audiences; and as a response mechanism for prospects that are interested in learning more about your company, products and services. You can think of your website as a valuable, 24-hour-a-day employee in your marketing organization. As such, it’s always on, always ready to communicate your brand value, and always focused on generating leads.  

Web Strategy: 5 Steps to Website Redesign Success

We like to say that developing your website strategy is like architecting a blueprint before you build a house. You need to fully understand the design and requirements and have your foundation fully set before you build it. Your website plan should work similarly.

Avoid These 3 Website Navigation Fails

When companies redesign websites, they often overlook or incorrectly implement a few website navigational elements. Because they are often overlooked or undervalued, we include the following site navigation fails and corresponding best practices during the website strategy meeting or as part of the design review process.

6 Crucial Steps in Preparing for a Web Redesign

Google’s algorithms, people’s search behavior, technology and web trends change rapidly- is your website keeping up? Without making routine, data-driven-design changes, and fully redesigning your site every few years, it’s easy to get left behind. Since your website is a crucial, 24/7 representation of your business, you want to be sure it accurately portrays and efficiently serves your business day in and out. To do this, you need to start any web redesign process by firming up your marketing foundation. Doing so will give you a clear strategy moving into the redesign, guiding content, structural and design decisions.

Growth-Driven Design vs. Traditional Web Design

A well-designed website is essential to online success. According to a recent HubSpot survey, 94% of respondents cited poor design as a reason they do not trust a website. On the flip side, an intuitive, well-designed website positively impacts how visitors view your company, it also improves lead conversion through easy-to-see calls to action driving conversions to your technical content. Before you decide how to redesign your website, let’s look at the current model of traditional website design and compare it to the new Growth-Driven Design approach. 

I Launched My Website, Now What?

Data-Driven Web Design and 7 Key Metrics You Should Track You’ve spent months redesigning your website and it’s finally live. While it may be tempting to just launch it and leave it on autopilot and return to your regular marketing routine, the real ROI comes from your ability to make your website work for you over the long term. If your website is the valuable, 24-hour-a-day employee in your marketing organization, you can’t just let it perform on autopilot.

Want to Market Against Your Competitors? Proceed Carefully

Remember when you were young, and there was that kid who spent more time dissing you or others than making something of themselves? Maybe you wanted to let them have it, but you knew (or maybe your parents gave you some advice) that it was best to take the high road and focus on your strengths and success. There is some wisdom in this childhood scenario for grownups running businesses, product lines, and service areas, who are competing for awareness, customers, and marketshare. In every market, every town, every application space, you are going to face competition. And that's a good thing - for companies and consumers. But maybe you are considering making a move to directly market against your competitor. Is this a good idea? The answer is, maybe, but be careful. Let's look at a a recent example to help illustrate some upsides and downsides for consideration: Microsoft's recent ad campaign against Google in the mainstream business press. Here is one of their ads: Microsoft ad, Text to the right

Infographic: Top 5 Findings from the 2019 SMFE Research Report

Planning without researching is just guessing. Strategizing your marketing spend this year without taking a look at what marketing research says is like playing darts with your marketing budget. Smart marketers research their industry, competitors, and customers so they best understand how to reach and sell to them.  

Landing Pages: Best-Practices and Benchmark Metrics

Content may be the foundation of your inbound marketing strategy, but landing pages are the vehicle that converts visitors into contacts and leads. You could have the greatest content offers on your site, but if your landing pages are mediocre, you won’t get visitors to complete your forms.