Your potential customers don’t care how you built your website. They don’t care which platform you’re using, whether you have a hot technology stack or even how they ended up on your landing page in the first place.
What they do care about is how your products or services can solve their problems, and how easy it is to progress through your sales funnel. Which means, from the moment they discover your business online, your website is your hero product.
Whether your customers decide to buy from you or one of your competitors, it’s likely the goods – even the services – are very similar, and often fundamentally the same. But how you’re framing the sale, how you interact, and how that makes your customers feel, that process is all down to you. That’s what makes all the difference. And when it comes to online, your website and user experience (UX) are at the very heart of that difference.
So, if your website is your hero product, why would you painstakingly plan, design and release your website, just to leave it untouched and going out of date after the final launch? With a traditional web development project, businesses may only carry out a major website refresh once every three years.
But now the world has changed. Online behaviours have evolved and customers are demanding much more. It’s time to think about agile UX design and how it can fit into your user experience (UX) design process.
What is agile UX design?
Agile UX design allows you to respond quickly to change. It’s about harnessing data to measure your marketplace, making incremental website changes so your online business stays relevant. It’s a way of dealing with, and ultimately succeeding in, an uncertain and turbulent world.
Unlike the traditional approach to web design, where most aspects of your website remain untouched, an agile UX design process allows you to iterate at regular intervals. It is user experience marketing at its very best.
You begin with an initial website launch, followed by a feedback loop. That’s when you discover what works, what can be improved and what can be added to enhance the experience. Then you build further, improve and measure again. Rinse and repeat.
You’re creating a continuous improvement programme that ensures your website never goes out of date. Your team members work in perpetual collaboration. Every new iteration is monitored and measured. Everything you do is focused on making a positive impact on the bottom line, by improving the user experience process and accelerating the sale. It usually costs less than the traditional web design route too.
Why agile UX and inbound marketing work so well together
Agile UX and inbound marketing share similar foundations. They create business success by examining what your potential customers want, then they build an environment that guides them towards the sale. Both concepts are focused on developing meaningful, lasting connections with your contacts and customers.
You may already know this, but inbound marketing works by giving you a four-stage framework. It attracts, converts, closes and delights your audiences.
Inbound marketing captures the attention of people before they’ve visited your website. It relies on your buyer personas to shape a compelling call to action (CTA), at the right time and with the right content. It’s a combination of paid social campaigns, explainer videos, emails, remarketing, landing pages, calculators, opinion pieces, guides and articles, all underpinned by a strong SEO strategy.
Once your audience arrives at your website, your UX content strategy kicks in to build trust and convert them into leads. From here, inbound marketing and agile UX work together. Inbound marketing not only feeds your funnel. It also gives you the feedback that allows you to measure your tactics and build a better UX marketing strategy.
What’s more, it provides you with the data to iterate your website. Which then adds incremental value back into your inbound marketing strategy. It’s a virtuous circle that improves engagement and powers up your ROI by closing and delighting.
Growth-Driven Design as a platform for agile UX
When you’re considering an agile user experience design process, Growth-Driven Design (GDD) is a great place to start. It’s a framework that takes agile UX design and makes it tangible. It can also reduce your time to launch by up to 50-70%.
Like inbound marketing, GDD leverages your buyer personas to shape your strategy. It begins with the customer’s needs and works backwards to identify how these needs can be met. And its core priority is to deliver the greatest positive impact. Continuously. By implementing regular changes to your website based on hard data.
Where inbound marketing helps you to build traffic, generate leads and maximise revenues, GDD both supports the cause and leads the charge. It also allows you to prioritise and iterate your UX strategy.
Think of Growth-Driven Design as a roadmap and a suite of tools that helps you accelerate your agile UX implementation. Whether your goal is to trigger a newsletter registration, a link click, a form fill or a purchase, GDD positively influences the number of visitors who perform the desired actions. And that’s because it doesn’t just focus on the end result. It reveals the journey. It shows you everything that happens up to the point of action.
If you like the sound of GDD, and how agile UX can amplify your inbound marketing success, there’s a rewarding road ahead. And we’ve only just scratched the surface. So, if you’re itching to know what agile UX can do for your business, let’s have a chat and explore the potential.
