Chapter 7: Websites

In most marketing strategies the website plays the central role: the hub of your owned content and the digital incarnation of your brand and marketing vision. Chapter 7 of Marketing Wins treats it exactly that way, walking through planning, design, build and optimisation with one test applied throughout: what do we want to say, who do we want to say it to, and what do we want them to do next?

What the Chapter Covers

The chapter opens with website planning. Before a single pixel is designed, we ask you to produce a Website Planning document covering four aspects: message and audience, perception, action and content. The template supplied in the chapter works through the questions in order: the primary message, the purposes and goals of the site, the target audience and competitors, the three adjectives a visitor should feel, the primary action you want from the homepage, and the content that will carry it all. That document, not taste or fashion, is what your designer works from, and it should express the segmentation, targeting and positioning decisions made in Chapter 3, Strategic Marketing Planning.

From there we follow the professional design process step by step: the sitemap that blueprints the site's structure, with a dedicated page for every distinct service (which pays off in clarity, sharper calls to action and the search visibility Chapter 5 takes further); the wireframes that fix layout and user journeys before any visual design; and the homepage visuals that set the design language for every page that follows. A project-management section answers the question every stakeholder asks first, how long and how much: for a typical marketing website, five months is our rule of thumb, and the chapter includes the full 8-step checklist from purpose definition through to post go-live support, plus design considerations such as HTML5 scalability and responsive design for mobile.

The final third is devoted to conversion rate optimisation. The chapter defines macro and micro goals, then works a B2B example through to the profit line: 10,000 visits at a 2% conversion rate produce 200 leads and $500,000 in sales; lift that rate to 3% through redesign and disciplined testing and the same traffic yields $750,000, a 50% increase without a single extra visitor. We then break testing down into the four drivers that most influence conversion (call to action, text, image and targeting) and close on landing pages, homepages and utility websites, with the Obama campaign's email programme, 40-plus persona segments whose best variation raised 45% more donations, as the classic case study.

Key Takeaways

• Answer three questions before anything else: what do we want to say, who do we want to say it to, and what do we want them to do next?
• Write the Website Planning document first; its four sections (message and audience, perception, action, content) turn strategy into a brief a designer can execute.
• Follow the three-step design process, sitemap, wireframes, then visuals, and dedicate a unique page to each distinct service or function.
• Small conversion gains compound: moving from 2% to 3% in the chapter's worked example lifts sales by 50% on identical traffic.
• Test the four drivers of conversion (CTA, text, image, targeting) and give every campaign its own landing page rather than sending paid traffic to the homepage.

The space on a web page is your real estate and your web designer should ensure that every bit of it is working for your business.

The Discipline the AI Era Cannot Skip

AI can now draft page copy, generate imagery and assemble whole layouts in minutes, which is exactly why this chapter matters more, not less. No tool can decide what your website should say, who it should say it to, or what a visitor should do next; those are strategy decisions, and they are precisely the decisions the Website Planning document forces you to make. That is why Marketing Wins deliberately carries no AI chapter: positioning, audience and message have to be right before any tool, however clever, can be deployed on them, and a follow-up revision covering the AI layer is planned. Get the planning and conversion disciplines in this chapter right and every new tool becomes an accelerator rather than a substitute for thought.

Related Insights

• Obama Campaign Data-Driven Marketing: A/B Testing Wins