2017 is coming to a close, but it’s not time to throw in the towel just yet. During this time of the year, you’re probably beginning to make plans for next year’s budget. However, before you jump to 2018, make sure you’re effectively utilizing the rest of this year’s funds. Overhauling your website, implementing growth-driven design, and integrating HubSpot are all great ways to use up the remainder of your budget. Make the rest of 2017 count with these strategic ideas.
Hubspot Website Redesign ($20-80K)
Depending on the size and complexity of your website, a budget of $20K to $80K will allow for a complete HubSpot website redesign. Redesigning your website ensures it’s kept fresh, relevant and on track for meeting your marketing, sales and business goals.
A Complete Overhaul
If you’re considering a complete redesign, you should also consider a number of steps that help you prepare for choosing an ideal design and development partner.
- Build a team: Your website redesign dream team needs to include a variety of key players within your company with roles and responsibilities you specifically designate.
- Establish goals: Get your dream team involved in creating goals for your new site, which are likely to include features that make your site stickier and processes that increase visitors and ultimately revenue.
- Get specifications: Making your team’s desired features a reality is the job of your design and development partner, and you can make both your jobs easier if you ask yourself the following questions:
- How is this specific feature usually delivered on a website?
- Is there a compelling reason to create a unique experience for this feature?
- How do I want a specific feature to work, what are the mandatory elements required?
- Get proposals: Proposals for your website redesign may contain various project plans, but all should typically include regular meetings, a discovery phase where you can provide input, design and development, page-level SEO research and implementation, and launch support.
Growth-Driven Design ($3-5K)
Another option for website redesign is going with a growth-driven design approach. Growth-driven design, or GDD, involves making constant improvements to your site over time, with a focus on areas that produce more visits, leads and customers. Your ever-evolving website will be kept fresh and current, optimized for lead generation, and relevant to visitors and customers.
GDD can involve changes like a new homepage banner, moving call to action buttons, menus or other content, regularly adding or editing content using personalization tactics – and then running tests to determine the impact of the changes.
Multivariate split testing (also known as A/B website testing) helps you better understand your users so you can more effectively provide them with pages and content they are more likely to lead to conversions. The objective is to test one version of a specific element against another version to see which draws more favorable attention and attracts more leads. You can A/B test components of your online marketing campaigns, landing pages, contact pages – or any other area of your website you feel needs a bit of attention.
GDD lets you save the money, time and headaches that come with a complete overhaul while staying ahead of your competitors by constantly optimizing your site.
Paid Media ($5-20K)
If you’re looking for a quick lift in visitors and leads, paid media is the way to go. While inbound marketing does work, it takes time for the results to kick in. Paid media can give you a quick infusion of activity while you’re waiting.
Paid media can be especially handy for promoting savings, alerting your audience of new content and encouraging specific action. Sending out emails to support your paid media efforts can strengthen your campaign even further.
Using the end-of-year budget for paid media can be particularly successful as the season gives you plenty of holiday marketing options. Seasonal specials or discounts can be in your lineup, as can releasing new or seasonal products.
Advanced Content ($3-15K)
Advanced content can include e-books, checklists, white papers, guides or any other type of content website visitors can download in exchange for their contact information. It takes more time to create than the basic content that appears on your site and social media accounts, but it’s also a master lead generator. Advanced content that is relevant to your buyer persona gives you a steady supply of contact information from people interested in your products and services.
Not only are warm leads delivered right to your virtual doorstep, but advanced content additionally helps build relationships and trust while expanding your reach and establishing your brand as a knowledgeable player in your field.
SEO Competitor Analysis ($1-5K)
In order to successfully rank for your desired keywords, you need to first identify keywords for which you can realistically rank based on the size of your company and budget. You then want to perform an SEO competitor analysis to see what you’re up against when it comes to your keyword competition.
An SEO competitor analysis begins with identifying your top competitors for your chosen keywords. It then dives deep into company profiles, backlink profiles and topical authority as well as social media and content strategies.
Establishing industry averages comes next, where you can look at keyword performance based on brand, link locations, and type of sites. Once you have all the data in hand, you can move forward creating an SEO strategy poised to deliver your desired results.
Whether your 2017 budget contains $1K or $50K, and regardless of how you choose to allocate funds, any of the above strategies can help achieve your ultimate goal of increasing traffic and leads.
Video ($1-10K)
Over 75 million people watch online videos per day in the U.S. alone. With such an extensive audience, video is a great platform to deliver your marketing messages. Producing a company video can help you increase brand awareness, explain your products, and provide education to your viewers.
From an inbound marketing perspective, video offers prime opportunities to capture your target audience and lead them along on the buyer’s journey. Viewers even retain around 95% of the information they learn in videos. If you’re considering using video but don’t know how to make it look streamlined and professional, now is the time to think about video editing software or hiring a professional for help.
HubSpot Integration ($5-50k)
Achieve closed loop marketing by integrating your CRM with HubSpot. We integrate with Dynamics CRM, NetSuite, Sugar CRM and many other external applications. Whether you are currently using the HubSpot platform or are considering purchasing it, we will help you maximize your portal by integrating it with your existing business applications.
If you have a business need to integrate cloud or on-premise systems with HubSpot, we can help identify the best solution. We are partners with Scribe Software, the best integration software in the business with broad support for on-premise databases, sales and marketing software, and ecommerce.