What does industrial website redesign have to do with a train derailment? I’m not trying to be funny here by using this image of the Montparnasse derailment that happened on October 22, 1895. The action of a train leaving its tracks accidentally can have catastrophic consequences.
Similarly, obstructions that prevent a redesigned website from meeting its goals and objectives can be devastating for a company. I’m not exaggerating to scare you, but I’ve seen too many industrial website redesign projects get sidetracked and go completely off course.
Let’s face reality here, it takes a lot of time (4 months or more) and money (budgets of 15K or more) to complete a redesign that will turn an informational website into a lead generating system. And that’s just the start, you have to continue to invest in optimization, promotion and content marketing.
It is worth spending that kind of time and money, because your target audience of engineers and technical buyers is online for work related purposes. They are in self-select and self-serve mode for a large portion of their buying journey.
The IEEE Globalspec 2017 Digital Media Use in the Industrial Sector report found that engineers spend many hours each week online in the course of their work. They require access to a variety of digital resources to perform work-related tasks effectively and efficiently.
Searches on Google and other major search engines (83%) and visiting vendor websites (66%) were the top two online resources used by engineers and industrial professionals. Social media was near the bottom at 18%.
I’ve been closely involved with redesigning websites for several manufacturers and engineering companies. From my hands-on experience, I can point to four major causes and my solutions to prevent them.
Review your Google or whatever site analytics tool you use both before and after the redesigned site launches to prioritize areas of the website that you need to improve. It can be overwhelming to keep track of the all the moving parts in a website. If you are using the redesigned site for industrial content marketing (I hope you are), then this adds another layer of complexity.
According to 2017 Manufacturing Content Marketing Trends—North America: Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs, the top two factors cited by manufacturing marketers for their stagnant success with content marketing were:
Use the data from your site analytics to guide you instead of guessing or going by “gut feel.” Here’s a handy chart published by Michele Linn, Vice President of Content at the Content Marketing Institute.
For more on this topic, read these two posts that I had published earlier:
While design by committee usually doesn’t work well, it is up to the website development team to flesh out all these issues during the planning stage for the industrial website redesign to succeed.
Let’s chat to determine if this will be a good fit for both of us. It will be a friendly conversation to get to know each other better, not a high-pressure sales pitch.