Is Your Website Growing Stale? How About a Beautiful New Navigation System?
So you have a great website. You are happy with the look and feel, but has it grown a bit stale? It’s something of a dead-spot; where you may be live with a relatively new site and content with the overall performance, but suspect that ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’ when it comes to overall performance. ‘Performance’ obviously being subjective; if you are seeking to drive site engagement, then perhaps scaling volume while maintaining solid site metrics, such as bounce rate — is your overarching goal. If you are primarily concerned with leads generated from your site, then performance is a measure of site conversion rate. For most companies, especially those marketing in a B2B sense, it is usually a mix of the two.
The solution to this may be simpler than you think. Here at CMT, we have been thinking about this and doing a good deal of research for our clients. Using a combination of analytics tools, we have been figuring out that a vastly improved top level navigation system can do many great things for your online presence. Typically, the need comes down to one of two categories:
- Revitalizing an older site, and making it appear as cutting-edge as some of your competitors with newer sites and much more sizeable website investments.
- Building upon and expanding a newer site, leveraging it primarily for optimization purposes as discussed in more detail below.
But simply building a new menu based solely upon what the organization wants people to see is somewhat short-sighted. The consideration MUST include what your visitors want to see, and how they want to engage. There are a number of things to consider on this:
- Looking at past analytics, what pages garner the most interest and/or the highest conversion rates that ARE ALSO not currently accessible though your menu? Need: Simplify the browsing experience!
- Assess the highest and lowest performing calls-to-action and overall form performance across the site. Need: Make top performing lead magnets readily accessible!
- Looking at your video content, perhaps on an external platform such as YouTube or Vimeo – what content is generating the most engagement? Need: Expand your website through the use of your menu by including highly visible links to company-owned web properties that are already adding value to your brand!
- See other social media channels along the lines of #3. Users are getting bored by the same old share, like and follow links. A powerful feature of a mega menu that no one thinks about is how you can better integrate top social media postings by linking directly to them from your menu. Need: Flip the concept of ‘going viral’ on it’s head by driving engagement from the mother ship!
- If you have multiple brands, are marketing to numerous verticals, or have segmented site domains in any capacity, there is no better way to highlight them than through a powerful menu presence. Need: Leverage a prominent site location without allocating precious site real estate to create as much brand and/or market synergy as possible!
We are excited about the finished product that we just released for one of clients, as shown below. Check out the video below which shows the before, and after.
And as part of our process, we connect various tools to each page so we can measure the effect of the new menu on overall visitor behavior and related metrics.
By making this investment, each and every one of our clients will never be faced with that ‘dead-zone’ feeling or that voice in their heads asking ‘maybe I don’t know what I don’t know, when it comes to the performance of my website…’
Check back again for more details on the actual performance gains!
