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Industrial Marketing Summit

How to Talk about the ROI of a Website Redesign with Leadership

Websites are one of the most consistently undervalued biz-dev resources in manufacturing. Here’s how to gain executive buy-in.

You’re the marketing director at a company within the industrial sector, tasked with lead gen over the next year. Here’s the problem: your company’s current website is a millstone around your neck, but leadership is hesitant to sign off on the budget approval needed to bring it up to standards.

Your concerns:

  • The design is dated and doesn’t represent your company well.
  • Information is hard to find and there are no clear objectives, user flows, or CTAs.
  • The Content Management System (CMS) is clunky making it hard to update your site.
  • There is no integration with your CRM/you have trouble tracking or attributing leads.
  • The site doesn’t generate enough leads, and they aren’t well qualified.

Leadership hesitations:

  • It feels like they either:
    • Just redid the website a few years ago and they don’t feel the last update achieved much.
    • Haven’t updated the website in over a decade and the business has been doing fine without it.
  • They highly value the person-to-person sales process and can’t see how leads generated from the website are related to a sale eighteen months later. Didn’t the sales guy do all the work?
  • They understand it needs to be done, but why does it cost so much? They paid 20K in 2010 and that’s the number they’re used to. Why does this feel like a frivolous expense?

As a marketing director, you understand intuitively all the reasons your website is holding you back. But if you’ve never built a website, articulating them for a skeptical or uninvested audience can be a challenge. Here are our top three talking points to help you make your case, achieve buy-in, and launch a successful web project.

1. A website upgrade affects all your sales channels.

Many CEOs are used to thinking of website redesigns as a new coat of paint: a necessary expense, but not something that will play a role in generating revenue. As long as this is their mindset, then the common sense course for safeguarding their bottom line is to invest as little as possible and infrequently as possible to keep up appearances.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what your website can and should be accomplishing for your company. You should expect your website to repay every dollar you invest in it and then some. Consider the following:

  • Your website creates new opportunities for engagement, lead capture, and direct sales. Let’s say your current marketing efforts are directed toward trade shows, upselling current customers, or leveraging your network for word-of-mouth referrals. Now you can add to the list digital advertising, organic lead gen through SEO, direct sales via ecommerce, and sales enablement by linking your in-person efforts to your digital strategy through your CRM.
  • Your website represents you when you aren’t in the room. Imagine you meet a promising lead at a conference. You make a great first impression, and when they go back to work the next week, they pitch your services to the decision maker at their company. That decision maker hasn’t met you, so they pull up your website to see what you’re all about. Does your website have your back or is it letting you down?
  • Your website works for you 24/7/365. The cost of building a website is comparable to or a little less than an employee’s annual salary. Only this employee never takes days off, never sleeps, and you only had to pay them for the first year.
  • Your website can accomplish multiple marketing objectives at once. Finally, while lead gen is usually the primary objective for businesses in the industrial sector, it isn’t the only one. Your website can also serve current customers to reduce churn, and in an increasingly competitive job market, it can position your business to attract the most qualified candidates.

2. Your website only needs to tip the scales to repay its investment.

Even a good website investment can feel bad if it doesn’t live up to unrealistic expectations. If you’re pitching your web project to leadership based on arbitrary goals rather than existing data, you might end up with a year-end report that underwhelms—even if your website generated substantial revenue.

We call this mindset New Year’s Eve thinking. You sat down and wrote a bunch of goals based on nice, round numbers that feel good. We all do this, but if you’re going to save yourself from the inevitable crash when wishful expectations meet reality, you need to be more realistic in your approach.

We believe it is worth sitting down and running a cost calculation to math out what your website would need to accomplish to repay its investment, and that math should be grounded in the context of your business’ actual numbers. Start with the average value of a closed sale. For example, if you’re a software reseller, that may be about 20K in ARR, with the possibility of selling services on a project basis. If your project will cost 60K-80K, then your website needs to help you close three to four new sales. If your close rate on leads is 25%, then your website needs to generate 16 new leads who close at that rate to pay itself off in gross numbers.

That’s a low bar.

What’s even more impressive is that you will inevitably undervalue the sales potential of your website because of invisible sales factors that you will never be able to track. You will never know the number of prospects who never enter your sales funnel because your website turned them away before you had a chance to talk to them.

You’ll also never know all the ways a good website warms the conversation for you. Again: it’s representing you when you aren’t there. Look at your current website. Is it the wingman you want it to be?

3. Thorough needs analysis justifies the expense that is required for the longevity and success of your web project.

Congratulations, you’ve successfully convinced leadership that a new website is a priority. They’ve agreed to devote budget resources to the project, and are expecting to see a high-functioning design that converts real leads based on achievable sales parameters. Now you have to find a digital marketing/web dev agency who can deliver the goods.

Here’s the reality check: A poor choice of web developer can eat up a lot of your investment and leave you with an underperforming site. On the other hand, a high-quality agency will not only build a better website, they’ll build a more durable website. A 60K website that lasts 5+ years between major rebuilds is a better investment than a 40K website that is falling apart by year 2. Instead of reacting to your feelings about the expected total cost, instead look at the delta between your options. How does that value compare to the risk of a subpar outcome?

So, to avoid this pitfall and ensure the success of your project, keep an eye on the following:

  • Avoid an overly proscriptive RFP. Agencies have their own processes for putting proposals together, and you will learn a lot about how they work if you keep your RFP as open-ended as possible. Rather than dictating how you want things done, let them bring their expertise to the table to solve your problems for you.
  • Pay attention to the questions your web dev agency is asking. A good agency asks questions from a place of both curiosity and authority. They should be seeking to understand the big picture (not just the immediate need) while also offering their best professional guidance.
  • Compare the discovery processes of your dev agencies—not just their final quote. A rushed discovery process often leads to unexpected costs down the line. If one agency is presenting a significantly higher quote after conducting a more thorough discovery process, take the time to learn why. If Agency A found and accounted for issues that Agency B didn’t, it may be because they did the work of understanding your project better. Agency B may look cheaper up front, but you’ll end up paying them just as much or more down the line when they finally discover what Agency A found from the beginning.
  • Consider the infrastructure on which your website is built. This includes your hosting, your CMS, and any plugins your agency may be using. Avoid anyone relying on “one-size-fits-all” page builders rather than actual dev expertise. Make sure the agency understands CRM integration. Also ask them about ongoing maintenance, which will be required to keep your site functioning long-term.

Remember the old adage (painful but true): “There’s never time to do the job right, but there’s always time to do the job over.”

You know what your website could be; getting buy-in from leadership is the challenge.

Ultimately, you need to speak to leadership in terms that reflect their business goals, and you need to do so in a way that is honest and realistic, or you’ll get blowback when you can’t meet impossible benchmarks.

Instead of promising hard numbers in traffic gains or increased leads that you can’t guarantee, show how the strategy behind the redesign is sound, and instead promise to document the outcomes using agreed upon metrics so that you and leadership are in alignment on what the results are. Agree on what your leads are worth and what your close rates are. Instead of saying, “A website redesign will generate X result to achieve ROI.” Frame the statement as “The website only needs to generate X result to achieve ROI.” That way, when the results are good, you can show your work. If you have still have some gap to close, you have clarity on how to do so without having compromised your integrity.

As with many things, you get out of it what you put into it. You can’t treat your website like a glorified business card and then use that approach to justify your lack of investment. But if you show leadership how a sleek, modern, multi-faceted site actually impacts the goals they care about, you may be surprised at how the conversation changes.

Eric Lynch is the Director of Business Development at build/create studios, a full-service digital marketing agency that specializes in web development and brand growth for the industrial sector, including manufacturing, manufacturing technology, engineering, and design.