Are you wondering how to convince the management team of your business to invest in a new website? Are you unsure how to show decision-makers that improved digital experiences will help the business scale? The best way is to write a business case that will bring you closer to securing business buy-in.
Here is our advice on how to write a successful business case and what you should include.
Some essential tips to a successful business case
- Your document should be brief and easy to read.
- Your copy should be clear, succinct and engaging.
- Limit technical terms and jargon.
- Include visuals where possible.
- Mention both tangible and intangible benefits and limitations of your project.
What to include:
Below we mention some of the significant parts of a business case structure. However, you are free to pick and choose the ones that are relevant to your situation.
- Executive summary
- Situation
- Benefits and Limitations
- Proposed solutions
- Impacts
- Plan
- Market assessment
- Competitor Analysis
- Governance
- Financial analysis
- Risks assessment
Let's now go through the six most significant parts in more detail.
Executive Summary
Starting by explaining the "Why". Why do you need a new website? What challenges do you face with your current website? And what benefits the organisation will get from a new website. You shouldn't go into much detail here, as you will address these points later in the business case. Your goal at this point should be to catch their attention and make them understand the importance of reading and considering your business case.
Benefits and Limitations of your website project
A new website can bring several short-term and long-term benefits to the business. They can be financial or other types of benefits. You should focus on how an improved digital experience will:
- Increase lead generation
- Convert more sales online
- Create or increase awareness for your brand
- Build a community around your products and services
- Better mobile experiences
- Improve customer service
- Keep you competitive
- Make it easier for your team to update your website
- Save time and cost on agency fees (if your team can update your website without technical help)
And the list goes on.
As with every project, there are certain limitations you need to consider and include in your business case. For example:
- Adequate time and budget allocation
- It might be hard and time-consuming to find and engage the right digital agency
- Lack of internal resources (e.g. project managers, creatives etc.)
- You might find it challenging to write your project brief
And so on.
At this point, you should also discuss how you plan to address these limitations.
How a new website will help you overcome your current challenges
In this section, you can list your problems with your existing website and propose potential solutions. List the most critical issues. For example:
Problem 1: Our current website design is outdated, and people don't trust it. This severely impacts our lead generation efforts.
Solution: A new design will refresh our brand, improve our digital identity and show the world who we truly are. The new website will be designed with the latest UX/UI standards to enhance customer experience and increase trust. This way, users will be more willing to give us their personal information, reach out directly or buy our products and services.
Problem 2: Our team cannot update or edit the website without technical help. Therefore, we pay X amount on agency fees every year to update our website.
Solution: Our new website will have a very easy-to-use and intuitive back-end that a non-technical team can use to update, change, and maintain. This will streamline our marketing activity and save us thousands on agency fees.
Problem 3...
We suggest you keep the list to a minimum of three and a maximum of five major issues and proposed solutions.
Your plan
At this point, it would be beneficial to outline your project plan. Don't worry; it doesn't have to be a finalised version, as you still have many unknowns. You should keep it top level and focus on priorities and important dates. For example, when you will start researching agencies, when is the deadline for picking an agency, and when the website development should start and finish. You can also mention who is responsible for each task and what other resources are needed.
Competitor analysis
Assessing the market and what your competitors are doing is one of the essential steps before creating a new website. You are not doing the analysis to copy them; you are assessing what they are not doing so you can do it. Or, you mix and match different aspects of competitive websites that you like so you can build your own, more advanced version. It is also an excellent opportunity to test your USP and understand if it is unique or if many other websites are using a similar version.
Plus, with a comprehensive competitor analysis, you will show your stakeholders that you thoroughly understand the marketplace.
Risk Assessment
The risk of creating a new website is significantly lower than, say, modernising a legacy system or adopting new technology. However, risks are still involved, and you should address them before starting your project. For example, your website redesign could affect your SEO; therefore, you must be very careful with redirects. In other cases, businesses do not audit their current website properly to understand what works and what doesn't. This means they can repeat the same mistakes in their new site or see a drop in sales, conversions, and engagement because they didn't follow the practice that used to work for them.
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