Realising that your business needs a new website is the first step on the long-but-rewarding journey towards better leads, tangible growth and the heartfelt acclaim of your colleagues. Unfortunately, the second step is getting sign off from the rest of the board – and that’s where most new web projects stall.
Summary
Wanting a new website and getting sanctioned for one are two different things. You may well be the decision maker on marketing and online presence, however, it is often the case that you will need to present a ‘business case’ in some form or other.
A good business case doesn’t present opinion, but instead offers a well-considered approach to an investment, the return that can be expected, and the uncertainties involved. It should be readable, and you should assume the people reading it are extremely busy, so it needs to be to the point (details can go in Appendices for those interested).
This article guides you through the main considerations a good business case should consider, if not contain. It provides examples and details to help you understand the audience and ultimately get sign-off on your new website development, a cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy.
It will take you through:
- The audience you may be addressing,
- The purpose of a business case,
- Illustrating the need and using data to support this,
- Outlining the solution,
- Presenting the risks, pitfalls, opportunities and mitigation and
- The adoption process.
We think a focused business case that tells a good story, and really hammers home the potential a new website has to transform your business is the best way to get your project approved.
If you’re in the process of putting together a business case and you’d like some more hands-on advice, give us a shout. We always enjoy helping people progress web build projects and have years of experience producing and assessing business cases.
Introduction
Some C-suite executives are fully on board with the notion that a website should be a valuable asset. They recognise that the right site can attract and engage your core target audience, nurture people through the sales process and provide your sales team with qualified leads: Generating revenue and enabling growth.
This (tiny) minority of C-suite executives also understand that the right combination of words, design, video and imagery can help you tap into brand new markets – or win business that you’d normally lose to a competitor more adept at using the
In short, they understand that the money spent on a thoughtful redesign of your company website will generate a positive return.
Sadly, we know that the majority of board members aren’t cut from this cloth. Indeed, twenty years of longstanding experience with B2B business has taught us that 80-90% of CEOs, CFOs and CTOs tend towards good-natured suspicion of expensive web builds.
To be clear, outright repudiation of the need for a new website is rare. But most of the marketing leads/CMOs we speak to say that it’s incredibly difficult to get sign off on the substantial budgets required to take the rough clay of an outdated brochure website, and transform it into something more polished, persuasive and resonant.
As much as you see it as an investment, they may perceive it as an overhead cost.
Introducing The Website Business Case
Building a compelling business case has been the go-to solution for as long as we can remember, and with good reason too: Irrespective of whether it's presented as a written document or slide deck, a good business case lets you set your stall out in a way that the rest of the c-suite are happy to engage with.
Building a new website should be more science than art, and therefore your business case needs to reflect this. It uses a grammar or mode that’s familiar to them – and drastically increases your chances of a fair hearing. It should be to the point, avoiding vague phrases, such as “and we hope this will work.” Hope is not a strategy.
A good business case also gives you the opportunity to tell a story that’s backed up with solid data highlighting fundamental problems with your current website, the cost of standing still and the benefits of building a new website that does a better job of pitching your core value proposition to potential customers.
Thing is, the distinction between “compelling” and “exhausting”, “dry” or “unconvincing” is hard to pinpoint. You’ll only get one shot at making the case for your new web build so you want to make sure that you pitch things correctly, and present a properly persuasive argument that’s as engaging as it is thorough. 
A tough call for any CMO, which is why we’ve pooled years of experience to provide you with a step-by-step guide that’ll help you:
- Plan and structure your business case properly
- Uncover the data needed to tell a convincing story about your current site’s shortcomings
- Outline the cost of not building a better and more engaging website
- Demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) that the right website could generate
- Prove that you’ve anticipated and accounted for the adoption process
- Present everything in a format and style that resonates with your c-suite peers
- Use comparisons of cost e.g. the cost of someone cold calling and prospecting
What Is A Business Case?
Business cases take many forms. Some boards expect a business case to be made with a presentation; using a slick slide deck and powerful oratory to convince the people that hold the purse strings. Other boards expect a concise document that can be skim-read at leisure, or a glossy booklet packed with attractive graphics (source: Harvard Business Review).
In truth, the format is irrelevant. As long as your business case makes an irrefutable argument for the design and development of a new website – drawing on data to articulate a clear need and anticipating any likely concerns, there’s every chance that it’ll successfully sell your proposed solution. 
For the purposes of this guide, we’re going to assume that you’re presenting board members with a written document. That said, the advice contained herein would be equally applicable to a slide deck.
We’re also going to make a couple of additional assumptions; namely that you have a CMS in mind, and know roughly how much it’ll cost to build a website that’s capable of moving the dial.
This is because it’s virtually impossible to build a convincing business case without a rough idea of costs – one-off and ongoing. If you’re not sure which CMS you want to use or how complex the design and functionality of your new website needs to be, we’d strongly recommend engaging with a B2B web agency.
As we’ve noted in the past, the costs associated with B2B website development vary dramatically. To persuade, your business case has to be precise and realistic so it’s unwise to try and build a story before you know what sort of investment you’re asking for.
Assuming that you do have those figures, you’re ready to dive in and start building. We recommend a fairly straightforward structure that allows you to cover off the ‘must haves’ in a logical order – as follows:
Step 1: Illustrating The Need
A good business case starts by outlining the problem you’re trying to solve. It can be tempting to rush this section of the document – so that you can start writing about the ROI your new website will deliver, or the many benefits of the CMS you want to use, the exciting tools you’ll be using to supercharge your marketing or the time you’ll save internal teams by cutting the busy-work involved in simple content edits.
But we think it’s worth taking your time here: Years of hands-on experience have taught us that demonstrating a very real and pressing need for a new B2B website is the only way to get key stakeholders personally invested in the idea of funding your project.
And if you’re not willing to take our word for it, consider the way that formal debates are conducted. There too, great emphasis is placed on contextualising arguments before the cut and thrust begins. (source: Edinburgh Napier Law Review).
We’re not debating anyone here, but your business case is designed to persuade and will need to overcome a certain amount of inertia so it never hurts to borrow techniques from professional agitators.
The question, then, is how to frame and evidence the problem. Most CMOs will start by talking about a general lack of traffic, the gap between their site and competitor websites, or their website’s poor rankings, but this is a mistake.
Board and c-suite members fixate on revenue. If you work very hard, you may also persuade them to think about the importance of lead generation or conversion rates, on-site engagement and search performance but the stats that will really make them sit up and pay attention are stats that highlight lost revenue – or money left on the table.
That’s why we always start out by outlining the average value - or average lifetime value - of a web conversion (using historical customer data from your CRM or customer database, as per this guide on the subject). 
This simple calculation is the starting point for a whole host of useful calculations, and the bedrock of a good business case so don’t skip it. Taking the time to understand the average value of a conversion can also help you shape and refine your overall marketing strategy too but we won’t dig into that here, because we want to stay focused on your website business case.
Conversions - And Conversion Rates - Are Key To Demonstrating Real Need
Once you know how much a conversion is likely to be worth, you can start to put your site’s conversion rate into its proper perspective. 
For clarity, your site’s conversion rate is literally just the number of visitors divided by the number of conversions in a given time frame – and it’s entirely up to you how you define a conversion, but it’s generally best to focus on the number of genuine enquiries or leads your website generates.
Conversion rate is a good indicator of a website’s overall effectiveness, and comparing it to an industry average from a reputable and up-to-date source like but it’s still a fairly abstract
Comparing it with an industry average from a reputable and up-to-date source like First Page Sage (for B2B) or Invesp (for eCommerce) is a great way to highlight your current website’s shortcomings, but it’s still a fairly abstract metric.
If we really want the point to land, we probably need to demonstrate the real world cost associated with your sub-optimal conversion rate.
To do this, we need to know
- How many people we currently convert per month or year (your choice)
- How much a conversion is worth (see the section above this)
To demonstrate, let’s say that we run a B2B SaaS website that sells asset management software.
Our website currently converts 10 people per month, with a conversion rate of 1% and we know that it should (or could) convert at least 3% of customers
We also know that the average conversion is worth £20,000. If we can triple our conversion rate by providing people with a better user-experience, more compelling content or a much-improved conversion process, we convert 30 people per month instead of 10 – and those 20 additional conversions are worth approximately £400,000 to your business.
To reframe for the introduction to your website business case, sticking with your current website could be costing you as much as £400,000 a month in potential revenue.
Now, there’s every chance that your figures will be less clean, that you’ll end up using lead instead of conversion data, that you can’t accurately identify a conversion rate for your leads and/or that you’ll have to do a fair bit of modelling to work out how exactly how much custom you’re leaving on the table but the overall principle is sound:
With a good grasp of your average monthly conversions, your site’s conversion rate, your industry’s average conversion rate and the lifetime value of a conversion you can paint a very clear and fairly accurate picture of your website’s shortcomings that will resonate with c-suite executives.
Engagement Matters Too
Digging into engagement data can be a bit of a chore, but the time you spend here will help to back up the point you’re making with your conversion data – and make your website business case that bit more compelling.
In simple terms, engagement data tells you how people are using your website: Do they skim-read content, or bounce away from your site because they’re put off by the overall design? Do they spend time watching videos, or fail to find useful resources because they’re confused by the layout of individual pages?
Do they like using the menu system, or do they struggle to drill down and retrieve the information needed to convert? Do they hone straight in on the forms or calculators you want them to interact with, or get frustrated with obtuse and/or arcane elements that interfere with the conversion process?
Individual data points are meaningless, but if you can identify strong trends, you can tell an impactful story about the way your current site is thwarting efforts to engage with well-crafted content, or otherwise diminishing the effectiveness of your team’s efforts
Google Analytics is a good source of engagement data, although the data you can access via Analytics tends to be top-level and fairly abstracted. If you’re using GA4, you should ignore Google’s nebulous “engagement” metric and focus on average engagement times (per user or session) or user stickiness.
These metrics are much easier to explain and understand, and removing friction is critical when you’re trying to engage time-poor c-suite or board members.
Moving beyond Google Analytics, you can also make good use of heat maps and screen recordings from tools like HotJar. These assets can be hard to present in a longform, ebook-style business case but if you’re presenting with a slide deck, they’re a fantastic way of quickly communicating the frustration that users feel – and the pressing need to rebuild your website.
Traffic Squares The Circle
We have to talk about traffic. But before we do, a word of caution: We can’t count the number of times that we’ve seen perfectly-competent marketing managers build their new website business case around an apparent lack of traffic - or the potential for traffic growth - only to find that key decision makers don’t really see “more eyeballs” as a viable reason to splash £30,000 - £90,000 on a brand new website.
Use traffic or traffic-related metrics to back up more compelling arguments about lost revenue, suboptimal conversion rates or poor engagement, but don’t try to make them the star of the show because they will land flat.
Be aware of what you’re trying to demonstrate too: Simply saying that your website doesn’t get much organic traffic won’t help unless the people on the other side of the table know how much traffic you could be getting – were your website better optimised.
When confronted with a shortcoming, most people instinctively rationalise and the last thing that you want is your CTO or CFO pointing out that you’re in a niche market, and that 150 monthly organic visitors probably isn’t that bad.
To add context, we need to look at your website’s traffic potential. There are multiple, in-depth guides to estimating these stats, including thorough examples from:
- SEMRush (How to Determine SEO Potential: A Comprehensive Guide)
- Serpstat (How to Evaluate The Traffic Potential of a Website)
- Brainlabs (How to estimate SEO traffic)
These guides are well worth reading if you want to make traffic a key part of your business case, but the long and the short of it is that you’re looking to take the keywords you are currently or should be ranking for, and work out how many times they’re actually searched per month.
You then want to take your average, page 1 click through rate (found in Google Search Console) for the type of page that you want to rank for those search terms - or the entirety of your site if you’re feeling lazy - and then apply that click through rate to your total traffic potential to work out how many people you’d be able to snag if you were ranking on the first page of Google for all the search terms you’d like to be ranking for.
You can then refine this calculation using keyword difficulty data, industry average click through rates or similar but the brunt of the work will be in mapping out all the keywords you ought to rank for, and finding out what your traffic ceiling really looks like.
In our view, these stats around your current traffic and your traffic potential are best used as an addendum to more convincing stats around conversion rates.
For example, you might argue that doubling your conversion rate would triple website revenue, and then go on to say that if you could also double organic traffic while maintaining your conversion rate, you’d be on track for an even more significant bump in total revenue.
But the specifics will come down to the story you want to tell, and the way you want to tell it. Above all, remember that the introduction to your business case document or slideshow needs to be short and impactful.
Screeds of research show that C-suite execs and other key decision makers are significantly more likely to engage with presentations if their high-impact and low-demand (source: Forbes). Enshrining this concept in every section of your business case isn’t a bad idea, but it’s particularly important here at the beginning, when we’re trying to set the scene and get people to engage with our proposed solution.
Step 2: Outlining The Solution
The first section of a successful business case is designed to agitate: You outline a problem, and then draw on detailed stats to demonstrate that standing still simply isn’t an option if your organisation plans to grow.
So far so good. But once we’ve laid out the case for change, we will need to quickly set about demonstrating that a new website is the right way to go. More specifically, we need to demonstrate that the new website you’re proposing is key to changing the paradigm, and to do that, we need to show the c-suite or board that:
- You have a detailed and costed plan for your new web build
- You’re picking technology that supports your growth plans, and will continue to deliver for some time
- Your new design/build website will solve (or at least address) the problems outlined in section one of your document or presentation
In other words, it’s time to show everyone that you have a detailed plan of attack, and that you’ve thought about how to make sure your new website makes up for the previous iteration’s shortcomings.
If you haven’t picked a CMS, don’t have a detailed plan or don’t have a budget in mind for your site, stop reading now. Seriously, you cannot write a good business case without knowing what you want to build and you’ll annoy everyone involved if you try.
We do have some fairly detailed guides to picking a CMS and costing a new B2B website. Check them out if you’re struggling to get started – or get in touch.
We’re a friendly bunch, and while opening our inbox up to a flood of emails from people who’ll never be customers may not be the most sensible idea, we genuinely enjoy helping people get their website projects off the ground and we know that genuine B2B web experience is hard to come by.
It’s also worth noting that engaging with a reputable agency is probably the only way to get an accurate handle your website’s technical requirements, the work that’ll need to go into design and the actual cost.
What If I Already Know What My Project’s Going To Cost?
Assuming that you’ve picked a CMS, and know roughly how much the design and build of your new site will cost, it’s time to document everything. The best website business cases are exacting: Most c-suite executives know that the devil is in the details and they’ll want to see a full breakdown of:
- Design costs
- Development costs (including the costs associated with unusual or bespoke features)
- Hosting or licencing costs for your chosen CMS
- Training/adoption costs
- Ongoing maintenance costs (agency side)
- Marketing costs (if you’re engaging a partner to design and market your site)
You’ll also want to list the features and benefits of your new site: The things it’ll do differently, and the ways in which it’ll help to reduce busy work and/or amplify the efforts of your marketing team.
If members of your c-suite or board are very visual, it may even be worth working with your design team or agency partner to mock up some initial designs.
There’s a cost associated with speculative work like this, but it can be very effective: Lots of people struggle to engage with intangibles like the promise of ‘an improved look and feel’, but if you can show them how much better the new site is going to look, you can overcome a lot of resistance.
Whatever route you take, remember that detail is important, but that the second part of your presentation or document needs to be frank and direct. The people you’re trying to persuade want to know exactly what you want to build and what you think it’ll do, but they don’t want to wade through paragraphs of purple prose, or see boilerplate copy about the many benefits of using Wordpress in 2024.
Bullet points are fine, but visuals are better – and waffle is an absolute no-no (source: Harvard Business Review).
Step 3: Identifying Potential Pitfalls and Risks
When pitching to intelligent people, it pays to show them that you’re being balanced and realistic about the project you’re about to embark on. 
Enthusiasm is laudable, but people tend to be sceptical of marketers who appear to be sipping Kool-Aid and there’s no sense in undercutting the power of your new website business case by presenting an unfairly biasedbiassed version of the truth.
That’s why we always recommend that you include a section that analyses the risks of rebuilding your website. This section doesn’t have to be an exhaustive list, but it does have to cover off the most common stumbling blocks for web build projects – and the ways you plan to address them (risk mitigation).
We have identified the most common risks and you can include these in a section or table on risks, identifying the actions to mitigate those risks:
Your Web Project Stalling Before It Gets Going
This could be because it’s taking a long time to get designs approved by upper management, because stakeholders can’t agree on which content should be kept or repurposed or because there are a lot of different opinions on the way your new site should be structured.
To avoid these roadblocks and prevent your web build from stalling,
- Make sure there are defined workflows for design and content approval
- Nominate one or at most two people to take responsibility for signing off on designs
- Try to sit all key stakeholders down -in one room - as early in the process as is humanly possible. This will allow you to hash out important decisions about the shape and structure of your new site without a lot of back and forth
We’d also advise engaging closely with your agency partner to work out the best way to manage your project. They’ll be well-versed at overcoming common roadblocks and may be able to help you implement processes that keep things moving forwards.
Your Agency - Or Web Design Partner - Failing To Deliver
It’s our view that this shouldn’t really happen, but it is still a risk you need to account for. Some agencies talk a big game and then fail to deliver suitable designs and/or web templates that do everything you need your new website to do so it’s always worth:
- Vetting a potential partner’s past projects to make sure they’re up to the standard you’re looking for, and perform as well as your new site needs to
- Giving potential partners a foot in the door project to check that they’re capable of producing the kind of work you want to see
- Making sure you’ve got proper processes in place to engage with and manage your agency effectively
- Making sure that you have agreed a process with your agency, so that you know when and how to deliver
Once you’re confident that your chosen partner is capable, it’s really just about communication and management. Creating an open and honest relationship with your partner, and focusing on making sure things run smoothly is key to getting a good website over the line.
Your New Website Failing To Perform
Say the build process goes smoothly and you launch your new site in good time, but the new designs and/or content fails to deliver. Nightmare scenario, right? That’s why it’s incredibly important to spend a decent amount of time working through the discovery and requirements gathering process your chosen web partner likes to employ.
Simply put, the more time you sink into strategising, working out what your website needs to do and really nailing the look and feel with your agency partner’s design team, the more likely you are to end up with a website that exceeds your expectations – instead of a website that fails to live up to its promise.
Good agencies will want to spend time drilling into your web analytics before they get going, so they can see which bits of the site are working, and identify the bits that fall flat. They may even want to install Hotjar or another piece of screen recording/heat mapping software to get a feel for the problems with your current design.
There might be a UX testing exercise they want to run, or some talk of focus groups to really hone in on the ideal design. Some of this is probably overkill, but engage with it anyway because it’s diving into the nitty gritty that tends to deliver really powerful websites – capable of generating good leads.
Your SEO Or Search Rankings Tanking After Launch
Again, this is high up on the list of things that should never happen as long as effort is made to:
- 301 redirect any old or defunct pages properly
- Transfer all title elements and meta descriptions
- Preserve or improve on your old site’s structure and url structure
- Preserve as much of the original content as possible, or improve on it where possible
- Ensure that the new site is as faster (or faster) than your old site and has a decent performance score on page speed insights
- Make sure your new site launches smoothly
These mitigation activities can be described in your business case in a risk table. Migrating to a new site doesn’t need to impact your search performance at all, but a significant percentage of new website projects do still end in disaster when a site’s launched and rankings instantly tank (source: Clicky).
To prevent this from happening, interrogate your partner’s migration process and make sure they have a plan in place (or at least an answer to) each of the four points raised above. Experienced agencies go to great lengths to ensure that the migration and launch process goes off without a hitch, and an unwillingness to explain how they’ll do that should be a massive red flag.
Step 4: Laying Out The Build Process And Its Associated Costs
Having:
- Highlighted the need for a new and more effective website
- Outlined the ROI your new website will deliver
- Laid out your chosen solution
- Explored potential pitfalls ,risks and associated mitigation
The last thing you need to do is explain the process and break down the costs of your new web project. As this is likely to be the last part of your new website business case, the focus should be on providing enough detail to get sign off without being unnecessarily granular. 
As highlighted earlier in this document, the people you’re trying to persuade are time poor, and while they may well need to see some of the fine detail before they can give your project the green light, they certainly don’t need to
Instead, we recommend bullet-pointing the process you’ll need to get your new site built, using you and your agency’s preferred methodology for delivering an effective B2B website. This will differ from partner to partner, but ours would look something like this:
- Initial discovery and requirements gathering
- Wireframing and designing initial homepage mock
- Gathering feedback
- Finalising new homepage design
- Wireframing and designing internal pages and elements
- About us
- Product or service pages
- Case studies
- Header and footer
- Menus
- Blog etc.
- Building page templates
- Finalising menu/site structure
- Migrating content into new templates
- 301 redirects (if applicable)
- Website launch
You can also append costs to each of these elements, or just peg a rough cost to the design, development and technical launch work if preferred. Ultimately, you know what level of detail your CEO, CTO and CFO will want here and any insights we can offer would be utterly irrelevant to your situation so instead we’ll recommend having a think about what the individuals involved in signing off on your project are going to want.
If they’re bean counters (offence not intended) break everything down in granular detail, but if they’re big-picture people who get annoyed when they’re asked to start thinking about the cost of individual line items, by all means focus on the tasks that’ll be completed rather than the costs associated with building individual pages. 
Don’t be afraid to leverage highly-visual ways of presenting this data either. Gantt charts, colour-coded timelines and flowcharts are all good ways of making cost- and process- related data easy to consume and as we’ve said before, your business case is all about telling a compelling story that resonates with time-poor individuals.
Whitepeak have a good sample breakdown on their website, but it’s probably best to start by talking to one or more of your prospective build partners because they’ll have a lot of experience with build timelines and may even be able to provide a boilerplate document or chart that you can modify.
Step 5: Outlining The Adoption Process
Experienced (or scarred) c-suite executives will recognise adoption as a source of potential pain.
Assuming that you’re running your department on a tight budget and want internal teams to be able to update and expand your website at a later date, you’ll need to ensure that staff feel comfortable navigating your chosen CMS – and making changes to your website without negatively impacting the look and feel of your web pages.
This point is obviously moot if you’re sticking with your current CMS but what if your business case is built around the idea of leveraging the capabilities of a new and more marketer-friendly CMS?
Historically, this has been a challenge. Many content management systems have unique quirks that need to be learned over time, and others have notoriously steep learning curves that necessitate a certain amount of 3rd party training time to negotiate.
Some orgs also battle a certain level of institutional reluctance, with staff dragging their heels because they don’t want to learn a new system or don’t like feeling uncomfortable with their website’s CMS.
But times are changing: Modern CMS systems like HubSpot, Drupal, Craft or later versions of Joomla tend to be designed with adoption in mind. They boast intuitive and user-friendly interfaces that are engineered to ensure that marketing folk can quickly add or modify pages without dev assistance and the SaaS based CMSs also offer hands-on support via live chat or phone which will enable your team to navigate a lot of problems without external assistance.
Other CMSs provide extensive documentation and/or training libraries that can be used to get your internal teams up to speed, and your potential agency partner(s) will probably have a training regime that they offer to clients onboarding on a specific CMS too.
The important thing is to show that you’ve anticipated adoption issues, and demonstrate that you have a step-by-step process for overcoming them.
After you’ve mapped out this process, you just need to wrap up your business case document and/or slide deck with a neat conclusion and you’re all-but ready to pitch.
Remember that this document is all about first impressions, so make sure that it’s designed and laid out nicely, that it’s quick and easy to drill into stats or figures, and that the story you're telling is nice and easy to consume.
It’s also worth making sure that your document doesn’t just fizzle out: Feel free to end with a quick recap of what your project aims to accomplish and what it’s likely to deliver because it is, ultimately, all about leaving your leadership team with the impression that a brand new website is a necessity – rather than a ‘nice to have’ that they can peg to the bottom of their priority list.
Any Questions?
This guide draws on approx. 20 years of hard-won experience, and aims to help you make a compelling case for a new website that will persuade reluctant or sceptical board members.
But it’s by no means exhaustive.
Indeed, there are a great many additional things that you could include in your new website business case: Some marketing managers like to add sections where they showcase feedback from other team leaders who have read through their proposal, to prove that there’s buy-in from across the business (source: Adobe).
Others like to include sections that model the impact on day-to-day operations or explore the strategic alignment between their organisations and their partners (source: James Cook University).
But we think a focused business case that tells a good story, and really hammers home the potential a new website has to transform your business is the best way to get your project approved.
If you’re in the process of putting together a business case and you’d like some more hands-on advice, give us a shout. We always enjoy helping people to progress web build projects. If, on the other hand, you’re happy to go it alone we’ll finish up by saying good luck! The world needs more decent websites, so we hope you get the budget you need.
