Hi there! It’s Matt with MessageUp.
As a strategic marketing consultancy (specializing in B2B content marketing), many of MessageUp’s clients end up reworking or replacing their website as a step in their journey with us.
It’s part of an inevitable cycle of technological and content evolution that occurs as the business grows.
Since we specialize in B2B marketing, many of our clients’ team members have an engineering or scientific background. They’re tech savvy and not afraid to adopt new tools or to roll up their sleeves and dive into the settings.
Unfortunately, this also means they’re suckers for a bit of coding.
Presented with the choice between paying a third-party developer to build the new website or doing it themselves, their first instinct is the latter.
And with low-code and no-code development environments becoming easier and easier to learn—yet another area benefitting from AI enablement—that do-it-yourself instinct is running stronger than ever.
However, there’s a big difference between putting together an attractive website for your club, hobby project, or lifestyle business and developing a fast, effective, mobile-friendly site for a demanding B2B audience.
Winning at the web delivery game means deploying the latest coding tricks and techniques and understanding how to deliver the most engaging CX at the lowest load time cost, across multiple platforms.
This is a job best left to the professionals—people who specialize in learning and deploying the latest web dev trickery, all day, every day.
I have to remind myself of this each time a website project crosses the company’s radar screen, since I’m drawn to the DIY approach just as much as my clients are!
So, how to dissuade a well-meaning, tech-savvy team member from what appears to be saving the company several thousand—if not tens of thousands—of dollars?
In this week’s post on the Framework blog, 8 Lessons From Homebuilding You Should Apply to Your Website, I draw an analogy between the complex process of designing and building a new house and the design and development of a new website. As you’ll see, the parallels are many and the pitfalls are remarkably similar.
The bottom line is that hiring a professional web designer/developer is just as important as hiring a general contractor to build your house. And, there are several preparatory steps that you can take to ensure the building process and the final result live up to your expectations.
In constructing this week’s What We’ve Been Reading collection of helpful B2B content marketing articles, we’ve assembled pieces on how Google Search evolved in 2023, things to consider when implementing an AI-driven customer experience, driving and measuring B2B marketing efficiency, and a highly unusual B2B marketing case study.
Evolving your approach to keep up with Google and to take advantage of AI are both great objectives, but a smartly written case history is hard to beat in our books. Pay attention to Jason Notte’s piece in two ways: to learn from what the company in question did, and to observe how this case study article is constructed, so you can emulate his approach.
Topping out this week’s edition, my One Step actionable tip adopts the homebuilding analogy that underpins this week’s blog post and asks you to reflect on how well your company’s website achieves its aims.
Happy building and browsing! I’ll see you back here next Wednesday.
Cheers!
~ Matt
Our Latest Posts on The Framework Blog
Jan 24, 2024 - 8 Lessons From Homebuilding You Should Apply to Your Website
Jan 17, 2024 - Investors Are a Lot Like Buyers: Effective Content Marketing Can Help You Raise
What We’ve Been Reading
Here are some articles we’ve been reading this week that we hope you will enjoy and find valuable:
Google’s 2023 Releases: A B2B Marketer’s Review
As a boutique provider focused on a particular dimension of B2B marketing, we don't have the bandwidth to keep a close watch on Google's every move. Fortunately, others do the hard work for us—including Laura Schiele, who produced this year-in-review piece for Search Engine Land. While the views are those of the author, she provides some helpful tips and suggestions that should be applicable to a wide range of B2B situations.
For AI-Driven B2B Customer Experiences, You'll Need These Four Strategic Investments
We opened this article expecting Matt Roberts to lay out which tools the Marketing Profs team thinks merit our investment, but we were wrong. Instead, he insightfully ducks around the AI technology debate and identifies four other aspects of your business that must be secured (by making appropriate investments) before AI can succeed at a broad level.
How to Drive and Measure B2B Marketing Efficiency
This article by Jenny Gardynski at G2 captures a handful of key takeaways from a fireside chat on marketing efficiency between Amanda Malko, former CMO of G2, and Latané Conant, CRO of 6sense. The highlighted points are worthy of consideration but make time to watch the full fireside chat video (linked in the article) for broader insights.
How Gympass Turned its B2B Marketing Message into a Murder Mystery Podcast
Case studies are an excellent way to learn how other organizations have taken their B2B marketing to new heights—and this one is no exception. Jason Notte at AdWeek reports on the controversial approach the corporate wellness platform, Gympass, took to market its solutions to HR professionals in an entertaining new way.
Books on B2B Content Marketing
If you haven’t done so already, secure your copies of Content Marketing: Mission Critical, a guide for B2B CEOs, and Content Marketing: Making the Magic Happen, a guide for B2B marketing leaders, in paperback, e-book, or audiobook format, by visiting www.messageup.com/books. There you’ll find discount codes as well as details on limited edition boxed sets that include copies signed by the author.
One Step…
Today’s One Step actionable tip follows the analogy between homebuilding and website construction that we explore in detail in this week’s blog post.
The question I ask in the post to assess the success of a building project is whether the occupants find it welcoming and functional. In other words, does it please them on both an emotional and a practical level.
The same question might be asked of visitors to your company’s website: Do they find it welcoming and functional? Are they engaged at both an emotional and practical level?
Many websites present relevant, helpful information but it gets overlooked because the site is clunky or visually uninspiring. Visitors leave because they don’t enjoy the experience, irrespective of whether they could have found the answers for which they came looking.
Other websites are visually stunning and captivate visitors with their slick graphical effects, but fail to deliver the nuts-and-bolts content that those visitors came hoping to find. Visitors leave because the site failed at a practical level, irrespective of how great it looked.
In either case, disappointed visitors leave with more than just a negative impression of the website; they extrapolate that conclusion to the brand and business as a whole. A bad website experience can seriously damage your company’s chances of winning a visitor’s business.
So, with the idea in mind that it’s important to satisfy website visitors both emotionally (welcoming design and performance) and practically (functional delivery of the information they’re seeking), how does your website stack up?
Ask yourself: If I were a member of our target audience, visiting our company website for the first time, how likely would I be to find it welcoming and functional?
Capture your emotional and rational responses and then translate them into improvement action statements: We should do {X} to improve {Y}, which will help visitors have a better {Z} experience.
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