As the saying goes, “The only constant is change.” Nothing is static. Whether it be the market, your competition, changing technology, or the needs and desires of your clients, there will always be factors at play that will impact your digital communications.
Does this mean you should just plan on building a new website every four or five years? No. In fact, just the opposite. A brand should always be prepared to iterate their website and digital communication tools frequently.
Back in the day, when you would buy a new computer, it would come with an operating system. Eventually, you would have to go buy a new operating system to install on this same computer, and it was this tedious and expensive thing. Now, we’ve evolved to a place where we expect our operating system software to update routinely with security enhancements and brand new features, enabling us to get the most of our investment.
The same thing must be true of websites. And as a result, today’s marketing teams must be as agile as possible. Our aim at Studio Science is to be your partner in agility. If we’re building you a website, we’re building one that empowers your marketing team to be successful (like we did with GloFiber). And we don’t stop there.
Still, agility can never help you fully anticipate what you’re going to need in a year or even six months. Change catalysts that will impact your digital marketing include:
Third-party influences: Take Google, for instance, and how they calculate page rank and make changes to their search algorithm. A few years ago, Google announced a plan to prioritize mobile page speed score as the predominant score for page rank. That little change made a big impact. While a page may load quickly on desktop, a slow mobile load affects your page ranking. Suddenly, what used to be an IT problem is now a marketing problem, pushing a marketing team to ask for performance enhancements.
Google Chrome and Apple Safari are dropping support for third-party cookies in 2023, which will impact marketing strategy. While we know this is happening, these types of changes are not something we can always anticipate, and ideally, a marketing website can adapt rather than wait until the next major overhaul.
Changes to your business strategy: A company’s business strategy is just as likely to be affected by change. There can be new leadership, new data that reveals the need to pivot to another market, or ecosystem changes that require a website redesign. These don’t always lead to significant initial impact but should be considered, because if you are changing who you are talking to, for instance, then that is certainly going to affect your digital communication.
Our expectations when it comes to web experiences: As technology steadily becomes more sophisticated, so do our acceptance and expectations of a “normal” online experience. Novel ideas become ubiquitous; for instance, remember when chatbots didn’t exist? The acceleration of the web experience won’t necessarily synchronize with a traditional website redesign cycle.
Changes to your brand: Brands should live and breathe. As my colleague Brian Pennington mentioned in his posts about living brands, “There’s a lot going on in the world and as a result, a living brand needs to be responsive, from acknowledging and addressing social causes or new verticals, to responding to customer inquiries in a timely manner.” A brand must be equipped to respond to change and its website remains a highly visible representation of its most current state.
Needless to say, change is inevitable, as is the need to be agile and open to new iterations of your web presence as you go. For example, we have a partner we’ve been working closely with to iteratively build tools for them to enhance their current site as well as other tools and services they offer. These include:
CX Blueprint tool: The CX Blueprint tool metaphorically represents the company’s capabilities as an interactive cityscape. Potential customers can turn on and off specific components to get a sense of how the company’s services can be configured to suit their specific CX needs. The tool provides a personalized PDF representing the customized configuration to allow users to share what they discovered with others with influence in the buying process.
Empathy Assessment tool: This company has been collecting data on empathy and its impact on customer experience. Studio Science designed and built an interactive assessment to bring that data to life, allowing visitors to gauge the empathy level of their business, and providing direction on next steps.
Tours plugin: The company needed a method of articulating what their product does and how it can be applied to specific scenarios. The solution needed to be responsive and easily updated to reflect changes in the product’s user interface. The result was a tool that enabled their team to quickly create custom, step-by-step tours and embed them anywhere on their website.
The old model of replacing a website every handful of years can be cumbersome, expensive, and limits its ability to meet business goals. As an alternative, an agile, iterative model that measures results and accounts for constant change will ultimately lead to better results.
Working with Studio Science is kind of like that software that updates on its own. A built-in value of working with us is that you are getting a partnership, where we continuously seek out ways to help your business innovate and grow.
