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With over 20 years of working with clients to solve their operational and growth challenges, we’ve learned that businesses must constantly own their transformation to keep delivering value to their customers. The world is more connected than ever, and we regularly advise our clients to have an aligned digital presence and Martech strategy.
Taking our own advice, in 2020 CMG embarked on an internal website redesign project to align our external messaging with our strategic priorities. Since then, we’ve continued to focus on a “test and learn” approach to explore other digital marketing opportunities. We’ve analyzed users’ behavior flow on our site, experimented with paid ads to drive awareness, and explored our buyers’ journey to better understand when and how customers engage with our content. Our team has made a commitment to clearly articulate our value proposition and the website continues to evolve to highlight our impact and better serve our customers.
The evolution of our website serves as just one example of how, now more than ever, it’s possible for companies to transformation in ways that make them more proactive, more data-driven, and better prepared to succeed in the market.
In fact, it’s not only possible, it’s imperative. Does your digital marketing need a refresh?
According to Forbes, what percentage of companies have fully implemented their digital transformations?
Our work with clients has shown us time and again that successful businesses are adaptable ones; an ability to be nimble and quickly respond to changing customer needs separates those with lasting success from those that are challenged by new developments in their market. Our case is no different. That’s why we continually challenge ourselves to think about how we can quickly create better user experiences and better engage with our own clients.
A critical component of customer engagement in an increasingly digital landscape is our website. It’s through our website that we showcase our firm’s unique characteristics and highlight the solutions and client partnerships that are at the core of everything we do. And to do so effectively in an increasingly digital marketplace, we must be flexible and self-sufficient.
Our website was historically managed, in part, by a third-party partner. And while this arrangement suited our needs for many years, with growth in our own capabilities we saw an opportunity to adapt. To be truly nimble in a digital age, we needed full, end-to-end ownership of our digital presence. It was time to make our own transformation.
We’ve found that many of our clients have similar opportunities. Whether it be full design authority over a website, visibility in marketing spend, or similar third party-led processes, the emergence of new, user-friendly technologies makes it similarly easy for your organization to enhance its level of ownership and reap the rewards.
A Wall Street Journal survey found that Digital Transformation was the #1 concern of directors, CEOs, and executives in 2019.
In short, we treated our own team like we would our clients. We partnered with leadership to identify near- and long-term objectives, established launch milestones, and collected feedback from internal stakeholders along the way. Importantly, this process represents one of CMG’s core strengths: combining strategy and action.
To achieve our objective, it was not enough to strategize. We had to act.
To begin, we identified our own core needs. Chief among these was ownership over content management, page design, and overall functionality. Next, we evaluated different CMS platforms against these criteria and our desired timeline, selected our best fit, and got started—it was that simple!
Before we began to build, though, it was important to define our objectives; to identify what constituted “success” for this effort:
Next, to create our site launch milestones, we first had to determine what needed to be included in our minimum viable product, or MVP. That is, what features did our site need; which features would we be hesitant to launch the site without? By asking ourselves whether certain features were necessary, we were able to accomplish a couple of things: (1) time to launch was reduced significantly and (2) features were prioritized, allowing us to establish a backlog of features to add in future updates. With our MVP features identified, we set weekly checkpoints in which we targeted development of key pages and features for leadership review. These checkpoints made a process that appeared gargantuan at the outset much more approachable.
Finally, CMG reviewed pages for functionality, content, and user experience at each checkpoint. This approach simplified revisions by limiting them to one page or a few pages at a time, reducing the time spent providing and collecting each round of feedback.Furthermore, this strategy served to provide leadership with a sense of transparency through regular updates, ensuring ongoing buy-in. In the end, this iterative approach to building shortened our overall time to site launch and—true to our aim—enabled us to quickly adapt to feedback and changing needs along the way.
As a result of our efforts, CMG has a brand-new site outlining our core consulting capabilities, and client success stories. We’ve made significant improvements to our abilities to test new layouts, analyze our site’s performance, and take ideas from concept to launch. And better yet, our new site is managed in-house, giving CMG full control over design, content, analytics, and more.
As we’ve continued to assess our own capabilities, we’ve focused on content generation that tells the CMG story. We’ve also utilized social media to share stories that highlight our brand and developed a Thrive Newsletter to increase our thought leadership presence. Recently, we noticed that the user behavior flow was not indicating a buying posture, so we worked to update our page progression to encourage users to view our “About us” page rather than our “Solutions” page – engagement in this case was about awareness not conversions.
Where might your organization benefit from additional ownership over its technology, tools, or processes?
Simply put, we took a dose of our own medicine: we challenged ourselves to adapt to a changing customer environment and took the first step. But the journey is far from over.
We challenge our clients to learn continuously from and build upon successes. In the same way, we’ve also challenged ourselves to build on our strengths, grow, and refine our new digital space. While the core components of the site remain largely consistent, the new site serves as a testing ground for innovative ways to engage with our clients. Changing our website was not a “one-and-done” task, rather requires regular attention and analysis as we drive the collective power of digital transformation.
This theme of transformation is core not only to our renewed and improved website, but also to our broader work with our clients. Businesses and the behaviors of customers are transforming at an accelerated pace. Relationships that were once simple must now be managed across channels and over time. Enhanced business performance now requires an ability to glean insight from customers and their behaviors. Their preferences are changing rapidly, and businesses must be poised to respond.
Drawing on first-hand experience and insights from business leaders across industries, CMG has committed to continuously refining our own approach to helping our clients navigate their own business transformations—digital or otherwise.
Look Inward to Look Outward: Transform Your Customer Experience
