Professional Services websites have moved on from the 'Brochure and Profiles' format of their forebears. It is now critical to allow your Experts to communicate, and demonstrate their knowledge throughout the sales process via all the digital channels - podcast, apps, video, email, webinar, chat, social media & blogs. If done well, your website should should be alive & bubbling with opinion and commentary - showing the dynamism of your firm.
Unfortunately, the costs of developing sites with this level of functionality are high and rising. No longer is creating a new site largely a rebrand process. To create these interactive sites is a huge, highly technical IT build. And doing all that work just for one firm makes little sense:
- There are no benefits of scale. Bespoke coding is costly and inefficient.
- It is difficult and very expensive to gather user feedback and improve your offering consistently in-house.
- Technologies, legislation & user preferences all change over time. To have a 'modern' website that doesn't fail in unexpected ways, you need to track and upgrade your site regularly.
And finally, why would you do that? It is not core business, it is expensive, and most likely it will run way over schedule
This is why adopting a Software as a Service (SaaS) model is becoming so popular as an alternative (or the "Headless CMS" as it is sometimes called). In this scenario, the vendor has spent thousands of months of coding time, analysing the market, testing and reworking their product so you don't have to.
To list the benefits:
- You get best in class work-flows to ensure a consistent flow of timely relevant content suggested, produced, and distributed by your professionals.
- Your site gets better, rather than worse, over time. New features are added as new opportunities present themselves.
- There is little or no 'Project Risk'; the platform is already built and in use.
- Your site is maintained by a dedicated team whose interests (in providing a great product) are highly-aligned with yours.
- Development and hosting costs are spread across multiple tenants delivering value to all stakeholders.
Finally, maybe the most important factor; not having a complex project on your hands leaves you free to concentrate on the real business at hand - marketing your firm.