Charlie: Hello and welcome to the CMO Series Digital Masterclass, a new sub-series of the CMO Series podcast.

In this series, we explore expert advice from professional services marketers on how to build an exceptional digital presence. I'm Charlie Knight, and today we're diving into the key strategies of creating a world-class website and building it with a point of difference first. So we've gathered insights from industry leaders featured on the CMO Series Podcast, covering everything from how to kick off your project, which stakeholders to involve, and the importance of clearly defining your goals for success.So if you're planning a new website project, tune in for practical advice on taking those first crucial steps.

First up, we hear from Sivan Koenig Galinsky, Chief Marketing Officer at BFKN. Sivan joined episode 142 of the CMO Series podcast to share her insights on crafting an award-winning website in a mid-sized firm. She shares the first steps for setting up your website projects for success.

Sivan: I would say the key challenges definitely arise at the beginning of the project, right? So you first need to kind of look at this as an opportunity to refresh a lot of things that you would put on the site. So, for example, it's an opportunity to either have your firm do messaging projects, messaging work in the first instance, if you've never done that, or to update whatever materials you have prepared in the past on sort of your firm messaging. You want to do this before you even dive into designing a new website. You know, if you haven't all agreed, and I mean with all the key stakeholders, agreed on what the firm messaging is, you really won't be in a position as a marketer to tell the firm's story. I believe a new website is not just about a new look and a new feel and better functionality and a better search tool, for example. I think it's more important that you look at a new website as an opportunity to give the marketplace a fresh look at your firm's story. What you're trying to do and where you're trying to go is really what hopefully is depicted on your website. And that's going to be depicted with a number of different interactive tools like words and video and art and pictures. But you can't really do that work until you know what that story is, what that message is, what your position is in the marketplace. And you have to be thoughtful about doing that work before you even sort of waste anyone's time building a website. Definitely do your legwork up front. Don't rush to start the project. Even if your vendor's pressuring you to start, right, don't rush to start the project until you have truly, you know, spent the time, made the effort to get it right before you embark on this timeline. And as I mentioned, the firm messaging, the strategy around what the firm story is and how you will depict it on the site, picking the right vendor, you know, in the first place, and really strategically building that internal committee. I think those are the three key things to sort of, you know, fall under the doing the legwork. I would also say, you know, when you're thinking about picking a vendor, I think you really need to pick a vendor that not just that they really know what they're doing and have done it many times. But I do think, you know, it should be a vendor that has worked with companies in your industry first and foremost, but also companies that are similarly situated to you.

Charlie: Crossley Sanford, Managing Director of Marketing at Ankura, took to the stageat CMO Series Live in London to share how their website build began by defining their North Star for the project.

Crossley: We decided to tackle the three-headed monster and do a rebrand, a new website, a new thought leadership platform, all funnelling for business development purposes at one time. So, yeah, no easy task. ask, but I would say that it's kind of like building a house. You can put fresh paint on the walls, and the walls will look great, but if the foundation's broken, it's not going to be sustainable. Our North Star, and every marketing department is different and views things differently. Some people are really big on the branding. Some people are really big on. Well, as long as our name recognition is out there, then that's a win for us. And that's totally up to the various professionals in different marketing companies that have different needs opinions. For us and for me, I was very convicted about if nobody's buying our product, our service because of what we're doing, then it's a failure to me. And that can be a controversial statement to make, but that's just how I viewed it. I asked you the first time we got introduced to pass. So I'm like, yeah, so tell me all the companies that have generated leads and revenue from this. Because that's what, to me, it goes back to what does success look like? And to me, it's if we're not getting our professionals at bats, if we're not helping them grow the revenue, then they're never going to look at us as strategic marketing advisors because they have P&Ls to manage. They have numbers and targets to hit. And so I've always viewed in my career, whether I've been on the client side or whether I've been in-house, how do I create value? And that ended up being one of our taglines for Ankura is protect, create, recover value. But it's kind of a principle for life is I really thought about when we build this website, I don't want it to just be a cool website. I want it to be something that functions in a capacity where it's value-added to our professionals, our clients. So if you view them as a client, then how are you going to deliver something that's valuable for them? Our North Star was what's the return on investment? So if we're going to make the investment in this thought leadership platform that's integrated into our website, what's the return on that and how can it be business development focused?

Charlie:  In episode 135, Vicky Cunningham, Marketing Director at Officio Consulting, delved into how they approach mapping the client journey alongside their content strategy when embarking on a new website project. 

Vicky: Every marketing director at some point likes to sort of do a brand refresh or a web rebuild, partly because you come in with a fresh set of eyes and you start taking things to pieces, you know, is this fit for purpose? Is this doing the job we want it to do? And so, you know, obviously I sort of began that process and we took a look at, you know, we took a look at who we are as a business and you know workshopped around where do we sit in terms of how we think our clients see us and what they think, you know what problems they would look to us to solve for them? But then we did a deep dive and said okay if we want to build a good user journey through our website and we want to make sure that we are putting together content which is going to resonate for our various clients you know what's the journey that the client goes through when they have a problem? What is their buying journey? We did a really deep dive in partnership with a number of the consultants in the business and we did a deep dive into the problems that come up most often for our clients around procurement and supply chain. And we went right the way down into, so what's the conversation that happens in the client organization when… You know, they realize they don't have the right skills to, or they can't have the team size they want to, you know, deliver an efficient, effective procurement operation. Or, you know, what are the questions they're asking themselves if they need to reduce their costs of some of the sort of categories that they're buying for their business? And so you get okay so if they ask these questions then what happens next when they've got the answer to that  question and then when they've you know what at what stage might they start to look for some external help to solve that problem and if they do how do they approach it and we just went through step by step by step to understand you know before they even would look at our website or start having a conversation with us or consume any of our content necessarily what's happening And so we mapped it in really, really solid detail. And then we use that as the basis for creating that. You referred before to the pillars that we have on our website. So we realize that most of our clients' challenges fall into five distinct areas. And so we headline those on our homepage, but all of the user journeys through the website are built around those pillars. 

Next up, we dive into the technical aspects of website builds with Mikkel Keller Stubkjær, Head of Development at Novicell UK, Mikkel joined CMO Series Live in London to dive into the composable approach to website builds and the distinct advantages for professional services firms.

Mikkel: Building a website is a daunting endeavor. It's a complex and challenging task, and it requires a lot of focus planning in the execution. So we've seen a lot of companies that actually select their platforms based on personal experience, legacy, and other historical reasons, just because we used to do this or I've done this in the past. But when a desired feature is not supported by that platform, then it becomes a complicated task to actually extend with that functionality. And that's what we're trying to avoid. I think it's very important early on to make the right decisions. And you can never make all the right decisions, hence the expectation slide I just showed you. We know it's not going to be a straight road ahead. So what this is all about, and this is probably the most important sentence in my slide today, avoid getting locked into the choices that you do at this early stage. And that's basically what's at the heart of composable architecture. Also, today's topic also revolves about customer-centric user journeys. That's all about staying relevant. And again, when you fail to meet your customers’ clients' needs on your online presence, there's always another competitor just around the corner. It's so easy out there to find additional or other options for what you need. So in the digital age, you're no longer unique. There's always another option with better usability, better performance, or a better user experience. And that's why you need to work very hard at staying relevant at all times. And again, all of this is kind of a segue into the composable principles. So remember Charles Darwin, it's not the strongest nor the most intelligent, but the ones that are most responsive to change that survives. And why is this relevant? It's relevant because you need to stay relevant by being responsive to change. And again, Composable Architecture will allow this for you. So, what is Composable Architecture? I'm a technical person and I'll try to explain in as easy terms as possible. But in order to understand the future, one must first understand the past. So, as I mentioned, I'm Danish and that means that I grew up in a small town in Denmark that happens to be the birthplace of the LEGO brick. And it so happens that the Lego brick is a fantastic thing to actually explain this topic. So imagine these building blocks have different responsibilities in your technology stack. This is your content management system. This is your email marketing platform. This is your personalization, et cetera. In the traditional approach, all of these were tied very closely together. So they were forever bound. You could not change one without affecting others. This is a monolithic platform. Has all the functionalities that you need. But then at some point, that's not enough. So you start modifying that monolith. Next time, I'll use Duplo bricks instead. They're a little bit bigger. These are small, I know. However, there's a red brick here now and a blue brick here. They represent a change in your platform, which means that now you've modified your monolith. But that goes even further because that's not enough. Over time, you need even more stuff. And then you start building on the side of your monolith. and it becomes this weird looking. Now it's not as nice as before, at least that's the intention here. So what does that mean? That means that when this platform is out of life and you need to start thinking about building a new website, all of these nice bespoke business capabilities that you built here need to throw it all away and start from scratch. 

Charlie: You can find out more about Composable Architecture by checking out the full session. And as always, links to all of the recordings featured in today's episode are listed in the podcast description. That's all for today. Head to passle.net/digitalmasterclass for more content on how to build a world-class digital presence and subscribe to the Passle CMO Series Podcast on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening.