This piece originally appeared in AllBusiness.com; see the published piece.
At this point, anyone in marketing has seen (or been the accomplice to) an unnecessary website overhaul.
To be fair, there are very persuasive reasons to burn it all down to the ground. Our culture deeply values the new over the old—particularly in a corporate world where “newness” can get more attention and accolades than the much less flashy “improvement.” The “what sounds better on a resume” question is compounded by clients repeatedly being sold or given the impression that they need to start over entirely to solve their business issues. It’s a chicken-or-egg question: Which idea came first—the one that website overhauls are necessary for creating change or that it is easier to sell a website overhaul when it is critical to change?
Here’s the problem: website overhauls don’t work—at least not in the way they’re promised to.
Website redesigns are often initiated because there’s a business problem: low conversions or poor lead capturing mean the website isn’t driving a significant portion of revenue; an underinvestment in the website leads to an outdated and out-of-touch image; acquisitions have grown the capabilities of an organization, but those aren’t reflected on the website. The list goes on.
Sure, a website overhaul may solve those problems … in the same way that firing your entire staff and hiring new people may improve employee morale.
But, like that analogy, website overhauls are expensive and hopefully unnecessary. In both the time they require and the financial investment needed, website overhauls demand the dedication and focus of large teams working for weeks, months, and sometimes even years. This time commitment poses problems of its own, adding in a layer of “well, we’ve spent so much time on it, now it really has to perform.” In other words, the perfect recipe for stakeholder disappointment, delivered late and way over budget.
It can also create more problems than there were to begin with. From structure changes to broken links, a great deal of complexity is involved in successfully migrating a site without decreasing SEO rankings. Data and content migrations are often underestimated herculean efforts, not to mention external integrations. A misaligned overhaul can also turn users off to the platform, creating frustration or confusion and causing a loss of trust and familiarity.
Lastly, it’s just not the best way to work. A website isn’t a static billboard—it’s a selling tool that should be responsive to customer needs. Responsiveness means it adapts as customers or the business adapts. Every month you spend on an overhaul is time that could have been put into making the site 5% better for the customers currently interacting with it. By the time you finish, the insights that you were implementing may no longer be relevant.
A website isn’t a static billboard—it’s a selling tool that should be responsive to customer needs.”
When we spread the gospel of incremental change, we cite three reasons to believe: speed, sustainability, and CMO satisfaction.
Incremental change is fast, allowing you to respond to customer needs in real time. Let’s say you have a news website where an increasing number of readers are complaining about readability on mobile devices. Rather than adding this to a potential list of significant redesign efforts, a quick analysis reveals that this affects phones with folding screens. The team can consider how to handle multiple viewport segments on those devices instead of assuming there’s a larger problem.
Just because a change is fast doesn’t mean it can’t have a big impact. You wouldn’t believe how radically different a site can look by simply changing a typeface or how much more engagement you can drive by making minor improvements to a website’s user interface.
An incremental approach is also sustainable. Rather than burning out your teams with a monumental overhaul, short sprints with tangible results keep everyone happy.
Lastly, it meets the needs of CMOs today. Top marketers are increasingly reporting that they are being asked to do more with less and prove ROI all along the way. Incremental change is a way to accomplish both. You can make a tangible impact quickly with a nimble team—testing, measuring, and improving as you go.
Top marketers are increasingly reporting that they are being asked to do more with less and prove ROI all along the way. Incremental change is a way to accomplish both.”
Leadership might have concerns. We’ve been indoctrinated for so long that a website overhaul is the only way to remove legacy baggage. So, the idea of forgoing a splashy rollout for minor improvements over time can be a tough sell. When advocating for an incremental approach, answer this question: What is the one change we can make that will prove to leadership that this approach can work?
Another common complaint is that implementation or approval will take too long. If that’s the case for your business, rectifying this is the first step. If an organization cannot quickly and confidently change copy, images, or other basic elements of an experience, it signals internal misalignment about how digital experiences are best utilized. The incremental approach doesn’t work if things don’t keep moving incrementally.
An incremental approach should also include a commitment to stop chasing trends. While a fashionable typeface, parallax scrolling, or aggressively minimalist (or maximalist) website may seem like a good idea at the time, this user experience quickly becomes outdated because it’s tied to what everyone else is doing, not what your brand stands for.
It also behooves teams to pick boring technology. Industry staples are staples for a reason. Sometimes, a start-up disruptor can bring real value to the table, other times it brings a host of problems and minimal support to fix them.
Keep your core teams small, ideally only 4–6 people. Choose experts over junior staff that may need a lot of oversight, and reduce meetings wherever you can by using asynchronous communication (like Slack) to keep everyone up to date.
You should also time-box every activity—don’t allow any single effort to run indefinitely. Always have a timeline in any hypothesis, and track it ruthlessly.
Even though you’re running with a tight team, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be getting input from across the organization. A successful incremental approach will be one where there’s buy-in from all stakeholders, and their needs are balanced with those of their colleagues and the audiences. Have listening sessions with different departments affected by the website. What do they wish was different? What are their pain points? This tactic helps you figure out what will have the biggest impact and how to prioritize.
Once you know what matters to your internal and external stakeholders, commit to measuring it meticulously. You should continually assess what works and what doesn’t and prioritize changes that can be measured against some kind of progress metric. If its impact can’t be measured, don’t do it.
As you begin to design, always reduce and simplify before expanding. Prototype with the lowest effort possible to achieve your goals—finding ways to consolidate changes and reduce redundancies in design can have substantial time-saving benefits over the life of an initiative. This tactic will mean starting with components you already have—ideally ones that exist in a design tool—and current code. The most optimized teams can prototype ideas in staging and run no-regrets experiments in production for quick feedback. They also create reusable assets that can be used for final delivery. Adaptable designs will lend themselves to adaptable prototypes and implementations.
When you reach something that feels good, make it happen. Move to the real product as quickly as you can. If it’s better than what you currently have, ship it.
The incremental approach comes with a hard truth: a website will never be “done.” At least not as long as you’re in business! There will always be new technologies, customer needs, and insights to incorporate into your digital experiences. Always measure, adapt, and revisit previous changes to make them a little bit better. It’s like Boy Scout’s honor: Leave it a little better than you found it.
Companies don’t always use data to power their brand positioning shifts. Often, it’s a subjective exercise that reflects what internal stakeholders are experiencing when they interact with customers.
That subjectivity can be dangerous for brand positioning work because it can root your brand in promises and messaging that won’t last over the long haul and may not reflect the needs of high-value growth targets.
When clients come to VSA for brand positioning work, we usually suggest their brand positioning journey start with Promise to Performance®, our proprietary quantitative research methodology.
Promise to Performance (P2P) was specifically designed to identify the key ingredients of a brand positioning that is true to your business, relevant to your customers and different from what your competitors are saying. In other words, it’s everything you need, and nothing that you don’t.
P2P provides the answers to three key questions that will help you prioritize the brand promises you should focus on in your brand positioning:
In this piece, let’s focus on promise alignment to high-value audiences—why we approach it the way we do and why it matters for brand growth. We’ll cover the other two areas in future pieces.
Our approach starts with prioritizing across a long list of potential needs—about 20 unique statements, on average—to find out which are most important to each respondent in the survey. The need statements are custom written for each study to capture a range of functional and emotional needs that represent different potential priorities within your particular audience.
We then use need segmentation to define the audience cluster groups. With any segmentation exercise, there are typically foundational needs that all segments identify as important for the category. These needs are important to be competitive in the category—so it’s important to have them covered—but they are not usually differentiating.
Here’s an example: We worked with a company that offers a technology solution for small businesses. First, we surveyed their total audience, and then we performed a need cluster analysis to reveal audience segments with different priorities representing unique mindsets. In this case, all SMB segments have similar reliability and service need priorities.
One of the big benefits of doing need-based segmentation is that it can uncover the hidden gems. These are the needs that don’t immediately rise to the top in overall audience ranking of importance, but they can actually carry outsized weight for certain audiences.
For a differentiated position, we want to isolate those needs that are uniquely important to different customer segments, and then act on them.
On average we find about 4.0 segments with each study, and each segment has an average of about 3.6 needs that shape that segment—meaning, they are both important to the segment and more important for that segment compared to the audience as a whole. Often, segment-defining needs are lower ranking overall, but they over-index in importance for a particular segment. In fact, when we looked back across our P2P studies, we found that 82% of segments have at least one middle-of-the-pack need. And 45% had at least two.
Take our SMB technology provider’s audiences. You can see that some of their needs are foundational to all audiences, and some are unique to just that segment. All segments believe that reliability and great customer service are important, but within each segment there are more nuanced needs that define that particular audience.
Based on these defining needs for each segment, we can now align product capabilities, brand strengths and other reasons to believe to inform both our positioning and our messaging to the opportunity segments.
And in fact, you shouldn’t try to be. As brand marketers face tighter budgets and scrutiny over returns, you need to focus your energy where it will have the most impact. Segmenting your audience based on needs allows you to see which ones have the highest potential for growth and which ones you should deprioritize because they don’t align with the category white space and what your company can deliver.
The risk of overlooking some of the middle-of-the-pack needs becomes particularly impactful when those needs are priorities for your high-value segments. That means more likely than not, there’s something important to your high-value target that’s lurking below the surface.
Back to our technology provider example: Of the four segments, we found that two of the groups (Control Seekers and Tech Skeptics) provided no opportunity for growth at all because of their complacent mindsets toward technology.
And then we found that one additional segment (Customer Advocates) was important but wouldn’t provide the kind of growth the company was looking for.
The fourth segment (Edge Seekers) was where the real opportunity was, and where the company could focus its positioning to accelerate growth. This is a group that (1) has one-third of the market size at 36% and (2) is actively seeking a technology that can grow its business. Both the segment’s size and its mindset make it ripe for growth—and a prime audience to focus on for positioning.
This approach yields more precise, differentiated positioning that will stand out from a sea of vague brand generalities, as well as ensure that the brand is focused on the places where it stands to gain the most. You don’t need to ignore your lower-growth audiences, but you can write positioning that primarily focuses on the accelerator groups while still appealing to the lower-priority audiences.
One of the best parts of P2P is how actionable it is.
After we identify our segments, we then build profiles of these different audience members that includes their needs and how to talk to them. These profiles easily onboard your marketing and sales teams to craft messaging that speaks directly to the things these prioritized audiences care about most. Using these audience profiles, you can also relate the need-based segments to other “addressable” audience profiles that your teams are using, which can serve as a great complement to demographic segmentations.
If you’d like to work with a partner that can identify the key ingredients of a brand positioning that is unique, ownable and aligned to your audience’s core needs, we’d love to hear from you. You can get in touch here to learn more about P2P and how it can work for your business.
Addison Group, a prominent professional services firm specializing in staffing, consulting and executive search, recently rolled out a new website and refreshed brand. The change comes as Addison Group celebrates 25 years of empowering people through its tailored talent solutions, and embodies its commitment to the people it serves.
To conduct the brand refresh and website redesign, Addison Group tapped VSA Partners, a creative and branding agency. From messaging and strategy to graphic design and website implementation, the agency partnered with Addison Group across the rebrand and activation process.
“Very early in our work together, we uncovered Addison’s unique commitment to building long-term relationships with candidates and clients. That became the central truth that guided all of our work together, including its new mantra: ‘No one gets talent like Addison Group,’” said VSA Associate Partner and Executive Creative Director Bill Maday. “From specialized staffing solutions to consulting, this idea encapsulates the breadth of Addison Group’s offerings and their dedication to the real people they serve.”
With this mantra in place, VSA reimagined the Addison Group brand by centering it on what makes Addison Group so special: its people.
“Addison Group does a lot. But what all of our different offerings come down to is pretty simple, and that’s understanding people,” said VP of Marketing, Talent Solutions, Michael Barry. “VSA has been a great partner in keeping our brand messaging and visuals focused clearly on what sets us apart as a business, and unifying all our offerings underneath a clear and compelling vision.”
The new brand system is anchored by the hero graphics affectionately known as “gems,” which are a playful nod to the caliber of talent Addison Group recruits and supports. The gem shapes are flexible containers that can be used as framing devices as well as connective elements, particularly between Addison Group’s new people-centric photography styling. Other aspects of the larger brand system include a fresh and elevated color palette, custom iconography, and a friendly display typography.
VSA then took these foundational elements and translated them into a website redesign, teaming up with Dapper Digital to execute front- and back-end development. Along with a visual refresh, the team workshopped Addison Group’s user journeys. The workshop findings resulted in a focused navigation structure and an overall better user experience for two key audiences—job seekers and hirers—as well as improved usability for Addison Group’s internal teams.
“At the heart of this project was a focus on clarity and user experience,” said Associate Partner and Executive Creative Director YanYan Zhang. “Part of that was pulling the brand strategy—Addison Group’s story and purpose—through all the content on the site in a really clear way. And the other part of that search for clarity was getting precise on the user journeys, and how we could easily guide people toward the information and pages that are most relevant to them.”
As the talent acquisition landscape becomes increasingly competitive, Addison Group’s enhanced digital presence ensures it remains a go-to partner for businesses seeking specialized talent solutions. The website refresh is a key component of Addison Group’s broader strategy to leverage digital tools to better serve its clients and candidates.
