Pillars of Marketing Communication

We redesigned the site! And what impact did it have on your business? Well, we have a new website... and it's really nice.

I recently wrote that the web is today one of the most essential pillars of communication for your brand and With a bad website, you lose your business. Among other things, we started helping others as part of COVID free Mini-audit of the site which will help you find out part of the problematic places of the site in an hour.

Some businesses have embarked on a redesign of the site this year even due to COVID. And, as with previous attempts, it had no benefit.

There may be more reasons, today I will focus on one of them. If you don't have the basics of your marketing in order, your next website redesign is useless... unless you use it as a driving force for a more drastic move forward. To illustrate this, I will use the tool Marketing Stack Portent studios.

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Four Layers of Marketing Communication

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Infrastructure, analytics and content form the foundation on which you build marketing communications, including your website.

Let's go through the entire Marketing stack in more detail.

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Infrastructure

Infrastructure means technical support for your marketing. Domains, hosting, CRM, emails and their deliverability, speed, security, reliability, accessibility, extensibility, portability or technical SEO sites and, of course, marketing automation. I rank here and legal security your marketing activities (your site is yours, isn't it? And could I see the contract?).

Infrastructure settings directly affect your marketing activities. Recently, a client came to us who launched marketing campaigns in the USA. The website hosted in the CR wasn't exactly fast in Oregon, so people were leaving it. So the client threw the money out the window. Speed just never goes out of style.

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Analytics

Do you measure the impact of what you do? The analytics layer includes detailed configuration of analytical tools, settings for reporting, notifications, and analytical processes. And above all, building internal analytical competencies so that you know what you are measuring, what it really means, what it does not mean and why you actually want to know it.

If you can't measure something, you can't even control it.

-- Peter Drucker

Detailed setup of Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Hotjar, and other tools is a typical start to a larger site redesign project. In fact, a) you won't get much insight from the standard setup, b) it will take you an awfully long time. Now I could have a long polemic about the fact that not everything makes sense to measure and not all numbers are useful. Sometime next time.

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Content

Modern marketing relies on having your own newsroom. You don't have to call it that within the organizational structure, but you have it. I divide the content layer into three parts. User research provides insights into the needs, problems, and motivations of your (potential) customers. The findings of the research form strategic documents and are based on the content itself. The strategy papers say:

• Who we want to reach
• what we tell them
• as we call them
• how it builds on itself
• Why do we communicate like this?
• Why they should choose us
• ...

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Documents are called content strategy, marketing strategy, brand manual, uniform visual style manual, communication strategy, brand tone,...

It's not about the title, it's about whether they actually help you maintain consistent and relevant content across the entire marketing communications.

Based on them, specific texts, photos, videos, illustrations, infographics are created, which you then use across different channels and at different stages of the shopping cycle — from an interview in a newspaper to automated communication with new customers interested in receiving news.

In addition, smart marketers store decisions to learn from them, search competitors' content, and reuse existing content when relevant.

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Marketing channels

The last layer, which at the same time is the most visible. These include

• own channels — web, emailing or posters in the office,...
• paid channels — ppc advertising, tv advertising, paid articles,...
• earned channels—things that others will write about you and share because you are useful to them,

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There are a lot of marketing channels (touchpoints), I like this diagram by Marty Neumeier:

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Redesign of the site

Do you want to redesign the site? If you have neglected infrastructure, measurement and content, it is quite possible that you need to grasp the project much more broadly. Most web agencies will deliver the website to you without any problem (tell us what will be on it and we will do it!) , although redesigning the site doesn't actually help you.

Little knowledge of key customer segments, lack of strategy and, as a result, outdated and inconsistent content are probably the main reasons why the website redesign will cost not 50,000 CZK, but 500,000+ CZK.

• For myself, I wouldn't put tens or even hundreds of thousands into a website redesign unless you want to focus on just one particular area (graphics, content, technical solutions).
• In our experience, the revision of the communication (content) of the site has the greatest impact.
• If you suspect that the site is not good, you can start gradually — for example, our online Web Optimization Workshop allows you to find critical points of communication of the site and propose modifications for a fraction of the price of the agency's work.
• Subsequently, I would seek out and expand the bottleneck of my marketing across all layers. This is what our Audit of the site.