Phase 1: Planning

Is your website up to date? When was the last time you made a significant change in the design, structure, navigation, content, or its functionalities? Do you know that on average, you should completely redesign your website every 2 or 3 years to keep its modern look and good performance? If this time has passed for your website, it might be high time you started planning for a new one.

Renewing a website is a complex process, that needs to be divided into several phases. The first one is the preparation of a thorough Website Brief and Overall Planning which includes the following steps:

Step 1: Design your Value Proposition

Why should someone do business with you? The answer to this question is the exact definition of your value proposition. You should be clear about your promises and the benefits a client would get when working with you. Here is what you need to include within your company value proposition:

• 3 to 5 sentences that best describe what your business do – no matter if you offer software development, web hosting or IT outsourcing solutions, here is the place to make it clear for your audience
• 3 main problems or issues that you solve – within every industry certain difficulties will always exist. Think about which they are for your target clients and list them starting from the most painful one. This could be the lack of software development capabilities for tech companies, the poor web hosting support that online businesses receive or anything else. 
• 3 major benefits that customers derive from your service – will they take advantage from cost optimization, better and more stable IT infrastructure or a faster website? Tell them what the expected outcome from your partnership will be. 

Step 2: Identify Your Buyer Persona – to Whom Will You Sell?

A common mistake for many businesses is trying to sell to everyone. They skip working on their target buyer persona(s) and end up with obscure profile of ideal buyers and poor ideas how to reach and engage them. However, if you do make the effort to go in details about your ideal clients, this could later lead to a doubling of the number of page views per visit of your website, according to SEMrush. In addition, using buyer personas can help all your teams design and deliver better products and services.

Here is what you need to know as minimum about your desired customers:

• their demographics – try come out with age, gender, level of income and location of your target buyers. Being aware of their family status and level of education would be also helpful. 
• their professional status – in many cases people’s job occupation influences or determines their buying habits and behavior
• pain points – try to really understand their problems, fears, and obstacles
• psychographics – examine their beliefs, values, and goals
• influences and information sources – research more about their favorite media, blogs, events, and influencing powers
• purchasing behavior and their role in the decision-making process

A great and helpful addition to SEMrush buyer persona guide is HubSpot’s buyer persona creation tool. 

Step 3: Identify Market Trends

When planning your new website you are not supposed to invent a new approach towards the structure, content, or functionalities. You simply need to observe market trends and adapt those elements to what is currently attractive for your target users. Here are some reliable sources of inspiration:

• listen to your customers – in the end of the day, all you do is intended to support them. Pay attention to their industry, business, interests, current issues, and feedback to come out with ideas for your new website. 
• examine industry landscape – currently, almost every industry is going through or is heading towards transformation. Get a real picture of the process and trends and try to predict what will be important for yours and your clients’ industries in the next months and years and use it as a basis for your website content.
• empower analytics and digital tools – tracking users’ behavior and signals is the most reliable source of feedback for the quality of your website. Take advantage of tools such as Google Analytics, Hotjar, or SEMrush to see how people interact with it and how you can optimize its performance. 

Step 4: Analyze Competitors

Competitors are also part of the market environment, but they deserve exclusive attention. It is a great opportunity to check how they have organized their website, what works for them and which their flaws are. Thanks to SEMrush, you can even check how their websites rank and what you can do to outperform them. Beware that blindly following and copying competitors would hardly bring you the results you want, but it is always a good idea to have an eye on their:

• user reviews 
• social media channels
• website
• overall positioning and message to the market
• reaction to emerging trends

Step 5: Write a Detailed Brief

This is a crucial step towards developing a good website. No matter whether you are developing your new site in-house or you are outsourcing the job to an agency, you should state clearly the overall objectives, the deliverables, and the expected outcome from the development project. Here is the place to state the outcome from the previous points and define your:

• key value proposition
• the user journey
• your conversion points

Elementor’s blog contains useful resources that will guide you through the whole briefing process and will also provide you with a good website brief template. 

Step 6: Prepare a Content Development Plan 

Redesigning your website does not mean creating everything from scratch. Of course, you will be using your most popular content again as long as it fits your business needs. At this step you should be aware of users’ interaction with your current website, the way the use existing content and the “feedback” they give by clicking more on some pages and abandoning others. Now is the time to decide which of the following will be your main goal:

• Driving traffic to your website
• Generating and converting leads
• Creating brand awareness
• Improving SEO

Depending on the chosen goal you might be putting focus on one or more of the following content formats on the website:

• Blog posts
• Podcasts
• Case Studies
• Whitepapers
• Infographics

If you consider emphasizing on any of these, the best time to decide it is during the website planning process. 

What’s next?

The process doesn’t stop with planning, developing or releasing the renewed website. It simply goes to phase 2.

What is phase 2? Expect more soon!

In the digital era, we are not even questioning the need of tracking and analyzing marketing activities to determine their value for the business. It is nearly pointless to spend even a small budget on a campaign without setting up expectations, KPIs and without measuring the performance. Any positive outcome from such campaigns sounds more like a chance rather than an expected result. 

In this article, we are listing some of the most popular and useful tools that can help you plan and lead your marketing campaigns to have a real measurable impact on your revenue, brand awareness or customer lifetime value. They will not only help you improve and optimize your efforts but will also make planning for business development and positioning a little easier.

SEMrush

One of the most popular marketing SaaS platforms is now being used by over 7 million marketing professionals around the World. It started back in 2008 with only 2 separate tools but in 2021 it has 48 tools grouped in several toolkits: 

• SEO Toolkit consisting of a useful SEO dashboard, keyword research tools, competitive research tools, link building, rank tracking, on-page and technical optimization tools, and more. 
• Advertising Toolkit designed to help you analyze competitors’ performance and better plan your keywords selection, PPC and display campaigns. 
• Social Media Toolkit that will help you prepare your posting plan, track, and analyze your performance across social media channels.
• Content Marketing Toolkit to help you find popular content ideas and prepare SEO friendly content on popular topics.
• Competitive Research Toolkit containing tools to analyze the performance of your competitors, the traffic they get and the result from their marketing efforts.
• Management Toolkit created to help you manage all your campaigns from one place and get reporting on your performance.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs promises to marketers better search engine ranking without being SEO experts. The platform is notable for its large database of resources among which are the help center, the blog and its own learning academy. The main modules of the platform include:

• Site Explorer to research your competitors’ backlinks and SEO rankings
• Keywords Explorer to help you find the right keywords for your content
• Site Audit to scan your website for SEO issues
• Rank Tracker to monitor your performance across various devices 
• Content Explorer that will provide some fresh ideas for trendy topics and content 

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is Neil Patels’ online tool designed to help you get more traffic and improve your SEO. Here is what you can take advantage from by using it:

• Domain Overview – you can get insight into the strategies that are working for others in your market so you can adopt them, improve them, and get an advantage.
• Top SEO Pages Report – discover which of your competitor’s pages are ranking for popular organic keyword phrases and which ones are loved by sites like Facebook. Thus, you will no longer spend time in writing content that no one reads.
• Keywords Suggestions – Ubersuggest provides a free keyword tool to help you think of head terms and long-tail phrases that you can use as keywords.
• Content Ideas – are you aware of the hot topics within your niche? This module will help you identify and work on content pieces that are really appealing to people.
• Backlink Data – with this tool you can see the exact content in your space that people are linking to and which links have the highest impact for you.

Mention

Briefly said, Mention is the tool that will help you monitor the web, listen to your audience, and manage your social media channels. Here are some good ideas how to use it:

• Listen to Your Audience – track and monitor what your audience is talking about across social media.
• Manage Your Brand – it can be very helpful for large brands to identify potential crises and monitor user feedback.
• Competition Analysis – what do they say about your competitors? You will be able to easily track users’ opinion, feedback and their share of voice. 

HubSpot

This is the platform offering one of the highest varieties of tools, not only for marketing activities, but for growing businesses online as a whole. If we dive into HubSpot’s Marketing Hub we will discover a rich set of tools that include all you need to successfully attract and retain your customers on the Web. A brief overview of HubSpot’s marketing features will tell you that the platform can help you:

• Attract Attention Online – just like any of the above mentioned tools, HubSpot will help you prepare the best content pieces by analyzing SEO metrics, competitors’ performance and most popular topics on the Web. You will also find support for managing your social media channels,  engaging your visitors with live chat or hosting and managing files right inside the platform to share them with your visitors. 
• Convert More Leads – HubSpot is going a step further with tools to help you turn more leads into actual buyers. You can try its user-friendly landing page builder, the form builder, the email marketing tool and the lead tracking tool to achieve higher impact of the marketing efforts on your business. 
• Get the Most out of Data – the Marketing Analytics tool gathers sufficient amount of data that will be helpful in planning for strategic marketing activities and campaigns. Another useful feature is the opportunity for integration with Salesforce – one of the most popular CRM tools used across wide range of businesses and industries. 

BuzzSumo 

BuzzSumo is a good alternative to all the tools intended to help you plan and prepare your content. By discovering good ideas, trending topics, and popular keywords the platform provides full insights to support the research process and creation of comprehensive content. A notable feature of BuzzSumo is the option to discover influencers – authors and creators with engaged audience and genuine authority on the Web whom you can cooperate with to increase your brand’s engagement level. Indeed, the tool is able to scan millions of profiles before choosing the right influencers for you. 

Bonus tool: Zapier

Zapier is more than just a marketing tool. In fact, this is an all-in-one automation platform that can save you hours of work per week. It offers integration with over 3,000 applications to optimize the process of customer management, communication and collaboration within teams, online advertising and monitoring of your performance online. 

So, which ones do you choose for your business? No matter how big it is, tracking and improving your results is a must.

Successful online marketing campaigns usually go through several key stages and issues among which are clear goals setting, effective performance tracking and analysis, media planning, proper budgeting and scheduling, and campaign asset production. 

No matter how good your Google Аds, Facebook campaigns, email copies and banners are, there is another step following that is of greater importance for your campaign. Having attracted a lead through your branding and promotion, the place to “close the deal” is actually on your campaign landing page. This is why it needs to be well-created and optimized to bring a pleasant user experience. Fortunately, creating attractive landing pages has recently become much easier, faster and more affordable thanks to some of the most popular landing page builders:

Leadpages

This is one of the most (if not the most) feature-rich tools you can find on the market. With focus on small businesses the platform enables opportunities for easy creation of whole websites, landing pages, popups and many more. What characterizes Leadpages in terms of landing page creation opportunities is the option to use a wide variety of ready-to-go templates but also to rely on more customizable ones. Among the other most prominent features are:

• Built-in conversion guidance that helps you predict the page performance even before publishing allowing for timely adjustments 
• There is no limit on web visitors or leads collected
• Unlimited page publishing which allows you to create dedicated landing pages for different campaigns or traffic sources 
• Incomparable page speed – the creators promise 2.4 seconds faster loading time and 30% better performance score than other leading page builders
• Built-in payment systems to efficiently run your store
• Lead-capture popups and exit intent
• SMS marketing capabilities

The team offers a good resource base to help you get to know the platform and inspire you for the creation of your own web project.

Not sure where to start from? See all landing page templates and choose the best one for your business.

Unbounce

The platform is among the most preferred ones for landing pages and can help you get the maximum out of your PPC efforts. It targets growing industries such as SaaS, E-commerce and Professional Services. What makes it popular is the combination of tools that not only help you design attractive landing pages, but also to measure their performance, increase engagement with popups and stickers, and integrate with other digital marketing tools. Here are some of the most helpful features and options:

• Easy-to-use drag & drop builder
• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) that load up to 85% faster than regular mobile pages
• Free images database by Unsplash
• A/B testing options
• Dynamic text replacement – a time-saving feature that allows you to replace landing-page keywords depending on the user’s search query
• Wide range of targeting options – by location, URLs, with cookies, etc. 
• Possible integrations with Constant Contact, MailChimp, Active Campaigns, Zoho and many more. If you choose an email provider or a CRM that is not integrated with Unbounce, you can also have Zapier which will help you connect any other app that works with it.
• Free 14-day trial

Of course, the landing page builder comes together with other common features such as customizable templates, publishing on your own domain, analytics tools and others. A good way to check if Unbounce works for your business might be taking it for an interactive test drive. 

Landingi

However, Unbounce may turn out to be a bit pricy option for startups and small companies. In such cases, a good alternative at better cost might be Landingi that offers almost the same tools and features, A/B/X testing of everything, and integration with almost every SaaS platform you can think of. The large gallery of templates and icons allows you to customize your landing page for nearly any business or niche. Within the website you can also find good examples of pages created with the tool in various industries such as Software & Technology, Advertising & Marketing, Education and many more. 

Landingi also provides a demo of the functionalities and features of the platform with the opportunity to even book a live 1:1 session with a consultant. 

HubSpot Landing Page Builder

Its greatest advantage is the fact that the tool is actually part of something larger, an entire marketing software solution for businesses and marketers and also one of the most popular CRM solutions on the market. For marketing efforts this means not only ability to create attractive landing pages but also to rely on great marketing insights, automation tools and smart approaches towards audience engagement, lead generation and conversion. 

Due to its background the HubSpot landing page tool allows for collecting useful information about users’ demographics and interests to create more effective content and campaigns. In addition to the most common landing page creation features, HubSpot’s one is notable for its good visual editing experience and the options to personalize content for individual users. 

Lander

If affordability is your main concern, Lander might be the landing-page creation tool for you. The platform still offers all the basic features that you need to create a contemporary landing page for your marketing campaigns. They have an efficient drag-and-drop builder that’s perfect for the inexperienced user. On top of that, they have a variety of elements like dynamic text replacement, A/B testing, analytics, CRM or email integration, and more. You can also edit advanced options like timers, countdowns, and direct PayPal integration.

To Conclude:

Which one did you choose for your marketing campaigns? The overview of the most popular landing page creation tools tells us that all of them come with the main functionalities needed to be attractive and engaging for your leads. You will always be able to create a great design, structure, and content for your page even without having technical, coding or UX/UI design skills. But how to make your choice among so many players on the market then? 

Take into account the following factors that are essential for your success:

• Page Speed – compare the performance of pages created with different tools. Even one-second delay in loading might result in people leaving your website and loss of revenue for your business.
• Security – prices can go as low as $0 for a page builder tool if you care for the costs only. However, it is much more important to find a trusted partner and solution since it will be handling your customers and their sensitive data such as personal information, payment details, etc.
• Support – all tools seem to be user-friendly even for inexperienced marketers. However, it is very likely that at some point you will need assistance before or after publishing your page. Here is why you need to make sure that any platform comes with reliable and trusted technical support before getting involved with it. 

For the last 20+ years, we are living in a world that is digitizing and dramatically changing due to the technology revolution. Similar to the Industrial Revolution started in 1760, the technology revolution is changing generations, services, business, and the way we live. 

Now, we are more than used to the on-demand business models, which allow companies to access technology, resources, service at any time they needed. We hear everyday words as Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Content as a Service… Anything as a Service. But isn’t it the right time to talk for Service as a Service? 

It is going to be a way to much to say that this is a revolutionary concept. As we already stated that the “…. as a service” model is working quite well. But it is going to be true that the Service as a Service model is creating an entirely new market niche. 

So, what is Service as a Service?

It is the opportunity to get any time of service done from an external person/team/organization for your business at the right time when you needed and in the way in which you needed. In other words, to satisfy real business needs with resources, which you do not have within the company at the moment, but in a way, much better than if you have an internal people or team for it. 

What can be delivered as “Service as a Service”?

There are a few very prosperous areas, in which we see the concept of Service as a Service to evolve – marketing, sales, web design, consultancy, HR management, system administration, DevOps, and many more. The concept is straightforward. You are an existing business, a startup, scale-up, or a big enterprise. It really does not matter. Then you came up with a situation in which you want to achieve a specific business target – expand on a new market, grow your sales, improve the sales process, reposition your brand, launch a lead generation campaign. The next factor is that you want to achieve a goal, but you either do not have enough resources internally (mainly human power and knowledge) or just the team/company has no knowledge or expertise in the area. And now you need somebody to help you to achieve your goal. 

That us how the on-demand model of Service as a Service works. In the right moment, with no vast efforts or spending, you find a way to meet your goals. By using the Service as a Service model. 

Marketing as a Service

The growing popularity of the Marketing as a Service model can be explained partially with the ever increasing amount of startups and the technology evolution on the other hand. Remember how many new startups were created every year ten years ago. And check the statistics of how many new-born companies are created now.

On the other hand, marketing as a strategic aspect of each company is changing every day. Ten years ago, there was no advertising on Facebook, Instagram did not exist, video content online was popular only on YouTube. The fast pace of change in the marketing area requires new approaches, better strategies, and skills, which were not existing last year … or last month.

So hiring an external expert or Marketing agency, which will deliver exactly the service you need, will save you costs and will guarantee a decent result. You can get an inbound campaign market research, marketing strategy, market audit as a service, etc.

The market, which needs the most Marketing as a Service is the IT market and technology companies. But this is a topic for other article.

Sales as a Service

The growth of the number of companies, and the growth of the services existing companies offer, require more sales power than ever. Customers are well-educated, they have excellent access to information. And for this reason, you need to be really good in sales and know the service or product you sell very good. 

It is of growing popularity for tech companies to hire salespeople on the as a service model. 

Advantages of the Service as a Service model for companies

They are numerous, but we will mention just a few of them:

• Getting the service in the moment you need it
• Better quality of the external service provider and service delivered
• No need to make long-term planning of the resources
• Cutting costs
• Business agility