Websites are revenue generators; in fact, I’ve written about it before. If you’re like most agencies, you want to represent your business in the best light which often means refreshing your website once a year, or possibly create an entirely new one. When undergoing changes it’s critical to not sacrifice your business development efforts.
Often times I hear from clients that they’d prefer to put their prospecting on hold until their website is just the way they like it. Their fear is: I talk to a prospect, they visit my site, they don’t like our old site, and we have now burned that prospect forever. Because of that fear, outreach efforts are put on hold, and new business takes a back seat to web design. If it’s like most website redesigns, timelines get dragged out and that one month projection somehow turns into three.
Don’t fall into this trap. A four-month hiatus is something your new business outreach can’t afford. Business development is a process that should happen consistently throughout the year, regardless of your website redesign. There are options however to keep your new business machine up and running through situations like this.
Play to your strengths, and drive conversations to those areas with these workarounds:
Landing Pages – I find these are grossly underused in the agency new business world, which is crazy. They are the easiest way to create specific content attached to your site that is directly relatable to your new business conversation. Need a page highlighting a particular service, vertical, or expertise? Create a single new page and link to that while your new site is being build. This allows you to drive people to something relevant and there is less distraction to some of the weaker parts of your site.
Hosted content – Every good marketing automation platform at this point has the ability to host media content. That means we can utilize the hosted media links to not only send people to a safe space for content, but we can track every one of those clicks and reads in order to follow up with them at the right time. For those of you trying to avoid your website completely, there is the added benefit that it is entirely away from your site.
Trying to perfect the imperfect can be a long, daunting task. Losing sight of your new business goals while obsessing over a website redesign can put you behind your revenue goals by 4-6 months in the blink of an eye. So if you are starting that site redesign, I’d encourage you to build a few new landing pages, get yourself a few pieces of content hosted, and keep selling!