Any comms agency will tell you that, when things get busy, client work always take precedent over its own. That can mean that, despite having all the expertise and experience to knock out top drawer activity, agencies’ own marketing and PR can often fall short of what they could be. We’re certainly guilty at times and it’s fair to say that our website’s been neglected a touch as a result. Until now.

What we had was just about serving a purpose, but we’d be the first to admit that it was looking a little dated, had become inconsistent with updated elements and, most importantly, no longer reflected us as an agency.  What was an agency with mostly a focus on PR for the place and innovation sectors is now a more rounded comms agency with growth marketing, creative design, web design and development, copywriting and HubSpot strings to its bow. Our new site reflects that and, in the interests of knowledge sharing, here’s what we’ve focused on…

Entry points

Today more than ever, it’s crucial to understand that people don’t just enter your website through the homepage. They might enter through landing pages that have appeared in search results, case studies clients have reshared or blog posts you’ve pushed out on social media. This means it’s important to bear in mind the overall goals of your site when you’re designing and developing every part of it.

For us, that’s making visitors aware of our services, giving them a means of making enquiries and making relevant new contacts. As such, content is linked from different pages, there are ever-present buttons that allow people to get in touch with us and we’ve got valuable gated content that can be downloadable in return for an email address.

Proposition

Our positioning – who we are, what we do and who it’s for – is now clearly and consistently conveyed using layout, design and language. Our strapline “strategies and stories to supercharge growth” is displayed prominently on the homepage and not only references the marketing and PR work that we do, but that our focus is on helping our clients grow. It’s supported by clear user journey options alongside and is respun for different sections of the site.

The design builds upon the bold, professional and personable service we like to think we deliver! The palette is simple and striking, the page layouts are clear with plenty of white space and our on-page calls-to-action have the lovely faces of the relevant team members alongside them! This adds a touch of openness and lets people start getting to know us before we’ve met or begun working together.

User journey

Despite the site being bigger than our old one, it’s designed to be easier to navigate around. Our primary services – PR and growth marketing – are signposted more clearly on the homepage and in the navigation menu and there are prominent links to their constituent parts on each of those pages. Copy is used more sparingly and precisely, there’s less clutter on the pages and elements are repeated throughout the site to help visitors find their way around more easily.

Content

Launching a new site is a natural opportunity to review the sort of content you’re putting out. For us, this means a move away from overly sculpted, longwinded blog posts (like this one!) and a move towards content for our clients and potential clients that is quicker, more easily consumable and valuable. It could be things like intros to useful apps for your comms, recommendations that a client has given us that day or a clever meeting exercise we’ve come across.

We’re also moving away from a more traditional SEO approach and towards a topic cluster approach. This means building clusters or relevant content around pillar pages focused on individual topics. So, we have a landing page about media relations that acts as an entry point for organic search and PPC traffic. But it also acts as a pillar page for content about media relations, so we might produce content with titles like “the best tools for media relations,” “how media relations can help in a crisis,” and “what’s the difference between media relations and public relations?”

By linking to the media relations page from those articles, we build clusters that help to improve our SEO performance around that topic and also act as useful grouped resources. It’s a less structured approach than traditional SEO and allows you to be more flexible in how you plan content, basing it on common questions your clients are asking for example, or stories that are in the news. HubSpot provides a more in-depth guide to topic clusters.

Social media

OK, so social media isn’t technically part of our new site, but our social activity is impacted by the new site. For example, our new approach to content means more content to push out, so we need to think about when and how that goes out, Similarly, our new landing pages give us places to drive paid social traffic to and our beautiful new case studies are great to be shared not just by us, by the relevant clients too.

So, welcome to our new website – take a look around and let us know what you think! You can add a comment below or let us know on Twitter at @activeprofileuk.