The new PracticeWeb.co.uk is here. It’s all shiny and fresh out the wrapper. We really hope you like it.
The new site is just but one piece of a larger transformation project that has been running through the core of the business for 18 months now.
Why change? Well, for a fleeting moment I did think about starting this blog with one of those aspirational type quotes – you know the kind of thing: ‘if you’re not moving forward, you’re falling behind.’*
But there’s a bit more to it than that.
It would have been very easy to carry on business as usual. We have a solid business model, low churn and a cohort of loyal clients. Why mess with that? Well, it’s all about taking a customer-focused approach to the future direction of the agency.
A few years ago we released the Landscape product – essentially what you got with a PracticeWeb website. Landscape is a very powerful tool with lots of bells and whistles, offering a full-on marketing automation from within the website content management admin panel. At time of launch, Landscape offered a one-stop shop that was groundbreaking compared to its market competitors.
Fast forward to today we have many customers on Landscape. But here’s the thing: only a minority are really using it to its full capacity. Those that do – we salute you – you sure keep us on our toes in terms of stretching product development.
But for a prospective new client to PracticeWeb, is that one stop shop still appealing in 2018?
Consider the firms coming to us with those first tentative enquiries through our website, or meeting the team at events. More specifically, consider where they are in terms of choosing the suite of products (the ‘technology stack’) that best fits their business.
If you go to a marketing conference, or even an accountancy event, you’ll hear speakers like Alex Falcon and Oli Evans talking about choosing best-of-breed tech solutions that fit your business from a range of suppliers.
That’s where the market has gone, and we want to offer that degree of flexibility.
Want your PracticeWeb website to do connect with your current Mailchimp account? Can do.
Want your landing pages to track your pay-per-click campaigns? No problem.
Are you a contractor specialist who just wants the payslip calculator and none of the rest? That makes sense, let’s make that happen.
Want your PracticeWeb website to include a news feed from us alongside your own blog and newsletter content? Easy, done.
We also need to make this change so we can play to our strengths. As a business, we have refocused from chasing top 50 accountants to wanting to work with firms with which we can add most value. That is, small to medium-sized firms with up to eight or nine partners, or ambitious startups who want to shake up the status quo.
Our staff have between them decades of experience in digital marketing, of working with accountants. Let’s take that and work it to your advantage.
The recently restructured account management team don’t want you to buy a website and then do nothing with it – that’s boring for us, and not good value for you. It’s not why we come to work every day. We don’t want to be a fringe supplier to your accountancy business but rather an embedded partner, trusted marketing experts, giving you the return on investment you need. We can even help you anticipate market trends and innovate through your digital strategy.
Our website relaunch tells some of that story. We’ve structured our products to fit a range of marketing goals and various degrees of business complexity. You can read new case studies from work we have done since we started down that road towards our new product set (which internally we call, ‘Horizon’) and ways of thinking. We’ve more client stories and demo sites to be added in the coming weeks. We also a suite of new content and SEOproducts in the final stages of development, almost ready to join the menu available to our clients.
And you know what, we’ve shown commitment to the cause – our new PracticeWeb site is built on exactly the same WordPress-derived platform, and with the same components, as are available to one of our new client sites.
We do hope you like both the site and the direction we’re taking the agency. Of course we always welcome your views and feedback – don’t hold back, the more candid the better.
Stu
*credit: me, just now.
