Transform Support into Expert Leadership: Maximizing Your Digital Potential

A lot has changed since the open source revolution of the early 2000’s, when the landscape was dominated by platforms like Drupal and Wordpress. We are very used to service agreements and support contracts that focus on security patching, performance monitoring, and bug fixes. With the modern composable landscape, and the emergence of robust, hosted solutions like Contentful, it’s been a conscious decision for us to shift our mindset from a “support” team to an “expert leadership” role.

Strategic guidance is not new to us: during a website build, UX experts, designers, SEO specialists, and engineers work with on-the-ground client teams and their stakeholders, led by seasoned delivery managers who set priorities, connect silos, and mitigate risks. But what happens afterwards is often categorized by default as “on-call support.” That’s not a box we want to be stuck in, and it’s not a value-add to your organization either. Traditional support packages often lead to incremental growth, providing only marginal benefits and competitive advantage since all firms benefit similarly from these packages. To truly stand out and gain a significant edge, firms need to embrace the basics and move beyond these incremental changes to embrace expert leadership that drives innovative and substantial growth.

Your tech stack is your foundation. The first step is to get beyond “built” to “built well.” What does that mean? It means your marketing team is empowered to tailor your message, dynamically build pages, and drive conversions. It means you’ve established the capability to go beyond collecting information from your audience, and actually learn from and grow from data driven decisions. It means your engineers have been onboarded into an ecosystem that lets them respond quickly as you scale, so you can stay proactive. It means your design and content are modular and accessible. It means your site is secure.

However, your site is never complete, because technology is just one ever-evolving component in a toolkit that helps you effectively communicate your message in the digital world.  So, how do you know if your message is working? You need a team of data analysts, UX specialists, SEO engineers, and strategists who can define and quantify your targets over the next 1-5 years, then craft an actionable roadmap that outlines how you can incrementally improve your user journeys over time, ultimately increasing your conversions, which increase your revenue. Is that something you have in-house? 

One way to look at it is, if you aren’t capitalizing on the robust platform you are paying for, you are throwing money away. Partnering with an agency can elevate your team of doers into a team of strategists who employ an iterative growth mindset and a business outlook, and align them around quantifiable goals and an actionable roadmap, vetted by your stakeholders. Your first goal is to get your siloed experts pulling in the same (correct) direction, so you can reach the rest of your goals more quickly. We all live in a landscape of restructured teams – it’s your responsibility to utilize your team to the best of its ability, and sometimes that means pulling in some outside experts. 

Sometimes we all need a reminder that this is a marathon, not a sprint. Your customer landscape is diverse and constantly changing, and you need to be able to get out ahead of it, to put yourself in a position of proactive innovation instead of reactive scramble. A successful organization will do more than just keep its head above water. Every year, you will have new challenges, and your website needs to iterate with them. What works today might be irrelevant in six months. 

Sometimes we get asked how to justify spending a finite budget on an external partner’s strategic leadership, when you already have an internal team. In my mind, there are a few reasons it’s a smart decision:

Article by Tess Trudeau, Director of Delivery, Adapt USA.