by David Schrieberg
For much of our eight-year history, our COO has loved to repeat that “we should eat our own dog food.”
It’s a standing joke between us – he knows I’ll smack him (half-)playfully every time he repeats it. But after years of rolling my eyes, I’ve finally admitted that there’s meaning in his cliche.
Which brings me to the point: After barely touching it for eight years, we’ve just overhauled our website and now that I survived the process, I have to say that you should probably take a look at yours and at least consider doing the same, if you haven’t recently.
The reason I held off for so long, given my experience with websites, was because I knew what kind of a project we would be taking on: Days, weeks and months of distraction, negotiations, back-and-forth, development, design, time, money…and arguments. Endless arguments.
If I’ve learned anything over 20 years spent in digital media, it’s this: Everybody and his or her mother know how to design a website. They know that this color should be changed, that quote should be dropped, this photo should be moved, that font should be altered, this text should be rewritten, that graphic killed…on and on and on.
Creating or relaunching a website is like living in an extended family argument: The fight is never really about the subject of the fight. Rather, it’s about lots of other things going on under the surface (and on the surface, too). Underlying tensions and issues have a way of bubbling over during the debates. Things can get heated. Ugly, even.
Yet, here’s the bottom line: That’s all healthy and all to the good of the organisation. It forces everyone to look hard at, and focus on, the strategy, goals, operations and products or output. Because the website is a window on your collective organisational soul.
In our case, our previous website was a thing of beauty, design-wise, but it wasn’t specifically intended to “sell” our services or products. So we decided it was time – go ahead and smack me – to eat our own dog food. And while it was painful in the preparation, it was a necessary meal and I couldn’t be happier we ate together.
Because in a world where trustworthy, accurate and engaging content is ever more important, effective storytelling is really about “story selling.” In this context and in our case, that means creating thought leadership content that showcases expertise, authority and trustworthiness – EAT – which mightily helps you get top-of-Google-search-results. That’s what our clients rightfully expect from us.
The process forced us to look hard at ourselves. We surveyed our customers and gathered new testimonials in order to better understand the value we offer them, and presumably our prospects. We added a revolving, regularly-refreshed carousel of examples of the content we produce for them across 25+ different industries including finance, technology, HR, Space and content marketing.
And maybe the most important outcome: We revised our own core message from “the cure for information overload” (still true) to a message more relevant in today’s confusing world: “content you can trust,” because we consider ourselves one small antidote for a world beset by fake news.
So take a look at our website. Then I invite you to ask yourself whether it’s time to join us at the table.
