Just like dogs, websites age faster than people. Which means if you’re thinking about a website refresh, it’s probably past time.
When MFI Group made the decision to overhaul their website, we saw the why right away. Over the past five years they’d seen a lot of growth, with new products and services, and on top of that they were celebrating their 40th anniversary.
So we decided to tell their brand story anew.
A modern site for a modern company
With a Pan-African footprint and a decades-long legacy, MFI is the go-to leader for cutting-edge technology, document and print solutions. Trusted by sectors from manufacturing to banking, from examination and electoral institutions to healthcare, MFI needed their new website to reflect who they are today; or, as their new tagline says, to enable “the pursuit of progress.”
While they’d worked with their own internal teams in Africa in the past, MFI reached across the Atlantic and asked MarketSmiths to overhaul the content and give it a fresh, modern, and more engaging tone. Since MFI has a diversity of offerings, we collaborated with both their corporate marketing team and leadership of their four divisions to get the overarching themes and the crucial details.
Key pointers for your overhaul
Now, your website refresh isn’t going to be exactly like anyone else’s—your brand’s online presence is specific to your brand, your value props, your audience. Nonetheless, there are some common steps we always keep in mind.
1. Even a web refresh needs to start from the ground up. The value of an outside writing team is that they bring a fresh set of eyes. You may have read your current web copy hundreds of times (or it may feel like you haven’t visited your own site in a hundred years), so it really helps to have an outsider ask about all the fundamentals. You refresh your website because something has evolved—your business model, your products, your value proposition or your customer profiles… or all of them! Only by talking through every aspect can you distill what can be kept and what needs to be revamped.
2. What’s changed. Goalposts move. A client may highlight how they were the first in their segment—but that had been years and years ago and, to be honest, nobody cares about that anymore. If there’s more competitors and the marketplace is crowded with options, the focus needs to shift to what are you doing better than anybody else. In the case of MFI, with the increasing use of digital over print, of networked vs siloed, of applications to a greater span of industries, their target markets had both transformed and widened.
3. Where are your customers, both literally and in mindset? In the case of MFI, their audience had expanded to 18 countries across the continent. And a lot of their clients, just like MFI itself, had cross-border operations. Being able to work with one company that could create a geographically unified solution rose in importance. Sustainability on their old website was treated as an afterthought. But for today’s MFI’s customer, sustainable solutions are a major mandate. We made sure this value prop got the attention it rightly deserves by calling out metrics that, in writer speak, “show, not just tell.”
4. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. A website refresh does not mean discarding all that came before. If something is still working for you, keep it. We respect good work, whether it was done last week or several years ago. Sometimes all it needs is a little polish to bring it up to your modern voice. In the case of MFI, we crafted new copy, but we also have lots of instances where we’ve preserved everything from total copy blocks to choice phrasing nuggets.
5. Always hang on to your SEO equity. Starting over with your website does not—in fact, must not—mean starting over with your SEO. You’ve built up equity that pays dividends when people search for you, your products, and your services. Make sure it transfers over to your new site by talking with your developer about how, exactly, they’re going to manage that process, whether that’s keeping page URLs, setting 301 redirects, or some other step.
The perfect compliment: content and UX
Once MFI had identified the ways its website needed to be brought up to date, MarketSmiths made sure not only the copy but the user experience (or UX) supported that vision.
As copy and content developers who work on websites all day long, and assess the websites of our clients’ competitors, we know a thing or two about what an engaging, intuitive visitor experience should look and feel like. With MFI, we first consulted on the site map, and were then given a clean slate to structure each page. With so many years of rock solid proof of their expertise, we made sure to call out stats at every turn, highlight MFI’s impressive roster of top-tier partners, and ensure their certification credentials were unmissable.
But there are also just as many times when we’re given a wireframe (comp) to work with. While we’re good at following directions, where we see room for UX improvement—whether it’s the order of content or including a place for proof points—we make sure to speak up (politely, of course).
Refreshing a website, realizing opportunity
When you decide to undergo a website refresh, it’s not simply a redesign. It’s also the opportunity to think about everything that informs it today—and for the near future: your brand story, your goals, your customers and their needs, your competition and the marketplace.
That’s why it’s important to work with a copy team that not only specializes in web copy, it also specializes in understanding the user experience and supporting your full spectrum of marketing. Your web copy refresh doesn’t stand as an island onto itself, it represents a beautiful new beginning.
Is your website ready for a fresh new voice? Let’s talk about it.
