How a Lean Tech Startup Powers The Company Website With Digital Meaning Muscle

The Inciting Project

Improve the company website

When early stage startup WEVO brought in their new VP of Marketing, Crystal Gettemy Jones, she soon realized that her small but mighty team needed to hire extra digital marketing channel-specific expertise.

The organization had big plans: a new brand identity with a new web domain address, and an upcoming product launch for their UX research platform. But the developer who had originally built WEVO’s WordPress site was long gone, leaving behind zero documentation on how the site functioned.

The First Playbook

An audit of the website's technical and health performance

In small startups, attention and effort naturally flow to immediate daily needs. Care and maintenance of the website had fallen into neglect. It was working well enough on the surface for the dev team to de-prioritize.

But Crystal, a veteran digital marketing leader, was afraid the website was not going to be useful in helping to reach her goals. Through the strategic playbook process—identifying the real challenge, key business considerations, and offering up a results-driven action plan—Crystal quickly saw “this is exactly what I need.”

The Real Challenge

Discover the underlying opportunities

As always, the process of building a strategic playbook begins with research to define the ‘why’.

While a new brand identity and updating content were the expressed concerns, we dug deeper into some of the technical challenges that Crystal described by conducting a starter audit of the website to uncover any roadblocks standing in the way of maximizing results.

What often happens when a site is built by a developer that’s no longer in the picture, the new developer must parachute in, put on a detective hat to determine how the site was built and how it is being used. So the first thing we do is document everything we find.

Right away, we saw some easy wins for the WEVO team, like auditing plugins, controlling users, and making specific security updates. But we also identified a much bigger need: a sustainable website development process.

The Marketing Subscription Plan

Continually drive performance with monthly marketing expertise

WEVO embarked on an initial three-month engagement with our Growing marketing subscription plan. Right off the bat, we implemented several best practices:

• With the findings from our audit, we determined exactly which plugins the team should keep, update, delete, or add — including Yoast to facilitate better SEO, and a caching plugin to improve site speed.
• We improved security across five layers of the website: updating the web host, adding security plugin JetPack, implementing the Simple History audit tool, adding security monitors through Google Search Console, and monitoring comments.
• We curated WordPress admins and added a dynamic date to the footer of the website.
• We migrated seamlessly from their existing .com domain to a new .ai domain, including mapping and implementing redirects.

“The team at Digital Meaning got really involved working with our head of engineering as we were doing our domain switch, and were very good about keeping me emotionally calm!” Crystal remembers.

Once it was clear how the website functioned and performance improved dramatically, WEVO was ready for a more strategic collaboration as we continued supporting their website management efforts.

We continued to build the backlog to include ongoing management tasks making the website WEVO’s most valuable marketing channel once again, and extended beyond the website with projects, such as:

• Adopting and optimizing GA4
• Supporting their new product launch by designing, building, and optimizing campaign assets across channels (including landing pages, email templates, and campaign segments)
• Managing email lists to improve deliverability
• Producing, publishing, and optimizing blog content
• Improving site navigation

The Learnings

Get channel-specific expertise to manage the company’s website

When we first started working with Crystal, she was overwhelmed by how to turn WEVO’s website into a strong marketing channel. But with the right support and a transparent development process, we were able to help her and the WEVO team get there within a few months.

Ultimately, with a monthly marketing subscription, we have the flexibility to partner with WEVO’s marketing and engineering teams to both strategically determine the top priorities, and get in the weeds on execution.

“The subscription model is ideal because it positions us as partners who align on what’s going into each monthly sprint,” said Crystal.