"A new website is born!" - sharing our roadbook

A new website is born!

d!nk has just launched a new website, and I am happy to share our experiences to bringing this endeavour to a result that we are very proud of.

Everyone of you who has ever set up a website definitely know what I’m talking about: it is complicated, so incredibly complicated.

How come?

The website is where everything comes together: your positioning, your branding, pricing, product offering… Fairly crucial. And obviously, there’s no room for fluffiness. All of these things that you could talk about for hours and hours, are now forced to fit in just a few lines of text and some images. How to fit the story in 3 seconds - the attention span of the average visitor?

Reborn & renewed

For the past few months, we’ve come up against this challenge. And let me tell you something: we were proud to finally introduce it to you. Something completely different. Something fresh, and very satisfying.  

In the 8 years of d!nk, this is website number 5. Some lasted just 6 months. It’s been a rollercoaster. The last one was a good one. We had it going for about 3 years, until we felt the message on the website was not the same as what we were proclaiming in pitches. At one point, we weren’t feeling comfortable to say  “you’ll find more info on the website”. In the end, too many people would say: “well, the website looks very nice, but what is it you are exactly doing?”. Our website became besieged by landing pages. That’s when you realise it’s that time again.

Since the start-up years of d!nk, a lot of things have changed. We used to be one of the first ones to make iPad apps. Yes, even before the iPad was available in Europe. Quite a novelty then, but those days are now long gone.  We were there when the word ‘sales enablement’ was invented. Guess what? It’s a busy playground now. And we don’t like to be in a red ocean. Innovation and partnership is way more fun to us than fighting and competing.

No wonder we decided it was time for something completely different.

A new future

Finding that blue ocean isn’t easy being 8 years in the business. We feared it would require a lot of beers to forget everything we knew. We turned to an expert in positioning, Merksmederij (dutch for ‘Brand Forge’). It was at the end of last year’s hot Belgian summer we decided to get started. The perfect weather to get our brains boiling on something real good. Frank explained to us the rules that would guide us to find the core of what we do. That was going to be our concept.

The ‘rules’ of Frank are straightforward, but still, so many websites reflect concepts that break these basic rules. Example: one of those rules “Everything=nothing; everybody=nobody” means that a concept that is too general and appeals to everybody is worthless.

Four long and intensive sessions indeed brought us to a longlist of possible concepts that would make d!nk stand out of the crowd. We had to narrow it down to one ultimate story.

“The 13th sales month” made it. A simple concept that fits our culture (we like it lean), our product, and is unique in the market. Frank warned us beforehand: “If you wonder why you needed help to find such a simple concept … that means it’s good.” Job well done!

Telling our story

Yes! Finally! We have a concept! But now what? How do we communicate it? How do we give it the soul it deserves? Thanks to a coincidence, we stumbled on the storytelling handbook of Donald Miller: Storybrand. Miller uses familiar movies (Star Wars, Speed, Nemo) as examples to show how to build an attractive story.

His breakthrough idea is that your customer is the hero in your story. Sounds straightforward? Then why do so many websites only talk about their best product or how great their own brand is? Your potential customers will feel connected to your story once you position them as the hero instead of the product or the company.

So how then to position yourself, the company, the brand? You are the guide who helps the hero to be successful, to achieve their goals and fulfill their desires. Think of master Yoda guiding Luke Skywalker, or Dory guiding the hero Nemo.

Once we made this paradigm shift, the outline of the website was like a walk in the park. Donald Miller even gives practical advice on how to structure the website.

Wow: a great website!

So next up: how do we get some visitors? How do we attract the right audience to our website and keep them coming back for more, right until they’re ready to be guided?

We turned to the brand new agency Tunity. Why? Of course they have great credentials and understand our business. But what we, as a SaaS company, liked most is that they offer the marketing services as a subscription. MaaS if you like. Each month, we prioritise the next marketing activities based on last month’s results. This agile way of working makes marketing a part of the overall business activities. Exactly what we need to achieve consistent growth.

So, here we are today. Very happy with the birth of our new concept, new website and marketing strategy. Let’s make this an excellent d!nk edition. We are very much ready for it. Are you?