Building the Plane Mid-Flight: SHIFT’s New Website

Maybe nobody cares about websites anymore. Maybe we ought to have forgone a website upgrade and instead focus exclusively on our social channels? Maybe a mobile-only site?

Call me old school, but I think a cool, clean, compelling corporate website is still an important part of any company’s approach to the marketplace. It’s a brochure, a cultural touchpoint and an ideal place for not only aggregating content in one spot but also for measuring how effective your efforts have been in wooing prospects to check out your offerings.

Thus I couldn’t be more happy with the latest and greatest SHIFT website! The one you’re visiting now. What do you think? Lookin’ good, right?

The important thing for us, beyond the upgraded look and feel, was to hammer on the data-driven PR aspect. Our business and capabilities have changed A LOT in the past few years. We are not only the first and only PR agency to stake a claim as a Google Analytics Certified Partner, we are doing stuff with data behind the scenes that is wowing us, and our clients, with everything from influencer identification to advanced ROI calculations. We’re also well on our way to embedding at least one data jockey on every Agency team.

Why do we believe in this approach?

Because every time we turn to our smartphones or fire up a browser, we are inundated with noise. The noise is created by the jumble of news sites, blogs of all types, celeb gossip, tweets and posts from numerous friends and acquaintances. It’s daunting to sort through! We feel that the unbiased, third-party recommendation of the media and/or independent influencer is more valuable than ever before, and it’s why when we nail a great piece of earned media, we refuse to let it die in just 24 hours. Instead, we use data to identify how, where and why that piece of coverage ought to be promoted (using media buying dollars), in those avenues where the clients’ most-likely prospects are hanging out.

What does that look like? We take that great editorial review of our IT security client that appeared in CSO Magazine and recommend it be promoted in (for example) relevant LinkedIn groups like ComplianceEX or the Information Security Community; maybe we’ll also use Twitter ads to light up that editorial for the IT-Sec twitterati. Then we can use our access to clients’ analytics tools to track how those efforts impacted the sales funnel, ideally all the way down to the bottom line.

In essence, we’ve built an Integrated Marketing Agency while in mid-air aboard a high-flying PR Firm. It hasn’t been easy. We aren’t done. But dang, are we excited about it! This new website is just a placeholder for our ambitions. 

Watch this space.

Todd Defren
CEO

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