Making a consultancy’s research part of its website
For a strategy consultancy, research and published ideas give potential clients a way to understand the firm’s expertise. Articles, reports and white papers may be read long before someone decides to contact the business, so the site has to organize that material and make it easy to engage with.
Strategica Marketing develops go-to-market strategies for companies launching products. It already had a Gatsby website backed by Contentful, while its articles were published through Medium and other marketing activity took place in separate services. The existing stack offered flexibility, and the company wanted help supporting and extending it rather than starting again.
SLIDEFACTORY joined as a design and development partner in late 2020. We reviewed the existing site, brought the blog into the website experience, connected lead forms to HubSpot, developed landing pages and research downloads, and improved navigation and SEO details. The work continued through May 2021, concentrating on the publishing and contact tools within Strategica’s existing setup.
Bringing the blog home
We began with a review of the site’s code and SEO setup. Strategica’s team was already comfortable writing in Medium, so the work wasn’t about replacing its editorial process. We kept Medium as the publishing source and brought those articles onto the company’s Gatsby site through RSS, styled with consistent typography, blockquotes and context-specific calls to action.
The feed only supplied recent posts, which would have made older articles disappear from the website archive. We added caching for those older entries and kept both new and historic articles in their proper date order.
Connecting interest in the content to HubSpot
Once the site presented more of Strategica’s content, the contact and subscription paths needed to connect to its marketing system. We added HubSpot tracking and connected the existing contact form, a footer newsletter signup and new lead forms to HubSpot, including follow-up email sequences.
We also addressed a captcha configuration problem that interfered with those emails and set up DKIM authentication for the sending domain. The result was a set of connected contact and subscription paths supported by the firm’s existing marketing service.
Giving research its own place on the site
Research reports became another part of the work. We designed campaign landing pages for white papers, supported them with graphics and HubSpot forms, and helped edit and lay out the downloadable PDFs. We also built a downloads library with an index, reusable individual-download pages and themed groups of related resources, each with its own form and thumbnails.
Alongside the research experience, we added case studies, rebuilt the navigation with mobile-friendly dropdowns, and corrected SEO metadata and 404 behavior. All of this was implemented within the existing Gatsby and Contentful setup rather than through a full site replacement.
One website for publishing and responding to interest
By May 2021, Strategica’s existing website had become a more connected home for its research. Articles still originated in Medium, but appeared in an on-site archive. Contact and newsletter forms fed into HubSpot, while white papers had dedicated landing pages and a reusable downloads library. Navigation, metadata and error-page handling were updated as part of the same engagement.
Across 143 recorded hours, we extended the firm’s Gatsby and Contentful website rather than replacing it. The result was a publishing and lead-capture setup that Strategica could keep using as it released new content. Strategica finished the engagement with a website that brought its articles, downloadable research and ways to contact the firm into one connected experience.
