How Can You Convince Your Boss to Jamstack Website?
Introduction
Jamstack development enables marketers to build truly competitive, superfast, lightweight, and SEO-friendly websites.
However, if you want your website to become the ultimate lead generation machine, you should stop thinking about it as a finite project.
Instead, think of it as a tool that you want to constantly rebuild and pretty much endlessly improve to get ahead of competitors, delight and help users, and optimize your conversions.
And that’s exactly what your boss should be aware of and understand as well.
P.S Mind that some bosses don’t have the ambition to use a website as the main lead generation tool. They are totally happy with what they have, and having a good referral program, for example, is enough to keep the business running the way they want it.
So, before you decide to push for a new Jamstack website, make sure your boss has the ambition to acquire new leads more actively. Otherwise, you may waste your time.
Digital Marketing pain points
The most important goal for you, as a marketer is to generate a steady stream of leads.
On top of that, if you decided to use your website as a lead generation tool, to make it happen, you need to think of a convincing offer, clear presentation of benefits, competitive advantages, etc.
Next to that, to keep the visitor happy and increase chances of turning him into a client (or getting him back again), you may want to deliver a decent user interface that will translate into a great user experience and a good first (or last) impression.
And finally, you have to become friends with Google (or other search engine).
To make a summary, on the way to become an effective online marketing-wise, you may find quite many challenges, such as:
- Low content performance and Google ranks are missing many opportunities in your competition favor.
- Poor user experience is causing high bounce rates and people leaving the page without purchase or contact made.
- Poor performance is causing damages to the overall domain rate pushing you down even more in google search.
To make it worse, sometimes your website is such an old or complicated lady that it requires the help of a developer, as your technical knowledge is not enough for:
- Fixing SEO and performance issues.
- Test different UX approaches.
- Making small changes on the websites.
- Build, or rebuild your landing pages to use it for campaigns.
But more than that, you may also struggle with a few (quite typical) problems for many marketers around the world:
- Marketers are asked for better results by using the same old tools
- It’s hard to convince stakeholders that marketing is an investment, not a cost.
- It’s hard to get a bigger (or any) marketing budget, as it seems to be less important than other departments.
- Marketers try to keep up with results by using quick “growth hacks” instead of building a true long-term business value.
In general, marketing is often being ignored when a company is doing good, as there is no need to push for it, but at the same time, when the numbers go down, marketing is also the first to get the blame.
The board wants to see some quick results, preferably with a small budget involved (as other departments need money, attention, and support much more).
To handle these challenges, marketers need to take care of many things, including the technical aspect of marketing, as well as constantly educating people around them, about how important it is to work on it constantly.
Why technology is important for business?
Whenever your potential client is looking for your help on the internet, he uses popular browsers (Google, Bing, etc.).
And if you want to be found by your client before they find your competitors, you need to build a website with many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rules in mind.
Some of the main factors that Google is taking into account (next to keyword optimization, links, domain rank, etc.) while indexing a website are general website performance, mobile usability, and user experience – a mix of marketer’s creative efforts and modern technological possibilities.
In other words, to be effective, a marketer should be supported by modern technology that enables him to become truly SEO-efficient.
Among such technologies, there is Jamstack – one of the most popular tech stacks for marketers and definitely the hottest one in 2021.
Could it be a real painkiller for marketers and their teams?
Why your boss doesn’t want a new Jamstack site?
However, as much as marketers love Jamstack, it’s hard to convince CEOs, bosses, and the finance department to invest in a new Jamstack site, as:
- C-level executives hate unexplained spendings and prefer to see easily measurable wins – yet, the ROI from such website may be visible only after a few months.
- To stay safe, they prefer to use and optimize what they already have (which still could be a good idea, but only until a certain point).
- Sometimes they don’t see (don’t want to see?) or feel the real and hidden costs of not making fundamental changes.
- They also treat marketing not as an investment and ongoing (or pretty much endless) process, but as a simple cost.
Because the real results from marketing efforts are visible only in the longer term, marketing is also not taken seriously in many cases, as. itis not able to present as a visible result as other departments.
Unfortunately, this makes marketing managers look and feel less effective, as they have to use short-term “growth hacks”, and may lead them to a quick burnout.
So, the question is – how, as a marketer, can you find the way to explain and convince your boss to build a better lead generation machine with technology such as Jamstack?
What is Jamstack?
Jamstack enables marketers to build truly competitive, superfast, lightweight, and SEO-friendly site.
Combined with a friendly CMS, marketers are armed with the ultimate weapon to build a truly iterative marketing process, ready to grow and build a lead generation machine.
Geek alert: Jamstack is a combination of JavaScript frameworks, APIs and Markup. This combination allows developers to benefit from a static website and connects it to the dynamic, headless CMS.
If you’re a non-technical leader, we’ve prepared a special guide through Jamstack for you.
Jamstack as a headless technology
Headless is a concept of disconnecting the front-end layer from the back-end layer. They become separated but still sync with each other. This approach can be used not only for corporate websites or blogs but also for more complicated solutions like eCommerce.
In other words, the headless approach separates the user interface from the back-end and connect them thanks to API (Application Programming Interface). Because content and design are separated from the logic and functional layer, marketers can make desired changes to user interface and experience without worrying about breaking the website’s functionality.
Benefits of headless approach
- Integration with any CMS – instead of building the entire website from scratch, you can still use your favourite platform as a back-end and build a frontend.
- Minimal risk of breaking down – during technical changes.
- Making changes (like fixing performance issues or implementing new features) is faster because of headless architecture’s openness.
- It can be applied to any website or store – regardless of its size or number of different integrations.
Need help with convincing your boss to Jamstack?
How to convince your boss to a new Jamstack site?
If your boss doesn’t seem to be convinced about the new website and is ok with the old version, but demands better results at the same time, here are some important aspects of online business that you should push him to consider.
Ability to create new pages easily
Finally, marketing can become an independent department that is able to make changes, build landing pages, reorganize information, fix spellings, remove fields that are not needed, etc, etc.
All alone.
If a Jamstack site is connected to the proper CMS like Sanity, marketers can create new pages or landing pages without involving developers in the process. It gives them more independence, freedom, and the possibility to act fast.
As we said before, you want your website to be a constantly evolving and flexible creature that will easily adapt to both – clients needs and unpredictable changes on the market.
SEO efficiency – getting more visitors
Each website’s goal should be to rank as high as possible in Google search results, which leads to more organic traffic and more leads. To make it happen, such a website needs to be SEO efficient.
Jamstack websites are fast, light and easy to scan by Google robots, and as a result, Google rewards such websites with better rankings. Also, Jamstack gives marketers full control over the content and structure of the site, which is crucial in search engine optimization.
Keep in mind that easy-to-scan content with added custom metadata and fast load speed is among the most important ranking factors.
Unique user experience – turning visitors into clients
Building a custom user experience and making changes according to users’ behaviour are among the most pressing problems for marketers. In the digital world full of look-alike websites, designing the user interface in a custom way is worth its weight in gold.
It’s not just about making the Jamstack website look great but also about giving visitors a pleasant experience interacting with it. Also, such a website should be performant and fast – it should load within a maximum of 2-3 seconds.
Marketers tend to choose Jamstack because it helps them achieve all of that. It’s possible because the Jamstack site is:
- Fully customisable in terms of user experience and interface
- Extremely fast (and that’s what people want) as it’s static
- Responsive and accessible for everyone
These things translate into a great and unique user experience that may create a competitive advantage and help with turning more visitors into clients.
Speed and performance – outrunning the competition
Jamstack websites amaze visitors with their page load speed. As a result, you may finally see fewer and fewer people abandoning your website without at least getting deeper into your offer.
What’s important is that the website’s page load speed is an important SEO ranking factor, which means you have more chances to outrun your competitors.
It is also an essential part of making your user experience great (as mentioned above).
Technical-wise: Jamstack site is pre-generated and stored on a Content Delivery Network closest to the site visitor.
Business-wise: It ensures high performance without a need for investing in the expensive solutions.
Readiness for high traffic
We are all waiting for this day when our product or even a piece of content goes viral and generates crazy traffic.
And you really want to be ready for such traffic.
Popular websites are trying to cope with increasing traffic, yet it requires additional work as it doesn’t happen by default.
On the contrary, the Jamstack site copes with increasing traffic without additional effort thanks to CDN.
A/B testing without developers
Thanks to Jamstack, marketers can try different approaches easily, i.e. writing different web copy, removing unnecessary fields in the contact forms, changing sections order on landing pages without involving developers.
Benefits of using Jamstack from a business perspective
Again, business (as well as sales and marketing) is not a finite thing. Or at least not nowadays. It’s more of an iteration cycle – you make it, you publish it, you measure how it works, you improve it, and you publish again. And so on.
And that’s why Jamstack is great -–it is giving you a possibility to use the best of web technology to become truly flexible and adapt changes the way you truly want it.
But there is still much more than that.
Having a Jamstack website can make a direct impact on the most important online marketing factors, as well as the most important business KPIs.
Better UX -> less errors -> higher conversion rate -> more sales
Conversion happens when a visitor performs a desired action on a website, i.e. makes a purchase or signs up for a newsletter.
Just mind that user experience is not about adding fancy features to your Jamstack site but removing whatever is unnecessary or damaging with ease. In other words, as user experience improves, visitors have fewer reasons not to buy (or convert in the other way).
Better SEO -> more traffic -> more leads
SEO efficiency, high performance and great user experience help website rank higher than competitors in Google search results. Eventually, that leads to higher organic traffic and more leads coming from the website.
Also, fast page load speed decreases bounce rate, so more potential customers will stay on the website instead of quitting without even reading the offer.
Better SEO -> beating the competition
As they say, the competition never sleeps, but modern technology will help you keep the peace of mind.
Firstly, if you choose wisely, you may get yourself a great competitive advantage for many years to come – especially over those less aware rivals. Secondly, trends and people’s behaviours are constantly changing. Building things is no longer enough. It would be best if you iterated them as well, and modern technology makes it easier than ever.
Static Websites -> Total Security
The awareness of the importance of cybersecurity rises and so is the importance of making sure that your Jamstack site is secure. As Jamstack websites are static and they have no direct connection to the database, user data or any other sensitive information, they are bullet-proof like Robocop.
Becoming future-proof
Technologies become outdated sooner or later, yet many companies still use them. Because of that, they may not stand the test of time. What’s more, they are missing a lot of possibilities to grow, not just thrive.
If you are choosing technologies, choose wisely – make sure that the technology of your choice is emerging, has a strong community and support from creators. Not just now, but also in the coming years.
Cheap and portable hosting
Hosting static pages is much cheaper (sometimes even free!) than in the case of dynamic pages because they are light. Additionally, you can use any hosting you like or change it quickly and effortlessly whenever you want.
Omnichannel approach
As statistics show, more than half of web traffic comes from mobile devices. And since Jamstack makes sure that your site works perfectly on any device and any resolution, you can convert both desktop and mobile visitors.
Back-end technologies that pair well with Jamstack site
You can use Jamstack with any back-end technology. For example, you could integrate your new Jamstack site (or online store) with:
The only thing you need is API.
Further readings
If you want to be even better prepared to the conversation with your boss about implementing Jamstack, we recommend you to read the following articles:
- Benefits of Jamstack Development
- Is Jamstack the Best Web Tech Stack for 2021?
- Why Use Jamstack for eCommerce in 2021?
- What is Jamstack? A Guide For Business People
- Jamstack FAQ – What? Why? And Why Not?
Need help with convincing your boss to Jamstack?