August 26, 2022
Words by Björn Audunn Blöndal
Pressworks on Being a One-Stop Agency for Web Content
In today’s agency market, delivering stand-out web creative by itself won’t get you far. Increasingly, clients expect you to design memorable custom websites, as well as build and host the whole thing too.
If your project can save a client the lengthy back-and-forth with their in-house developers—and remove the responsibility of lifetime web hosting and maintenance—it’s all the more attractive. If the client you’re pitching doesn’t even have technical resources in-house to solve those, you’re the obvious choice.
Yet few agencies enjoy, aspire, or even know where to begin with managing the technical side of web content—Pressworks was one of them. We caught up with Pressworks co-founder Björn Audunn Blöndal to learn more about how offering clients an all-in-one creation and hosting package has helped his agency increase project revenue and client stickiness.
Björn, the content marketing landscape is vast. Where does your agency fit in?
For us, it’s about handling digital content production in its entirety—doing everything from the start to end of production, except from distribution. We manage all of that with an extremely lean unit, with four of us in-house organized around a base of freelancers, who cover copy, photography, video production, and immersive web design. Our digital solution lets us connect with a diverse pool of talent and creatives, and manage projects from A to Z effectively with a distributed team.
Interestingly, we actually have two commercial models: we work with partner clients—big media outlets and agencies like TV2, The Oslo Company, and Shifter—but also with direct clients like DNB Eiendom, KLP Eiendom, Høyskolen Kristiania, and RiksTV, where we operate as their extended editorial or content production team.
"Our clients want one agency to do everything—to create next-level, immersive web storytelling, and handle publication, hosting, and maintenance."
What kind of content does Pressworks specialize in?
My roots are actually in publishing houses. I started out as a journalist and editor for magazines, and I always wanted to experiment and push the reader experience online. That’s why we specialize in editorial e-magazines and campaign microsites, although we do also create commercial websites and “always on” content marketing campaigns too. Storytelling is a huge focus for all of our work: we craft engaging stories, interviews, and videos for our clients’ existing sites, and we also develop whole branded content hubs from scratch.
That focus is partly down to shifts in the content marketing landscape itself. I’ve been in the content marketing space for 15 years, and when I first started out content marketing was extremely basic—it was grouped around very simple websites with template-based design, where you were really restricted by the placement of images. Basically, the “Wordpress era”.
I’ve witnessed first-hand how content marketing has gradually developed towards creating richer content environments. Clients are now spending more on content campaigns than ever before, and their audiences are expecting more exciting, unique experiences.
Björn Audunn Blöndal
(Pressworks co-founder)
How have you adapted to those market changes? Why did your agency choose to become a one-stop-shop?
We didn’t choose it, exactly. In the beginning we didn’t even intend to do a lot of web creation; we’d been burned by the technical responsibility of the Wordpress website experience. Instead, we wanted to focus on what we excelled at—photo, video, and copy production—and just hand over the web part to someone else.
Yet, expectations have changed. Our clients want one agency to do everything—to create next-level, immersive web storytelling content, and handle publication, hosting, and maintenance. We realized we needed to find an easy way to publish websites and handle the full delivery. The technical part is not our core business, and we don’t want to do anything with that, so we had to find a solution.
That’s where Vev has really changed things for us—it’s really like an all-in-one package for content marketers. It gives us the design freedom and flexibility to create almost any web content and relieves us from the responsibility of hosting and up-time. We don’t spend loads of time publishing sites—the easy creation and publishing process means our projects have a very short time-to-market.
How has offering an all-in-one creation and hosting solution impacted your agency?
Aside from quicker publication, handling the technical part for clients has led to larger project margins. Copy production is difficult to get a profit on—it’s time consuming to produce and there’s an expectation that it should cost very little. But clients are used to paying for the technical part of hosting and development work. It’s the same with video production; there’s an expectation that it’s expensive. By offering publishing and production, we can put a higher price level on our work, since it’s easier to put profits on the web part.
We’ve also found that our Vev projects give us increased client stickiness. Clients effectively outsource the whole magazine, production, and web part to us, and while Vev actually does the technical heavy lifting for us, we still own the relationship with the platform. Vev integrates easily with their existing CMS, whether they use WordPress, EPI Server, or another solution. So, in clients’ eyes, we are sitting on the technical part that they don’t want anything to do with; it’s a plug-in solution for the content marketing part for them. By having the platform, it’s easier for us to secure more projects down the road, so using Vev is generating more profits for us in the long run.
Of course, it helps that Vev lets us create amazing work too. Every website you create looks really well designed. The platform itself is very high quality—much higher quality than Webflow, who I think are compromising on quality by trying to tackle everything. Vev does fewer things, but does them much better—it’s more of a tool for professionals and specialists.
What advice would you give to other agencies looking to offer an all-in-one solution?
Make sure the web creation and hosting platform you choose is future-proof and flexible enough for what you want to do with it. We are in the creative industry, after all—the last thing you want is to invest in a tool that limits you. During our research, we found that most web creation platforms are still heavily based around templates. For us, this was not a priority, since we want to build our client work from scratch.
That’s really where no-code solutions excel—they let you build custom content from scratch, but without the development backlogs or cost. Vev is perhaps the only “hybrid” no-code platform we’ve seen that offers a visual design editor as well as a code editor. It’s very powerful, like a bridge between two worlds. You can really use the best of both.
You need to do your research and know what you want, but it’s definitely worth it in the long-run. Clients are always impressed with our work in Vev and how fast we can deliver it. We still get very good feedback on what we do—we are still blowing minds. Now, we have to keep finding new ideas.
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