Why Marketing Agency Yools Switched to SiteManager

Yools is a marketing company that focuses on websites for entrepreneurs and small businesses. The past five years they’ve built over 2,500 websites. We interviewed Lino Meert about their company, their story, and their strategy.

Not a Typical Marketing Agency

Yools isn't exactely a typical agency. I read you've stopped selling?

We’re not a typical agency because we offer our clients a full Yools experience, which means that they regularly get website tips & marketing advice, to help them grow.

For us helping always comes before selling. We start a relationship with a client by helping him with marketing advise that he can use to build his company, even if he doesn’t have enough budget for an entire website.

We’re never going to fool someone with fine print or things like that. We do what we promise and sales is a logical consequence of our way of working.

You even work without a contract, right?

We even work without contracts. We work based on trust, and if we’re honest towards the customer, they will be honest to us.

Yools is on a mission to help 10,000 entrepreneurs grow. How do you want to achieve that?

A lot of entrepreneurs go online with a website that eventually gets lost in the masses of the internet, because they focus on the wrong things. For example a lot of companies are competing on prices, which creates a lot of pressure.

What we try to do is help the client get his own story out there. We tell his authentic story and highlight his strengths. This way he can attract the right clients for his business.

How does technology help you on this mission?

We try to work as efficiently as possible. Our clients are often busy people, and we don’t want to take too much of their time to build a website. So our process needs to be very efficient. We work remotely to be flexible, to save time and costs.

The technology helps us developing websites so we - as designers - can focus on the graphic design, the strategy and the content. So we can make sure that the website actually achieves its purpose without increasing the development costs.

The Hidden Costs of WordPress

You used to build all your websites in WordPress. Did you have problems with it?

WordPress definitely isn’t a bad platform and we still use it for some projects. But we wanted to make our whole process more efficient. It takes a lot more time to build a good WordPress website, because either you buy a good template and you configure it all yourself, or you start from scratch and you build a new website. Either way, it takes a lot of time.

There are also hidden costs: the themes, the plugins, and the server. These things take time and add to the total cost of the website.

So at some point you decided to switch technologies. Can you explain why?

As a company we always keep track of the trends in web design. We were trying to make our processes more efficient, and we already tried working with different CMS systems and cloud web builders, but we didn’t find the right match, until we found SiteManager.

More than only optimising the website workflow, SiteManager empowers us to implement a design system in our agency. For us it is important that a new technology helps us make our work more efficient, but doesn’t break down the quality. It still has to be a high-quality product.

Also SiteManager is a growing Belgian company, just like Yools, which made it a perfect match.

You are a web designer yourself, so you're actually building websites in SiteManager. What is your experience?

It’s a very user-friendly platform where, as a designer, I can use my entire creativity without being limited by the platform. I can really do what I want. I can build beautiful amazing websites without having to take hours to code everything.

That results in a better website, because I have more time to put into the graphic and strategic part of the website, which results in a better website for the client.

You even built the Yools website in SiteManager?

Yes, we recently built our own website in SiteManager. It made sense, because we’re building the websites for our clients in the platform, why not our own?

How do your clients experience the platform?

Our clients are very happy. They’re able to make changes to the website themselves, so they no longer need to go through us and pay us to edit their website. They can just log in themselves and start changing the pictures, edit the text, add new products or write blog articles.

Our clients have a great experience so far and we’ve received a positive response.

Some of your clients used to work with other platforms, but are now also using SiteManager, was it easy for them to make the switch?

At first it’s a change, because they are used to Wordpress, but once we show them the platform they pick it up very easily. The visual interface is much easier to understand.

For our clients the learning curve is much shorter. We don’t need to invest as much time in training our clients. This goes a lot faster with SiteManager, and afterwards we get less questions because the platform feels more intuitive.