Going digital: This Roanoke tech company is helping clients adapt to the 'new normal'

As the work-from-home weeks accumulate, I continue to be encouraged by our team at Reusser Design’s positivity, hard work, and willingness to “play ball” as we adapt. I mentioned earlier that our business model is set up for remote work, and we haven’t been negatively impacted by the change.

However, that doesn’t mean we haven’t had to adapt both in mindset and production. In fact, each of our core competencies (development, design, strategy) have had to adjust processes and implement new solutions to meet needs for our clients.

Here’s a quick look at how each team is adjusting.



Updating Website Development Features

First and foremost, we are a team of developers. With more than 21 years of experience in building websites and applications for clients, developing modern solutions to meet needs is what we’re best known for. We also maintain site updates, bug fixes, and more through our help desk system.

Once the pandemic began impacting businesses, we had the opportunity to step in as a strategic partner for many clients and offer additional support in the way of email marketing set up, live chat integration, and e-commerce solutions. For many businesses operating with only a brick and mortar shop, e-commerce became a necessary solution to maintain business.
The opportunity to offer help and be proactive in adjusting business models has been an exciting challenge for us and strengthened our partnerships with clients.



Providing Journey-Based User Experience

During the first few weeks of the pandemic, our help desk was flooded with requests from clients to add banners, CTAs, and unique landing pages to their websites detailing how their business was handling the COVID-19 outbreak. This required quick work from our UX team to make appealing design updates and lead users on a journey that would help them quickly find information they were looking for.

Additionally, the increased need for digital advertising created an urgency for unique, compelling display ads and social graphics that our designers were able to create.

Offering Digital Marketing Solutions

Under normal circumstances, our digital marketing team typically serves clients in a 12-month partnership capacity. This offers plenty of time for our team to understand a client’s brand, build creative strategies for their marketing needs, and execute great work while delivering on KPIs.

Since we are not under normal circumstances, we welcomed the opportunity to provide strategy and solutions to clients on a week-by-week basis. This new request challenged our digital strategists to think outside the box and put together a robust “digital bootcamp” for clients that would evaluate their existing online presence and provide a roadmap for implementing recommendations.

This method has proven to be quite successful and has caused us to reconsider the length and parameters of our digital marketing partnerships going forward. If we can meet urgent needs in a shorter period of time, we consider that to be a great success.



Challenging Website Complacency

Being forced to work apart has made us all the more thankful for the time we had when we were together. One way this has proven powerful is working remotely on website content strategy solutions. In particular, one project in our queue has many target audiences, key stakeholders, and unique stories to tell.

Collaborating on all of these elements while apart could have proven incredibly difficult. Thankfully, we implemented conference calls, focus groups, and personal interviews early on in the project to help nail down our understanding of what the client’s needs were.

This project, and several others during this time, have helped us refine our entire content strategy process making it more accessible and enjoyable for the client. We are excited to bring what we’ve learned back to the office and continue to strategize in person.

As we continue to strategize, ideate, and implement creative solutions for clients, I am continually surprised at how this process is growing us as a company as well. We look forward to returning better than we left and thankful for how this time has made us consider new ways of thinking.