Consolidating Websites in Mergers and Acquisitions

We recently partnered with Progress on a webinar to discuss the challenges arising when companies or brands merge and digital assets must be consolidated. 

What is a digital asset? 

A digital asset is a broad term, and many forms of digital content can be categorized as digital assets. 

Let's look at Gartner's definition:

“A digital asset is anything that is stored digitally and is uniquely identifiable that organizations can use to realize value. Examples of digital assets include documents, audio, videos, logos, slide presentations, spreadsheets, and websites.”

How to Manage Digital Assets?

There are multiple software products available to manage digital assets or digital content. There are Digital Asset Management platforms, also called DAMs, or another solution that many marketers are familiar with is a CMS or WCMS (Content Management System or Web Content Management System). 

A WCMS like Sitefinity is one of the platforms you can use to manage the digital assets that make up your website. 

M&A Challenges When Handling Websites and Digital Assets

We understand there are many mergers and acquisitions, and different scenarios will impact how you handle digital assets. It's important to point out that every merger and acquisition is different. There are various types of acquisitions (ex. vertical or horizontal), and many decisions must be made before you merge your web applications. 

A few decisions will be made before merging websites or digital assets: 

• What is your merger and acquisition strategy?
• What is the timeline?
• Do you have a budget for digital asset migration?

Cost/Challenges to Consider When Consolidating a Website 

We broke down the website costs/challenges you will likely encounter when undergoing a merger and acquisition, separating each into one of three buckets. It’s important to note that this isn’t an all-encompassing list but hits on most common considerations that generally apply to websites.  Your company or industry will likely have other items to add to each bucket. 

Brand/Marketing

• Branding considerations and decisions
• Design and templates
• Logos and branded assets
• Domains
• Content migration
• SEO (redirects)

Technology

• Licensing costs
• Hosting and infrastructure
• IT/Dev support for multiple platforms
• Integration of systems, data, and 3rd party apps
• Increased workload and responsibilities for internal staff
• Change of deadlines for current IT and marketing projects

Operational

• Coordination and communication with multiple teams/organizations/partners
• Multiple platforms to manage
• Day-to-day maintenance of the website

Brand and Marketing Costs and Considerations

When undergoing a merger or acquisition, one of the biggest challenges organizations face is consolidating digital marketing and brand assets. 

A typical example is a parent company acquiring another brand. 

Deciding how you will treat that brand is essential. Will it become a product line and live on your current site, or will it maintain a separate website and digital presence? 

If you are merging it with an existing website — does the branding match that site's color scheme and style, or will you need to accommodate this new brand? How are you migrating content from one site to the other? Is the tone of voice similar, or must the content be adjusted? 

If you plan on merging digital assets from one site to another, what are the plans for that other site? 

Do you plan on getting rid of it or keeping it? If you are holding it, for how long will it last?

A website or domain can come with a lot of brand equity; what happens if you decide to remove it altogether? Domains build domain authority over time; getting rid of that domain means forgoing the authority built.

Also, SEO needs to be considered. Search engine ranking is another practice built with continuous effort over a long period. Have you considered how SEO will be impacted when merging two websites? Do you have a process for handing redirects?

There are a lot of marketing and branding questions you need to consider when it comes to merging websites. These questions shouldn't be answered without first understanding how customers use these websites.  A crucial first step is an in-depth website and digital presence audit. This data will help guide your company in merging these digital assets. 

Knowing the primary website traffic — specifically user and traffic acquisition data (number of users, sessions, engaged sessions, average engagement time, engaged sessions per user, events per session, engagement rate, etc.) and also finding out what the most popular pages are, how those pages rank in search engines, backlinks (links from other external sites), and how many leads or conversions the site has been generating or other KPI that are important to your business. 

All of these data points are important to have before deciding on the fate of a website — whether to keep it or eventually phase it out.  

Suppose the brand's website you are acquiring has high domain authority, performs well in search (has a lot of high-ranking content), and has historically generated a lot of leads. In that case, keeping the site might be an excellent strategic move as it would be an asset to your company and an advantage to sales and marketing. 

Since templates, themes, branding, site functionality, and custom widgets can be shared between sites, spinning up a new site with similar features is simple. The alternative would be to create a new site from scratch, clone a website (or parts of it), and customize it to fit your needs.  These alternative options cost more than spinning up a new site on a multisite CMS instance. With those options, you don’t get all the multisite CMS benefits like sharing assets, simple user management, and streamlined rollouts and deployments for site upgrades and updates. 

Technology Costs and Considerations

Technology can complicate things during an M&A. How your company handles the tech side during the M&A process can have significant implications for your business.  You will need to consider software licenses, hosting and infrastructure, data, and third-party applications. Handling this part poorly can be costly for your organization. 

Monetary Costs and Opportunity Costs

Before making any decisions on technology during the M&A process, weighing the monetary and opportunity costs is essential.

Let’s look at a scenario where an organization has acquired several brands — each with a website but all on different content management systems. You are paying for several different licenses for those platforms and managing things like ongoing maintenance, security updates, dev teams, content management, and permissions.

An organization can save a lot of money if they unify these websites on a single-platform CMS solution with multisite capabilities. There are many other benefits companies fail to consider like:

• Internal training and knowledge are simplified – only one CMS to learn instead of multiple platforms.
• Security or any other system updates can be rolled out to all sites.
• Simplified infrastructure, data, and integrations
• Shared templates, themes, branding, color schemes, and styles
• Shared site functionality for a consistent user experience across sites 

Finding ways to simplify your tech stack can save your company thousands of dollars (or even hundreds of thousands) depending on the amount of resources and number of digital assets you are consolidating. 

Operational Costs and Considerations

One area that companies tend to look at last, or sometimes never think about, is the operational costs and challenges when acquiring a website or other digital assets during a merger. 

It's easy to see how adding new website software can add expenses like licensing costs to your business, but don't forget that these technologies must be managed and maintained daily.  Internal departments, teams, and individuals within your company will be responsible for these tools. How they are managed — Whether you plan on managing them in-house or outsourcing, a considerable amount of coordination and communication is still required. 

Companies with multiple websites on different CMS platforms typically require working with multiple development partners. Coordinating site updates, CMS upgrades, development, and design changes can be time-consuming. 

Moving to a single CMS instance can save your company a lot of money with hosting and licensing, but there are cost savings that come with improved operational efficiencies.

Internal teams who spent a lot of their time managing the day-to-day management of these systems are now freed up to direct their focus on initiatives that push your company forward.  Utilizing one CMS for all your websites reduces time spent on submitting support requests, contract renewals, and managing the relationships with technology vendors and development partners.

Best Practices for Website Consolidation in an M&A

Almost every merger and acquisition is different, so there are always different things to consider.  In this section, we tried to come up with some general rules and best practices that your company can use when you are dealing with the challenges that arise when consolidating websites.  These are meant to help you access and identify how to move forward so the process is successful.

Due Diligence

The first best practice we’ll cover is due diligence — an essential part of any website project but essential when merging website assets.

You will first want to establish a website growth strategy that aligns with your organization’s M&A strategy.

What is your merger and acquisition strategy?

If you are acquiring a brand — maybe you plan to transition it into a product family or keep it as its own brand.

This information is essential before you start making changes to your website.

For simplicity, in our examples we will refer to our parent site or the site will be kept as “Website A” and the website of the brand or company we acquired as “Website B”. 

Audit CMS Features and Capabilities 

Starting with a website/CMS audit of the site you are acquiring is where you will want to start.

Asking questions like:

• What features and capabilities does the CMS have?
• How was it built?
• Is it monolithic and locked down? Do I even have access to migrate content?
• Where are the gaps?
• Can it accommodate your growth strategy? 

Preparing Your CMS

The next step is to prepare your current CMS (Website A) to accommodate any incoming assets from Website B.

• Are there any new features or configurations that need to be enabled?
• Does site navigation or structure (backend or frontend) need to be updated?
• Are there sections, widgets, or any custom functionality that needs to be created?

Site structure changes often need to happen, and there are multiple ways to do it. Making these changes to a site should be well thought out and planned since it directly impacts user experience, SEO, and the overall architecture of your site. 

A Real-Life Example with Biamp

Biamp is an audiovisual hardware and software company that works on projects like stadiums, conference rooms, auditoriums, etc.  

To provide some background, Biamp came to us in 2016. Their current site was built on Sitefinity by another development company. Much of their site was hardcoded with monolithic widgets that kept them from quickly making edits to their site. They couldn’t add products without getting a developer involved.

This is not the way developers should build websites. Instead, our approach has always been to empower our customers by creating a website that is easy for the client to update and edit and, if they want to, completely manage the content of their website without ever having to rely on a developer.

As we started rebuilding widgets and reworking their CMS, we received news that Highlander Partners had acquired them.  The goal of Highlander Partners was to scale Biamp’s business aggressively.  Since 2017, they’ve acquired nine companies, including:

• Cambridge Sound Management (2018)
• Crowd Mics (2018)
• Community Loudspeakers (2019)
• Apart Audio (2019)
• Huddle Room Technology – HRT SLR (2020)
• Neets A/S (2021)
• Evoko (2023)

A new challenge had been added.  We needed to address all the current CMS issues they were having and quickly come up with a strategy for accommodating around 500 new products. 

Challenge #1: Audit CMS and Rebuild Site Components

We partnered with Biamp to audit existing functionality and create a strategic project plan to address all existing site issues. After this, we made critical technical improvements to improve their overall site performance.

We spent several months going through their website, breaking widgets open so they could edit them on the fly, creating landing pages and a bunch of modular widgets – so they could easily create new pages for all these new brands they were acquiring.  

Their site navigation was also hardcoded, so we updated that to be a widget that can easily be edited, which is a must-have for companies frequently adding new product lines.

One significant benefit of using a CMS like Sitefinity is it is very robust, customizable, and easy to use.  Marketers and content editors who find it challenging to use most often find it the result of poor implementation by developers who don’t keep the CMS’s core internal users (content editors and marketers) in mind when building site components, like widgets.  

This was the situation Biamp was in when they came to us, so during the first step, we helped get their Sitefinity CMS to a place where they didn’t need to rely on developers to make content edits and updates.

Challenge #2: Create a New Product Website

Crowd Mics was acquired by Biamp in 2018. As an established brand with a solid digital presence, it was important for Biamp to maintain the digital brand equity that Crowd Mics had built up over the years.

To accommodate the Crowd Mics product, we first created a separate second site using Sitefinity’s multisite feature.  This allowed Biamp to use existing page templates and widgets and share resources like images and other site components.  This meant that Biamp didn’t need to build another website from scratch to accommodate another website.

The benefit of utilizing multisite is that Biamp had a starter kit for a new website.  They saved on development costs because widgets and templates already built for Biamp.com could be used for this new site.  

They basically could spin up a new site on-demand with already-established branding.

Today, Crowd Mics is incorporated into the Biamp product line. If you go to Biamp.com, you will see it is under Biamp’s product families.  However, the ability to quickly spin up a separate site at the time of acquisition allowed Biamp to slowly transition Crowd Mics into its product portfolio without compromising brand identity.

The point is that all digital transition strategies are different for mergers and acquisitions. Having a CMS that can align with your M&A strategy, whatever that may be, is crucial to a successful migration.

Challenge #3 – Deprecating a Website

Neets.io was acquired by Biamp in 2021.  Instead of the slow transition approach that Biamp took with Crowd Mics, it was decided that the Neets products would immediately transition to the Biamp website as product families instead of living on a separate website.

Neets.io wasn’t on Sitefinity but had a couple of hundred pages with hundreds of products—thousands of content, including images and documents, needed to be added to Biamp’s website.

When going this route, it’s essential to ask, "What will happen to the site that has been merged into your main site?”  In Biamp’s case, they decided that Neets.io would be deprecated.  What happens when a site is deprecated, though?

What happens to your domain or domains? URLs? How does this impact SEO?

URL redirects are a crucial step when migrating from one site to another.  You must redirect all the URLs from the old site to the new site so that any URLs on the web will be automatically redirected to your new URL for that content.

To solve this challenge, our team created a redirect module in Sitefinity.

This allowed the Biamp team to easily add old URLs (from Neets.io) and the corresponding new URL (to Biamp.com) to their CMS. It also gave them a directory of all the redirects that have been added.

There is quite a bit of variance in mergers and acquisitions, and what you need to do from a digital standpoint may vary depending on the type of M&A you are dealing with. Still, some common challenges/questions you will run into during the process are:

• Will we merge or keep CMS platforms separate?
• What platform/system are we keeping or moving to?
• Can this CMS platform accommodate our strategy/plan?
• If not, what do we need to do with our CMS so it’s ready to accommodate our current plan?
• How can we make incremental updates to our CMS to handle future mergers and acquisitions?

Questions from our session:

How do you determine which site to keep and which to depreciate when acquiring a new company or brand?

Determining which site to keep and which to remove is a big decision.  It all comes back to your M&A strategy, which hopefully you’ve already dug into some of these things, like how much brand equity or traffic a site has.  Those can be a determining factor, but there could also be technological reasons. Maybe you like the CMS that one site is built on or the structure already in place on one site.  Many reasons could guide this decision, but ultimately, returning to your overall M&A strategy and goals is essential.

How do you handle migrating all the content from one site to another?

This depends on the CMS that you are using. If both sites are on the same CMS, there may be options for automatically migrating content. If you acquire a brand on a different CMS, it could be a much more manual process for migrating content.

First, it’s essential to audit your content and decide what will be kept and migrated to the target site and what won’t be carried over.

Then, devise a plan for the actual migration of the content. Will you hire an agency or do it in-house? How will you track the process and progress? Whether it’s a spreadsheet, a tool like JIRA or Trello, or another tool that tracks and manages your content migration – you need to have something in place to manage everything, especially if you have a lot of content, you're bringing over.