Guides Web Design, Brand

July 23, 2025

10 min read

The post M&A website playbook for CMOs

Depiction of 2 websites for 2 different companies undergoing M&A

Chantelle Little

Founder & CEO

It's easy to treat post M&A website work like digital spring cleaning. Create a few pages, set up some redirects, and add an announcement banner to the homepage.

But that's thinking small.

The operational decisions tend to come quickly after a merger: org charts, payroll systems, email domains, and office leases. The strategic ones take longer to sort out, especially marketing decisions: messaging, positioning, go-to-market models, even product naming. They're complex, so they need time, context, and buy-in. You know the drill.

So you, (the CMO) end up with a classic case of the terrible twos: two value props, two sets of messaging, two sales motions, sometimes selling overlapping products to the same audience.

And your website(s), your most visible and complex marketing asset, often stays frozen while everything else shifts around it. So, how do you get marketing momentum?

Here’s what we’ve learned as a B2B SaaS agency about the strategy, timing, and technical lift behind successful post M&A websites.

Understand your branding opportunity

70–90% of mergers fail to meet investor expectations, and not getting the brand right is a major reason why.

Your merger creates a new competitive entity that didn't exist before. The new brand story should help customers see that space clearly and understand why you're the only one who can fill it.

Your website is often the first (and loudest) place that story shows up. Before a prospect talks to sales, they’ve likely already explored your homepage, product, and pricing pages, and done their own research on top of it. It’s your public answer to the question: “What does it mean for me?”

So, when thinking about your post M&A website, you’ll need to:

Translate all those months (maybe years) of internal decisions into a clear, confident external story
Align messaging across sales, marketing, product, and customer support
Clarify what’s changing, (and just as importantly) what isn’t changing

Here’s how.

Choose between one website or two

Unless you're operating in a tightly regulated space (think finance, healthcare), serving fundamentally different buyer journeys, or working with high-equity brands, the path forward after a merger is almost always a single, unified website.

How you get there can vary. Sometimes, the acquiring company’s site becomes the foundation, and the acquired brand is redirected into it. In other cases, especially if the acquired brand has stronger equity, search volume, or customer recognition, the acquired brand’s website might remain live as part of a phased transition. In rare situations, companies choose to maintain two distinct sites, but only when they serve a clear strategic purpose.

When to keep two sites:

Legal obligations or regional regulations: Different data privacy laws or country-specific requirements. But only if you can't solve this with language toggles or regional settings.
Starkly different buyer journeys: Within B2B, this might mean selling to HR leaders and IT admins, two audiences with different needs, questions, and paths to purchase.
Long-standing brands with distinct equity: If both brands have serious market recognition, rushing to merge them can destroy value.
Subsidiary branding with established recognition: When a sub-brand has its own audience and roadmap, standalone sites can make sense.

Benefits of a unified site:

Brand Clarity: Reinforces a single market position and reduces mixed or outdated messaging.
Trust Signals: One site communicates maturity, confidence, and alignment, especially during press, investor, or other third-party reviews.
SEO: One domain means all your backlinks, keywords, and content work together to build momentum and boost your rankings.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): It’s twice as efficient to test, analyze, and improve one site instead of two.
Paid Media: Consolidating campaigns to a single site means you’re not splitting budget, audiences, or performance data across multiple domains.

Questions to ask yourself and your new team:

Is our long-term vision one brand or a portfolio of brands?
Do our audiences overlap with similar needs, roles, industries, or buying behavior?
Have we mapped our product portfolio and ICPs to see if/where they fit together?
How can we help users intuitively navigate our expanded offering?
Will we end up cannibalizing our own SEO by competing for the same keywords on different sites?
Do we have the team and tools to manage separate websites, CRMs, lead flows, and analytics effectively?
Are there legal or contractual reasons we can't combine, or is it politics?
What additional time, tools, and team effort will it take to run two sites well, and is the payoff worth it?

Decide what content to keep, combine, or kill

If you're moving toward a single, unified site, you’ll need to decide which content makes the cut.

Start with a content audit: a full inventory of both sites’ pages, purpose, and performance data. Then, apply our Keep/Combine/Kill framework.

Keep content that earns its place:

Drives consistent (or growing) traffic and engagement over 12–24 months
Ranks for high-value keywords aligned with your SEO strategy
Gets used by marketing, sales, or onboarding teams
Demonstrates domain expertise that successfully drives users to commercial pages

Even strong content may need updates to reflect new messaging. But if it's performing and aligned, it stays.

Combine content that can be merged and redirected:

Covers overlapping topics across both sites
Competes for the same keywords or audience intent
Would be stronger as one comprehensive resource

Prioritize the acquiring site unless the acquired content is significantly better. Evaluate based on traffic, backlinks, keyword relevance, and content quality. Redirect duplicates to the stronger asset.

Kill (unpublish) content that:

Targets off-strategy keywords or the wrong ICPs
Has stale or decreasing traffic, backlinks, or engagement over 12–24 months
Contains outdated product or industry information that is no longer relevant
Doesn’t support your new positioning or strategic direction

Set a traffic threshold, then recheck your “kill” list for content targeting important keywords. If no other page covers them, it may be worth keeping.

Keep in mind that age alone doesn't kill content. With the right keywords and content optimization, you can teach an old blog new tricks. But if it’s no longer relevant and you don’t have time to revamp it, it may be time to pull the plug.

Move fast, but not carelessly

Most CMOs know they need to move, but they're also aware that hasty decisions can create more work later. These are the signs you’re drifting too far in either direction once you’ve begun the website project:

Red flags you’re moving too fast:

You're still changing your messaging direction: If positioning is still shifting or stakeholders can’t align on the story, you're not ready to build, let alone launch. You can (and should) iterate post-launch, but the core narrative must be stable enough to clearly communicate your value proposition to the market.

Your product roadmap is fuzzy: If pricing, packaging, or even your product lineup is shifting week to week, you're not ready to lock in site architecture, let alone finalize messaging. Building a website on top of shaky ground will lead to lots of rework.

Your CRM, analytics, or martech stack isn’t aligned yet: If you haven’t finalized your system (e.g., merging two Salesforce instances), you don’t know what to track or how leads should flow through to Sales, and won’t have visibility on the new site’s performance.

Red flags you’re moving too slow:

Sales and support are struggling to explain your value proposition: If teams are struggling to explain your new value proposition and can't reference the website, you've waited too long.

You’re running dual campaigns with split budgets and reporting: Two brands mean double the cost and half the insight. It’s harder to optimize anything when performance data is scattered.

Traffic is flattening across both domains: If neither domain is gaining traction, your audience may not know where to look.

PR, marketing, and product aren’t on the same page: When each team tells a different version of the story, the whole thing feels messy both inside and out.

Before or after the press release? Site launch timing strategies

Comms strategy	Web launch timelines	When to use it
Simultaneous	Launch the website the same week as the announcement	Most common when you want messaging alignment across PR, marketing, and product
Comms First	PR goes out first, and the website launches later	Use when investor relations, legal, or compliance require early disclosure
Web First (Soft Launch)	Update the website quietly before the announcement	Useful for internal testing, redirect mapping, or QA without creating public buzz
Phased Rollout by Region	Stagger URLs based on region or brand	Often necessary in global mergers with localization or compliance needs

Beware of tech debt

Tech debt is the cost of moving too fast in a growing digital system. It’s like skipping steps while building IKEA furniture. Everything’s fine at first. Then the drawer won’t close, and the whole thing wobbles. Tech debt is the collection of "we'll fix that later" decisions that can lead to forms that send leads to the wrong place, redirects that drop visitors on outdated pages, or 404 errors.

Here’s what to do early on to avoid tech debt later, especially in complex B2B SaaS environments.

Redirects:

Every indexed page needs a home, even if the content is outdated
Vanity URLs, campaign UTMs, and legacy PDFs must be included
Test the full redirect map in a staging environment (a private version of the site used for QA before launch) before go-live

Heads up: One of the most common (and costly) contributors of tech debt is leaving a noindex tag on a live page. It’s usually added during staging (a pre-launch version of the site used for testing) to hide in-progress content from Google, but if it’s not removed before the site is live, that page won’t show up in search. Teams miss this all the time, especially when pushing code last-minute.

Analytics:

Run dual GA4 properties 4-6 weeks before and after
Benchmark performance before making big site changes, so you have a clear view of pre- and post-performance
Confirm goal tracking, event firing, and form routing

CRM:

Check field mappings, source logic, and lead scoring
Preserve lead scoring data across systems (resetting it during a site or CRM migration can disrupt nurture flows)
Audit and preserve key campaign IDs and workflows

Stay in the loop

As a CMO, you don’t need to weigh in on every technical detail, but it’s worth knowing where issues tend to surface. When you understand what to watch for, you’re better equipped to spot gaps, push for clarity, and make sure the work supports your strategy. That’s especially valuable when you’re working with a partner and need confidence that what’s being built aligns with what the business actually needs.

Before you launch, use this 10-question review to pressure-test the essentials and prevent post-launch issues:

Do final site copy and page content reflect the current positioning and product lineup?
Has Sales or CS reviewed the new site for any messaging gaps or broken links they rely on?
Is anything still broken, incomplete, or misaligned with the brief?
Are all redirects in place, especially for high-traffic and SEO-critical pages?
Are GA4 events firing correctly in staging and tagged according to plan?
Have we checked Core Web Vitals and page speed on key page types?
Are crawlability and indexing set up correctly in the staging environment (for example, no lingering noindex tags)?
Are all high-traffic URLs accounted for and functioning as expected?
Is form-to-CRM syncing working correctly in test submissions?
Have we documented pre-launch benchmarks like traffic, conversion rates, and engagement metrics to compare against later?

Transition the brand without losing trust

A Forrester study of nearly 20,000 B2B buyers found that trust is the most important factor when selecting a vendor. It even outweighed price and perceived capability, especially in uncertain markets.

So, how do you build that trust? You earn it. According to LinkedIn’s "Be Category Famous" report, based on feedback from 1,500 B2B marketers, found that peer validation and consistent visibility are more influential than general brand awareness when it comes down to building trust.

Here’s what consistency looks like in practice:

Repetition across touchpoints: Reinforce the new brand with consistent headlines, support messaging, and visuals wherever customers interact with you.
Transitional cues: Use phrases like "Mailchimp is now Intuit Mailchimp" or "Same brilliant team, evolved name" to give customers clear, recognizable signals.
Dual branding: Temporarily display both logos or use constructions like "SendGrid, a Twilio company" to maintain recognition while introducing the new identity.
Visual continuity: Retain legacy brand elements like colors, fonts, or iconography to create a sense of familiarity.
Functional consistency: Keep vanity URLs active, migrate logins without requiring resets, and preserve core navigation structures to reduce disruption.

What the best CMOs make of the “mess”

Mergers and acquisitions are not for the faint of heart. They test CMOs in ways that regular rebrands or product launches just don’t. The stakes are higher, and everyone from your board to your customers are watching your every move.

It can help to bring in a partner who understands the realities of post-M&A web work, the shifting inputs and the pressure to show results quickly. Look for someone who can connect those dots and moving targets.

And to be clear, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all playbook.

But from our experience, successful post M&A website projects are led by marketers who:

Prioritize clear communication to customers about the change and why it benefits them
Think strategically about the pros and cons of consolidating versus maintaining multiple sites
Use the M&A as a moment to audit existing content and keep only what’s relevant and/or high-performing
Address the technical and operational complexity early, from redirects to integrations to CMS decisions

Because at the end of the day, your website is the clearest expression of your post M&A market positioning and growth.

Own it, invest in it, and celebrate it accordingly.