Overview

The problem to solve

Though my title was Director of Marketing at this tiny, early stage ed-tech startup, I was the first growth and marketing hire, which meant my role spanned strategy, user experience design, and front end development. The first challenge was enormous: create the startup’s marketing foundation and inbound lead generation channel from scratch.

The approach

First, we needed to establish and position the brand. I developed a campaign with a creative brief, uncovering the core value of the product in a succinct way that resonated with our audience. I also listened to as many user interviews and sales calls as I could, to quickly get to know our customers.

As soon as we identified the brand's voice, positioning, and initial campaign strategy, we desperately needed a new website that effectively answered questions from potential customers, while enabling a high volume of demo requests to drive sales. When I came on board, the website was not conducive to either of these goals.

Before jumping into a redesign, I did a complete usability audit of the existing website and analyzed the page structure, copy, URL structure, and information architecture of the site. I outlined why and how each problem area needed to be addressed and proposed a new recommended architecture that made information more accessible, organized, and SEO friendly:

Wireframing

Once the team aligned on the new structure and approach, I put together wireframes for each step of the potential new customer experience, from the website to email to our blog and social media channels:

Optimization

Because of tight budgets and timelines, we had to be creative with user testing and optimization. I conducted user interviews to uncover usability issues and modified content and layout, accordingly. We used Heap and Google Analytics to monitor ongoing usability issues.

The finished product

With the new site architecture and wireframes in place, I worked on creating key assets: icons, graphics, photography, and copy for our site and for our blog.

After writing the responsive HTML/CSS/JavaScript for each page, I partnered with the engineering team to incorporate the pages into the company's core Ruby on Rails application. From there, I edited the code in HAML/SASS, as needed, while setting up our blog on an easy content management system for fast, flexible editing. 

Results

As soon as the new experience was launched, our Account Executives and Customer Success team were proud to show off our new website, blog content, and branded collateral to customers. They were thrilled to have a strong reason to revive conversations with potential leads (including sharing our first case study and the product marketing video I produced). Many of these conversations turned into fruitful new customer acquisitions. We continued to receive positive feedback on our new experience from customers, existing and new. 

In all, with the new website redesign and the blog and content strategy, the company's first-ever inbound lead generation experience was a winning one: the website demo request conversion rate quadrupled with the new designs and the inbound sales cycle proved to be 7.5 times more efficient than the company's historical sales efforts.