SAM Labs: Website Renovation
The date is Q1 2021 and I've been in role for 5 months. As mentioned on other pages (Results Deep Dive, Evangelizing the Problem), we were in dire straights. We had 6 months of runway at current burn rate and a YoY revenue decline trend of 30-40% in the trailing 12 months.
Adding to my list of problems, the website I inherited was not performant and stuck in a CMS from hell called Craft. Craft requires custom PHP code to make changes to the website and no one on the team knew anything about PHP. The contractor who set it up years ago didn't end on good terms with the company, so we had no documentation. It took me 2 weeks to track down the login information buried in a colleagues inbox.
This is the story of migrating, then renovating the website. To get where we needed to go, the website had to out perform and be an advantage for us. At present, it was a massive disadvantage.
The Pre-work
First, signed a contract with a web dev agency to handle the migration from Craft to Wordpress. I chose Wordpress for several reasons, (1) multiple folks had prior experience with it, (2) free and we were on a tight budget, (3) robust community and documentation.
Second, set up tooling and digital marketing basics.
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Created a Google Tag Manager container, populated with all of our relevant tags and added in advertising pixels so we could start properly measuring and targeting.
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Connected the site to our Hubspot and stood up the Marketing package in Hubspot. I used Hubspot for landing pages and forms.
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Additionally, Hubspot collects rich data on website behavior and connects it to contacts and companies. This was incredibly valuable for our MOFU and BOFU selling motion.
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Bought and configured an IP unmasking tool (forget the name) to give us the contact information of folks who didn't convert (for outbound media and emails).
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Set up Google Analytics to track the right conversions and paths, this was a modify as GA was already running.
Third, planning the content and UX. This was work done internally, by me and colleagues. I'll summarize our process briefly:
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Persona development (+firmo/psycho grahics) and JTBD framework.
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Problems and solutions.
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Messaging, copy, brand tone and feel.
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Building the case (evidence based marketing).
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Positioning.
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Content gaps identification and creation.
*Spoiler Alert*
The Impact/Results
2021 Results YoY:
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Traffic growth: +42%
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Traffic conversion rate: +524%
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Contact/Lead Growth: +462%
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Increased branded search: +571%
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Increased organic social and search reach: +346%
Before & After: Homepage
The first image is the prior state - what I inherited. The second image is what I/we developed.
