How we increased session duration by 514% with a new website
After more than a decade of designing and developing websites and creating marketing campaigns using typical channels such as Google Adwords, SEO, Social Media Marketing, and email marketing, Touch recently embraced the Inbound Marketing methodology and partnered with leading technology software providers Hubspot.
This has meant an expansion of services to include CRM integrations, content marketing, marketing automation and sales alignment and customer research based website design processes.
The old Touch website wasn’t up to scratch so we had to build a new one.
Objectives
- We needed to communicate our new core service offerings.
- We need the website to deliver more high quality lead.
- We wanted the best chance to rank highly in Google and be an industry leader.
- Most importantly, we wanted our content to help educate and also demonstrate our own knowledge rather than be all about ‘we/Touch’.
Approach
1. Identify the main Touch services
Four core services, four separate pages. Inbound Marketing, Digital Marketing, Website Design and Sales Enablement were the four core services we decided to launch upon and we duly set about writing the copy for each of these pages. A core part of an Inbound strategy is to define your services clearly and informatively on individual website pages. These so-called ‘pillar pages’ aim to define your website as an authority on the page title or topic. Pillar pages are therefore rich with information and detailed descriptions on the subject that go into detail or provide blog links to articles that explain further.
2. Create Touch Values
We held a workshop amongst ourselves to decide what we wanted Touch to be about. We settled on 5 key values: balance, honesty & integrity, fair play, commitment to excellence and innovation, relevance and creativity.
3. Persona Research
We reviewed existing customers and considered what types of future customers we wanted to work with. We looked at:
- Role
- company
- Goals
- Company
- Where do you go to learn,
If your'e interested, have a look how Hubspot helps you develop personas.
4. Analytics Review
There was little in point in creating a new website without considering the performance of the existing site. The aim was to take what was working on the old site and bring this into the new site. We delved into Google Analytics and looked at:
- The landing pages with highest sessions
- How much Time was spent on on site and certain pages.
- How many Pages/sessions were viewed.
- How long did visitors spend on our website. Sessions and duration.
Our Portfolio page is the only part of the old site that we’ve kept.
5. Identify the main problems Touch solve for our customers.
We wanted to narrow down our offering and communicate to potential customers that we understood the kinds of problems businesses were dealing with. The top 3 we identified are:
- lead generation
- wasted marketing budget
- poor brand awareness
7. Content
This part was hard. We designed the pages to align with the concept of pillar pages or topic clusters, based around our main services. The concept is that we cover off some of the what/why/how/ questions within the content so it not only educates the person looking but also helps with SEO.
8.Design, Style and User Experience – UX
Website design is first and foremost about function and its vitally important to catch peoples attention and give them what they want to see on your website in just a few seconds. Superfluous frills just get in the way.
- Highlight your core message clearly.
- Use bold page title that speaks to the content of the page.
- Break the content down into easy to read chunks.
Websites are usually ‘scanned’ by visitors rather than read, so areas of importance need to highlighted in some way. If you want your user to take some action like click a button you need to make it very easy for them to do that.
9. Live wireframes using UX Pin
A hugely important part of the exercise was creating a live prototype of the website with content included, editable and navigable elements. This was done in UXpin where we were able to ‘see’ what the site might look like before building it. We refined image choice, content, layout and navigation here before building the website.
10. Live Chat and Downloadable Content
Once the site was live, we activated Live Chat and created two pieces of downloadable content to generate leads - the Inbound Checklist and 29 Unbeatable Lead Gen tips.
Results
So, did we meet our objectives? The behavioural and engagement metrics we track have increased impressively compared to last year.
Our Google Ad campaigns were revamped and we are still improving these, but so far, we have increased conversions.
We think the site is still a work in progress and there are more changes we want to make - because we know that iterative changes over time make a huge difference.
If you’d like to chat about redeveloping your existing website, we’re up for it! Contact Katherine on 021 228 4449 or katherine@touchmarketing.co.nz
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