Increasing Qualified Leads with Website Redesign
Rise Interactive
Rise Interactive (us!) is a full-service digital marketing agency that leverages data-driven strategy to maximize results. Throughout significant industry evolutions, we've remained agile and innovative — all while inspiring confidence in our clients and partners. We're powered by our proprietary cross-channel media optimization platform, Connex®, and a proud part of Quad, an Integrated Marketing Solutions Provider.
The Challenge
At Rise Interactive, we grow brands with industry-leading digital media and website development. With aggressive YoY growth goals, we needed to better optimize our own website to drive more leads while visually representing the evolution of our brand.
The Strategy
Rise team members across multiple team departments completed a collaborative analysis of our website in order to leverage data that informed decisions, identified areas of opportunity, and determined how to optimize the user experience. Our expert creative, content, web development, and SEO teams used that audit to identify core recommendations across:
1. MESSAGING
2. DESIGN
3. USER EXPERIENCE (UX)
4. INFRASTRUCTURE
5. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)
1. MESSAGING
Communicate Rise's unique capabilities
Insight: By exploring the ad agency landscape, we found a sea of sameness in the market that presented an opportunity on how to communicate Rise’s points of differentiation. We aimed to convey the ways Rise as an agency could be a hero to our clients, and serve their needs, as opposed to focusing solely on our services.
Action: We shifted focus to the customer and solving their problems, including shifting the language from “we”, to “you” and “yours.”
Action: We re-crafted Rise’s three differentiators and wove them into the homepage narrative, including speaking to specific personas and how Rise solves industry challenges.
2. DESIGN
Update the visual experience to reflect the spirit of the Rise brand: confident, consultative, and innovative
Insight: Our team of expert designers identified a need to refresh the site design and content to incorporate creative best practices and visual innovation. We wanted the Rise site to digitally greet our visitors in a way that immediately acquainted them with our brand tone and offerings. We refreshed the look and feel of our entire website by:
Action: Adjusting our color palette to be more modern.
Action: Changing the templates of high traffic pages from text blocks to include more skimmable and visual ways of showing what we do. By adding cards, distinct sections, and headers we were able to better tell our success stories.
3. USER EXPERIENCE (UX)
Leverage UX improvements to increase lead generation
Insight: To reach and exceed our business goals, we needed to grow our qualified leads and increase conversion rates generated by the website. We leveraged tools like advanced CRO testing and Google Analytics data to find frictionless ways for website users to take specific actions — like filling out a contact form or signing up for our blog newsletter.
Action: Using Google Analytic's user behavior flow, we discovered that we needed to align the homepage flow to guide users through our customer journey with a greater understanding of the problems we solve and how we are different.
Action: Simplified navigation and CTA buttons to help users get where they need. For example, we separated “Careers” and “Contact Us” into different parts of the header after data showed that Careers page visitors found the page without a specific navigation section.
Action: Created new landing page templates with Contact Us buttons and optimally placed forms. We also recreated the contact form itself to populate different fields depending on the user’s need. This personalizes the data to each persona and captures only relevant lead information.
4. INFRASTRUCTURE
Streamline the backend user experience for efficient content management
Insight: We completed a high-level Keep, Combine, Delete (KCD) to prioritize pages that needed to be transferred to the new style. A KCD helps identify:
- All content assets on the site
- Assets that are essential for the redesign → KEEP
- Assets that can be combined to enhance current content → COMBINE
- Assets that provide minimal value to the site → DELETE
Action: More user-friendly CMS for faster and more efficient content updates. We chose Kentico because it allows our Marketing and Web Development teams to synergistically manage and deploy content.
Action: Incorporated more flexible page templates and less hard coding for shorter time to publish new pages and update existing pages
5. SEO
Use Cross-Functionality to Increase Website's Search Visibility
Insight: Oftentimes a website will be redesigned, and search engines cannot understand how all the pieces are fitting together. This can have major effects on organic traffic and keyword rankings. When upgrading, it’s important to make sure that search engines, like Google and Bing, can correctly identify and crawl the website.
Action: Rise’s SEO team worked very closely with our UX team to help build out SEO-friendly wireframes and templates that enhanced both crawlability and user experience (location, readability, scannable).
Specifically, we set 1:1 redirect mappings which help search engines understand all the changes on the websites, and how all the parts should function within the redesign.
Action: Kept SEO keyword optimization in mind throughout by using keyword relevant copy on updated pages, headers, and subheaders.