inbound Failures?
Gartner is known globally for delivering research and analysis services to technology business leaders. Part of the new business strategy was to provide the same services for marketing professionals by leveraging the thought leadership of lead analysists in the industry. Gartner for Marketing leaders is an extension of the Gartner brand that offers real-time, personalized digital marketing guidance from vision through execution.
A portal was commissioned from an independent design firm that failed to deliver on the conversion metrics desired for this business unit. The business leaders decided to revisit the design and the overall strategy. The original site’s information architecture made it hard for users to quickly identify the brand’s valued proposition and failed to convert a significant amount of leads.
Before and After of the Gartner For Marketing Leaders site structure.
Process/Experience
I worked directly with the business in crafting a new ‘go live’ plan that addressed the immediate gaps in lead generation efforts and accommodated enough flexibility for further changes without disrupting the site’s availability. Our plan addressed the site’s overall structure and the logic assigned to content being pulled from other web properties.
By aligning the site’s structure with three major objectives for site users, we were able to reduce the amount of content users were exposed to before finding the lead generation elements of the site. The objectives were: Meeting Our Experts, Exploring Our Methodologies and Understanding Our Solutions.
The plan also included a new content strategy that leveraged existing content and organized it within a new product solutions engine. This engine organized content around ten major key initiatives relevant to users’ needs and services provided by the client. Once users provided some key pieces of information the engine would create a ‘customized’ action plan for the users. This strategy allowed the client to receive better quality leads and understand major user concerns for future content creation.
Design Solution
Having three major objectives for site users allowed us to significantly simplify the experience. Users would immediately be aware of what they will find on the site rather than be exposed to endless navigation. The design also proposed secondary navigation that would serve as a filtering feature for site users and enabled the site analytics team to capture top-of-mind topics from users.
An important part of the new strategy was to communicate the organizations’ thought leadership. The proposed Homepage design showcased a wide variety of subjects and formats, effectively presenting Gartner for Marketing Leaders as a useful resource for top marketing leaders.
Focusing on three main objectives for the user experience helps create a cleaner navigation that will guarantee users can fully understand what Gartner for Marketing Leaders can help with by simply scanning the site.
For the Meet our Experts page we combined bio pages with the research approach Gartner employs. In the previous design this information lived in separate areas of the site, forcing users to navigate aimlessly and not allowing for the connection between experts and the research approach that this new design allows.
Creating mini content hubs with relevant information around a specific topic reinforces the connections user make betweenmdifferent pieces of content.
Bio pages for Research Experts have a new structure based on information priority. Social media channels and the top 5 challenges they can help address are prioritized as they are considered the most important we would like users to consume. Previous site versions buried this content below the fold or placed it within the bio paragraphs.
It is important to showcase the information that will add value to users and influence the conversion.
Gartner for Marketing Leaders offers a great depth of information and resources to help users with different initiatives and concerns. Rather than ask users to enter information into 30 different fields every time they wanted to download a piece of content used for lead generation we created a ‘solutions engine’ that with a few key pieces of information would gather the relevant pieces of content for lead generation and create a big document with pertinent information.
This solutions engine will also serve as a pulse meter for our research and analytics team to gage how relevant is the content being produced as compared with the concerns capture in the engine.
Simple design solutions can communicate a greater sense of satisfaction for users, specially when being asked for personal information in return.