We thrive on growth. It’s even one of our core values.
Just like any growing company, we’re presented with opportunities and reasons to reflect on who we are, as we evolve and refine our brand.
It’s not uncommon for companies to struggle executing their own services for themselves. We’ve never had a problem with drinking our own Kool-Aid (yes, it’s orange!).
So, when we decided that changes and growth warranted a website redesign, the team did a remarkable job of treating the project like it was for a client.
From our defined design and development process, to content interviews for every page, our in-house team flexed their creative muscles as they went through every part of our client process for the fully redesigned website.
Why We Redesigned Our Website
We embarked on a website redesign because the fundamentals of how we do business have changed over the years.
Three years have passed since the last visual redesign of our website and our company has matured, and the industry changed. Our sales process and communication no longer matched what our website said, so it was time for a big change.
The Nature of our Business has Changed
When we began offering inbound marketing services, we were part of a couple hundred partners worldwide. Since then, the industry ecosystem has changed drastically (and so has the competition).
It’s more important than it’s ever been to differentiate ourselves.
Our Sales Process Began to Change
Over the past few years, the way inbound marketing operates has also changed.
Although our sales process and service delivery constantly adapted, the way our website explained inbound marketing and campaign tactics didn’t change.
While our blog remained a useful resource for the latest industry direction, the site content we relied on to drive conversions began to weaken, as the way we worked strayed even further from the way we explained it.
Challenges We Faced Prior to the Launch
Our last website redesign, about three years ago, was a big visual refresh. For the most part, the content didn’t change. So essentially, we were still communicating the pain points of four to five years ago, focused on validating and explaining the inbound marketing methodology.
Nowadays, inbound marketing is more widely known and no one needs to prove it works. However, there’s now a significant misconception that it’s a “service” you can buy.
It’s not.
It’s a way of rethinking all of your marketing, sales and delivery. We were missing a big opportunity to do that, by not showcasing every facet of the work that goes into a successful inbound campaign.
Video Marketing
In 2017, video became an essential medium that marketers (and business owners) could no longer ignore. We responded by hiring a full-time video marketer to fulfill this need and serve our clients. Then, we developed a solution that uses HubSpot to easily integrate videos onto every single page of our website, without embed codes.
“Unfortunately, our old website didn’t respond as well to the video marketing boom,” says CEO, Remington Begg. “Uploading, sharing and displaying videos was nowhere near as easy as it was on other platforms. Sure, we could have messed with embed codes and gotten it done, but with the technologies available today, we figured, why not make it easy so that our team can spend more time doing what really matters?”
Not Enough Trackable Conversion Areas to Measure Interest
Modern marketing is focused on solving a problem for your consumers. In order to solve your customer’s problem, you have to consider and understand the context of each buyer. Your website can be an invaluable tool to measure this intent.
The problem for us was that our old site only had about six pages capable of showing the intent of someone interested in our services. From a sales perspective, this made it difficult to measure interest everywhere but with our top of the funnel marketing content.
The Solution
Refocus on Brand and Buyer Personas
While completely rethinking our online presence, our team analyzed how clients looked for services to help their business. Unlike past years, “inbound marketing” wasn’t the big answer to their problems anymore, reaffirming our entire redesign project and direction.
With a more buyer-centric perspective, we were able to create an experience that matches how our customers are inquiring about services. We rethought the entire navigation and restructured every page of content to lead with the “why” of our services, not the “what.” This strategy adapts to consumers who are more educated than ever before, who are searching for a solution to specific problems and a fresh new way to look at them.
A New Domain for Brand Fortification, Not Fear
Many companies are hesitant to change their domain, afraid that they’ll lose rankings on Google and other search engines. While that’s a valid concern, it doesn’t have to be a problem.
After a lot of thought, we decided that a new domain was absolutely necessary for in order to maintain the integrity of our brand. So we shifted our entire site from our old domain, chooseimpulse.com, which we’ve used for almost 5 years, to our new home, impulsecreative.com.
By analyzing our own situation, fully understanding the risks involved and moving forward with strategic due diligence, we were able to achieve a great outcome for Impulse Creative and develop a successful case study for our clients.
Utilizing HubSpot Technology Enhancements
Our website was one of the first to be launched using HubSpot’s new Design Manager. In addition, we’ve utilized all of the technologies that HubSpot has to offer, in order to create the most seamless user experience possible. This includes various uses of HubDB, Smart Content, Meetings and Messaging tools.
We utilized HubDB for several pages, including our learning center, services, resources and Drift conversational learning center. This tool made it simple to implement our content and is something we utilize for several of our clients.
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Reaching Goals with Strategy and Methodology
The Impulse Creative website now boasts 40+ service pages and a wealth of industry-related content. By outlining the activities needed for a customer-centric marketing campaign, we were able to create actionable lead-nurturing workflows and sales conversations, as well as provide resource links available on the fly.
Major Upgrade on Reporting
What gets measured, gets improved. We’ve connected various technologies to track the effectiveness of our website and our marketing.
One key tool in this effort is Databox. We’ve set up several dashboards that rotate in the office all day, connecting the best data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMrush, HubSpot, and Wistia. Detailed reports help us to fully understand the top pages, the top videos and the top lead sources, all from intuitive dashboards.
Utilizing Video
With our new website, we made it a priority to utilize video to its fullest potential. We integrated our HubSpot account with Wistia, making this transition as seamless as possible, and the results have been outstanding.
The Impact
The only requirement of our team for this project was simple: completely rethink the website from the ground up, with NO CONTENT MIGRATION.
So What Happened?
Well, the only thing more remarkable than the site we created has been the public response. In just one week, Google re-indexed our website with rankings for the new domain. This increased our visibility in areas we didn’t have exposure in, and improved our rankings for teams we were already ranking for.
An Accurate Representation of our Brand
Our new website captures the unique essence of our team, our culture and our brand. Whether you visit our website or walk into our office, you’ll find a brand that is vibrant and consistent everywhere you look.
Part of that brand experience was leveling up our design by eliminating ALL stock photos throughout the website (with the exception of the blog).
Shift to a Video-First Strategy
In 2017, the Impulse Creative Client Success Team adopted a “video-first” meeting strategy. All meetings and client communication were on video, to keep us at the forefront of this major shift in digital marketing. Armed with the right professionals, equipment and strategy, we were soon primed to handle the full-service video needs of our clients and beyond.
So the timing was perfect to bring our own website into the video world in a major way, creating an online showcase of our vast new video capabilities.
Our new website currently has a video on every page, portraying an authentic, humanized image, which is what our brand is all about. Implementing video marketing so heavily has also had a positive impact on our search engine rankings, significantly increasing our discoverability.
Since implementing Wistia videos on our new website, we have seen an increase in plays by month. The graph below displays this increase of views from January to June.
Topic Clusters and Pillar Pages
Other new website elements that contributed to our success were topic clusters and pillar pages. Since incorporating topic clusters on our new website in January, our traffic has more than quadrupled!
We have added two pillar pages to our new website; one on video marketing and one on conversational marketing. These pillar pages have been SEO powerhouses for overall content marketing strategy, significantly contributing to our ranking increase.
A Seamless User Experience
Customer-centric marketing requires a website built around what the customer is looking for, and should be 100% focused on providing that information as easily and quickly as possible. The mobile-first approach to site building allowed us to cater to the growing mobile user base, while more granular service offerings provide valuable resources and capture attention.
Each page was designed with at least two opportunities to convert (for “MOFU” and for “BOFU”) as well as a live chat via Drift to assist or answer any questions our prospects have, which we integrated through HubSpot.
It did not take Impulse Creative long to come to the realization that instant communication with a website visitor can help convert them to a prospect and client much faster.
Adding this feature to our new website has allowed us to capture valuable leads in our sleep! In fact, we’ve seen a 10% conversion rate from chat to meeting and have watched our conversion vs. lead rate double. Let these numbers speak for themselves:
Each day, we are able to immediately assist website visitors through the use of live chat and have conversations with valuable leads. We’ve turned 15% of these conversations into meetings since January and continue to watch the number of conversations increase every day.
Overall Success
All of these enhancements and improvements to our new website have resulted in some incredible insights. Our website sessions are up 102% from the previous year. These sessions resulted in 445 new contacts, and 99 of those contacts turned into customers. We are only half way through the year and have only seen an increase since the website launched.
This project was so successful because, not only did we create a new website that is more visually appealing, the seamless functionality of our improved website has allowed us to more than double our traffic and increase our conversions by 39%. From the live chat integration and mobile-user functionality to video implementation and the ability to measure the performance of every single page, our new website officially has all the elements necessary for a friendly user experience.
How This Made an Impact
The success of our new website has made a significant impact on our company as a whole. It’s allowed us to build our rankings, increase our contacts, connect with several new users daily and bring in new customers.
The elements that were previously missing from our old website have allowed Impulse Creative to grow and blossom. The flexibility of our new, HubSpot-friendly website gives us the ability to keep up with the trends as online marketing continues to improve and evolve.
Flexibility to Expand
Our new website this is just the beginning. We’ve built the entire site based on the principles of the Growth-Driven Design methodology. As we get more questions, create more videos, and incorporate more services, our web pages, layouts and reach can be easily expanded and evolved. This allows for us to be more agile than our competition by bringing new services to market faster.