Project Summary and Client Background
TalkingParents wanted to improve their service by refreshing their website with a more concerted focus on the end user. They also wanted to increase brand awareness and reach net new users in their market. To achieve these goals, the website required a complete design and user experience strategy overhaul and brand refresh, along with the addition of a digital marketing platform to measure activities and success. These improvements also included an upgrade from
Kentico (content management system) version 8 to version 11 while maintaining the integrity of the complex integrations with the highly custom-built Web Application and the iOS and Android mobile apps.
The Challenge
Initially the varied stakeholders for the TalkingParents brand included the business owners, app development team, and support team. All the stakeholders have specific insights and ownership of various aspects of the success of the service. Considering the stakeholders’ views during content development and site design and balancing those with the needs of the end user was imperative to the successful launch and ongoing digital marketing requirements for TalkingParents.
During the initial stages of the project, the product roadmap was in flux. There were many decisions to consider from how to communicate pricing to how to eventually display content for the different customer types that the brand would ultimately serve.
Also, the current TalkingParents website used only Google Analytics to track website analytics. The only other marketing activities applied by TalkingParents was a one-to-one marketing campaign for visibility purposes. To shift and focus on user experience and converting new site visitors, TalkingParents needed a robust marketing platform that could inform the digital marketing team with data to make decisions on how to engage users and non-users alike.
The Solution
Business Solution
To allow for the agile needs of the project and the inclusion of the stakeholders, the digital marketing team and the front-end development team worked closely to build out a user experience to allow the site visitors to easily access content related to how the service works. This user experience will also need to showcase educational content to current subscribers and continue to engage them with helpful co-parenting information even after they subscribe to the TalkingParents service. Throughout this process, the team met with stakeholders to allow for needed iterations and shifts as the product roadmap changed.
The front-end team developed website wireframes based on the content developed from proper keyword research and a brand voice refresh. During development, the digital marketing team engaged with the HubSpot partner team to onboard TalkingParents as a HubSpot customer. HubSpot is the chosen digital marketing platform for the TalkingParents brand because of its robust feature-set, and integration options for the custom databases that store the TalkingParents user data.
Technical Solution
The front-end Kentico v11 portal website and backend custom-built web application share a Kentico database which contains user, and various activity data. The website and web application use custom-built Kentico web parts as well as Kentico users, user settings, email templates, and scheduled tasks. The site has integrations with Postmark, HubSpot, Braintree, Twilio, iTunes, and Microsoft Azure services such as Azure Storage, Push Notifications, Service Bus, and SignalR.
TalkingParents’ digital marketing needs are vast. Bit-Wizards began with user persona development, blog topic research, and a concerted digital ad push on Facebook and Google. Contacts from the current user database were imported into HubSpot to build out the initial contact and persona lists. Then a database sync was set up to push newly matched subscribers into the HubSpot database using the HubSpot Events API along with other activities such as upgrades and user purchases.
The Result
Within the first four months of the website relaunch, net new customer subscriptions increased by 40%, with a 1.9% new visitor to customer conversion rate. Also, new user session duration on the TalkingParents blog increased by 124%. With their end-of-year growth goals already in sight, the Bit-Wizards digital marketing team is planning new initiatives to increase the conversion rate of site visitors while focusing on nurturing current subscribers and increasing brand awareness nationwide.