iStone soars to new heights with revamped, inbound-based .com

In 2016 Zooma teamed up with key stakeholders at iStone to create, build and launch a new istone.com. This article details the underlying challenges and reasons for the project, the solution that was implemented, and the resulting impact the new .com has had on iStone and its business.

Zooma and iStone first began working together in 2015, based on the mutual understanding that iStone needed to adapt its way of working to align with its customers’ changed behaviour, habits and expectations. To get there, iStone decided to use online and digital as a natural part of doing business and to use the inbound methodology to achieve tangible results. Come 2016, a completely new istone.com (and local .xx versions) was the natural next step in the company’s inbound journey.

The Challenge

Utilising the inbound methodology, iStone was able to greatly improve the performance of the previous istone.com by increasing the number of leads and new business generated online. However, along came also a realisation that there was a growing divide between the behaviours, expectations and needs of the personas and what the existing .com was able to deliver. To improve online performance further, there was a need to start over fresh and to define different principles than had previously been used. Simply put, to place inbound at the core of their sales and marketing activities. Increased focus was put particularly on the following:

1. Create a structure and content based on personas’ needs, habits and expectations

The old istone.com was trying to tell a story about everything for everyone and everywhere. The new website, in contrast, uses an architecture and content that is tailored to the specific needs, habits and expectations of iStone’s personas. Everything else was removed. The new architecture and content were defined and developed by Zooma and iStone in an iterative and collaborative manner using Zooma’s creation process and methodology.

2. Develop a design that improves speed and guidance to relevance

iStone has a broad offering of services spanning a wide range of software, industries, areas and specific challenges and it’s possible to describe the offering from many different perspectives. This makes it hard to envision a content structure that is relevant to all visitors and that provides effortless simplicity for them. For this reason, the choice was made to group content based on different perspectives and not to hide anything from the menu structure. Expanding the ‘What we do’ option gives one-click access to the full offering based on persona challenge, industry, area or software.

3. Develop a design that respects the purpose of each type of content

The page templates of the new istone.com are module based in order to give the flexibility to adapt the layout to the purpose of a particular page. Blog articles, reference cases and other pages for long-form content have been given large types, serif fonts and spacing to respect the reader. To help visitors understand the effort needed to consume content, the blog even has an indicator showing how far the reader has come and how far to go to complete the article, while pages meant for quick consumption by scanning have been given graphics and tighter sections that enable and support that behaviour.

4. Increase the visit to lead and lead to qualified lead conversion rates

In little over a year and powered by inbound, iStone more than doubled the traffic to istone.com, but the conversion rate did not follow the same aggressive curve. A central point of the new website, therefore, was to increase the number of opportunities for visitors to convert. Now there are points of conversion for every step of the purchase journey and lead nurturing programs in place to help leads discover new content.

5. Make sure there is evidence to support closing customers

The old website had a lot of content for the early phases of the inbound journey and focused on explaining what and how, but less so why one should work with iStone. With the new .com, focus was put on adding more evidence to support the case that iStone is the right fit as a partner.

Solution

iStone had already been using the Marketing and Sales tools of HubSpot for key aspects such as blogging, landing pages and marketing automation, so the natural choice when designing and developing the new .com was to use HubSpot also for the website. In order to tackle above challenges and meet the needs and expectations of iStone’s personas, Zooma had to make sure to only think from the outside to deliver a solution based on the personas’ perspectives.

A flexible layout system for each individual page

One such solution is a flexible layout system that enables editors to tailor the layout of each individual page to the content, rather than the available page template layout defining the content, as is often the case when working with fixed page templates.

Blog topic subscription

HubSpot only allows someone to subscribe to a blog, not individual topics of that blog. Given the width of iStone’s offering and interests of the personas, a single blog, however, could easily become too broad in topics to be relevant and having a large number of multiple blogs would be confusing. So instead Zooma had to create a solution in HubSpot to let users subscribe to individual topics.

Related blog content

Seeing the importance of speed and guidance to relevant content, we wanted to create a blog experience that also supported this notion. In order to help Personas discover related content, posts from the same author, or posts within same topics, modules for each of these were created. Finally, we made it easy for the editor to add the custom related blocks to each post as well as to the author profile.

Knowledge bank (only available in Swedish)

In order to make it easy for Personas to educate themselves, and to help drive conversion rates as well as providing evidence and testimonials, a ‘knowledge bank’ was developed. It consists of a collection of knowledge (content offers) that can be filtered by doing a free text search or by using category or type of content. This solution makes use of HubDB and also supports the keyboard, if you are on a desktop, for quick filtering.

In addition to above, there were numerous challenges in terms of for example localisation to multiple languages when using a fully flexible page layout system, as well as making sure that the responsive behaviour of the website could be supported with such a system. The latter part is important because Zooma’s design philosophy is users first—meaning the users expect a certain user experience depending on what device they are on, and it’s not a question of mobile or desktop first. Rather, on a mobile device users want an optimised touch experience, and on a desktop, they expect to be able to make use of the added precision and advantages of pointer devices.

Impact and results

12 months after deploying an inbound sales and marketing strategy, iStone saw a return on investment of 1,950% and, perhaps more importantly, for the first time the marketing department could prove the $10’s of millions it was contributing to the company’s bottom line. Put differently, it had been transformed from a cost centre into a profit centre.

Another 5 months after the revamp of istone.com, the inbound success story continues. Visits to the site have increased a further 28% compared to the year before and lead-generation is up a whopping 112%. Those numbers would be impressive for any company but are even more remarkable considering that iStone was already running a very efficient inbound operation.

2017 is poised to become a new record year for iStone and the inbound mentality is spreading like wildfire across company departments. This is how Hanna Nätt-Falkäng, CMO at iStone, puts it:

‘Believing in such a structured marketing methodology as inbound and being able to preach it to an organization of 600 colleagues has been a sheer pleasure—not only when it comes to how these colleagues view marketing of today, but also the satisfaction in showing actual ROI on the business’ investment in marketing. ’

This is just the beginning of iStone’s inbound journey. The next step is to start working with 'smart content' and to adapt on-site content in realtime based on personas.