It's not all logo colors and CSS animations: great websites tell strong stories and become the best way to discover your brand. In this talk, I'll walk you through my step-by-step process of uncovering the brand identity, articulating it in messaging, telling that story through design, and telling an ongoing story through content, co-marketing & community.
I'll share tactical resources like my favorite agencies, downloadable PDFs that you can use on your own, as well as step-by-step guides to building a great SaaS website.
Liam Bogart:
How to weave a compelling brand story into your website. I've worked at a number of SAS companies. I've done a number of rebrands, a number of launches over the years, and I'm going to try to distill down everything I know really quickly. Let's jump right into it. Really quickly about me, if you're wondering why I'm legitimate to talk about this, I originally started as a founder of a blog. I moved to Paris from California when I was 21 and started writing in English, telling stories about startups in Paris. I got really lucky, it was at a really explosive time for the Paris startup scene. A lot of companies know Algolia, know even companies founded by French founders like MadKudu, but at the time, there wasn't really a lot of visibility, people weren't writing in English about it, and I found that there was a huge value for me in writing stories about these companies that I found exciting that people hadn't heard of.
Liam Bogart:
Because the founders were often engineering founders, especially the ones that interested me, and they didn't speak English natively, I often had the job of storytelling for them. I wasn't always nice, hence the name, but I told a story and I told a story that I liked. When I finished doing that, I found that what I really wanted to do was go to those companies and work on telling their stories in the inside. I took my experience telling stories through content and events, and I brought it into companies, and pretty quickly found a comfort zone in this thing called brand. I've spent the last three years going on four years, really, just honing this skill and trying and learning and going again. I'm going to try to teach you some things today. Here's what you can expect to learn over the next couple of minutes.
Liam Bogart:
One, I'm going to ask the question, why should I care about brand and website? Isn't the goal just to get people to click through, and don't I just need to put unique value prop, CTA, schedule a demo? I'll talk a little bit about that, to how can you go about uncovering that brand story? Maybe you've done it. Maybe you did it a while ago and you're not happy with it. I'm almost never happy with anything that I did over 12 months ago, so if you haven't done this in the last year, you're probably thinking about doing it right now. When we're talking about telling a compelling story, that's a big visual exercise, so we'll talk about that, and then how do you make a splash with your supposedly new website? What can you do? How do you leverage the fact that you put in this energy?
Liam Bogart:
In doing so, I'll talk a little bit about my recent experience with 360 Learning. I just joined six months ago, very large company, 200 employees, series B backed by 40 million in revenue, but not a lot of visibility and not a lot of historic investment into the kinds of things that I do. The first thing I said when I joined is Brand has a metric, it's not fluff, and I want to own that metric. That metric that I always want to own is organic pipeline. This I think is the number one thing to get, especially data-driven companies and product-led companies focused on why brand is important. Companies with strong brand acquire more than half of their customers for free. Maybe they aren't exactly for free because you still hire employees, but your MQLs are free and your traffic is organic, right?
Liam Bogart:
Why is that? That's because if your brand is well-known, people think of you on their own when they have the problem that you solve, and they go to your website and they sign up. From your perspective, that looks like, "I have direct traffic, I don't know why I have direct traffic, but I have it, and they signed up. I can go and ask them and they say they heard about us. Maybe they read an article about us." Those are great to know touchpoints and campaigns and what works. But overall, what you know is when more than half of your traffic is organic, that means your brand is strong, strong relative to other initiatives, right? Maybe your traffic is more than half organic, but it's not a lot, and then there's a problem about making the pie bigger, but this is ultimately the metric that I was looking at.
Liam Bogart:
Today, my team, which consists of content, communications, website, design, and a dotted line connection to even field marketing is measured entirely on organic MQL, so organic pipeline and organic traffic. This is what we care about. What do people who came here of their own accord think about us, and how do we do more of that? This I think is... I cannot overstate the importance of aligning around a metric. I have done the opposite. I have thought brand was just, "Let's tell a great story. We know when it's a good story. You'll know when you're telling a great story. Who needs a metric? There's demand gen for that, there's growth, there's sales." What I found is that in the long run, the momentum that you will need to keep a brand aligned, to stay focused, to say no at times where you really want to say yes to doing the easy thing, that only works if you have a number to back it up. The best number I have found today is a number that looks a lot like an SEO metric, which is organic pipeline.
Liam Bogart:
So, with that in mind, I'm going to assume that you're convinced of that already, and I'm going to show you a little bit about what the first thing I do when I join a new company. First thing I do is I pull up the same PDF that I've pulled up for the last four years. I Google the same thing that I've Googled for the past four years. I Google brand strategy canvas, because I never seem to save it and it's always on the internet. I've actually turned this entire form into a type form or Google form, and I send it out to the entire company. I probably do this within the first week or two max. I think at 360 Learning, our onboarding is very intense as we're a learning tool, so I think I did it around week four once I had sort of come up out of our initial intense onboarding.
Liam Bogart:
But over the years, I've discovered different ways of going about uncovering your brand. You might know one, you might have some sort of framework or positioning tool. I discovered this one when I was first doing this exercise, redoing the website at Algolia and rethinking the brand, and over the years, as I've been exposed to smarter people in the space with different methods, I've never found a method that was so radically different that I couldn't continue to use this, so I continued to use it. A tool is only as good as the person who's using it, so I've customized my relationship to this product over the years, and I'll show you how I use this particular tool. I've left the URL there, you can pull that up and follow along. You can even Google brand strategy campus SlideShare, and there's actually an entire presentation where they show you a section by section what the questions are and sample answers for Zappos, which I have over the years found very useful.
Liam Bogart:
I actually share the sample answers in the type form that I send out to employees every time I sit with them. When I get all the answers, I encourage a 100% response from executives and leaders, especially founders. There's no way you can do this without founders participating. I typically want to get 50 percent, about 60 responses in a 200 person company is where we were at last time. That's a pretty good response rate. Eventually, you get to a point where more responses won't give you more information, but what you want to get as a combination of veterans, early employees, and people who've been here for three months. What you're looking for is not the best answer. There's no right or wrong answer. What you're looking for is convergence and divergence.
Liam Bogart:
In areas of convergence, do you like where you're converging? Maybe your answers are converging on the old you. Maybe the company's evolved, but the understanding of that evolution hasn't been communicated, so people still know the 18 month old pitch, and they don't know that the product roadmap has been updated and the vision has been updated and the sales deck has been updated, and so they're still pitching the old story. So, you want to ask yourself, is that what we want? Then you want to look at divergence and say, "Why is there divergence? What do we want it to converge to? Who is right and who is wrong? Who is going towards the place we want to be going to and in a place where we're going from?" Then you try to fill it out and you go through each section. I typically follow the order of the letters. So A, B, C, D, E, to go through the customer company competitive.
Liam Bogart:
Then I try to plug all of that into the brand positioning statement and come out with a nice tight phrase that I can then delineate and build key messages, which are essentially brand campaigns on top of it. Then I stress test it. The question is, do I like it? Do I like the response I get? If it doesn't feel right, it means you probably messed up somewhere in the insight. You probably haven't yet found the competitive edge. Maybe your emotional benefits are too vague, and so at the end, you don't really have that hit because the emotional benefits don't actually align. So, you go back and you repeat. At 360 Learning. We did it four times. It was exhausting. We probably did it like nine times, but micro iterations and four major iterations.
Liam Bogart:
I'm going to run you through really quickly our brand strategy canvas. I won't read out everything, but you can pause this or rewatch it later if you want. What we're really looking for here is to distill down those nuggets of truth that just feel like, "Wow, that distills it down." In our customer section, we really got hung up on connecting the dots from learning, from training to business impact. That was big for us. In the competitive edge, we talked about this, we noticed this idea of generating scalable impact. We focus on the idea that it takes a long time to create a learning material, and they're deployed in silos by dedicated trainers. There's no two way dialogue in there, and therefore there's no engagement between the people who are meant to be the users of that content.
Liam Bogart:
We started to come up, we started to notice the things that really we felt summarized what made us different, and we started talking about deep collaborative workflows. This is something that historically 360 Learning had invested a lot in, was making sure that the learning experience was a two-way street. We started to notice that. From there, we moved on to rational benefits, emotional benefits. I find that company value and brand personality is typically where you get the least aha moment, mainly because tech companies and modern companies tend to have that set in stone very early. Your company culture defined by the founders, you don't really innovate that much here. I found emotional benefits to be the hardest part, one, because you stumble onto a lot of default emotions like they struggle to or they feel great because, and you actually really need to dig deeper.
Liam Bogart:
On our end, we started with two different answers. One was content creators, and the other was content consumers. Then we actually found that the benefits emotionally were the same, and that was how we knew that we were onto something. We knew that confidence in the curriculum of material is something that both content creators like a sales enablement manager care about, and also an SDR, right? Excitement about the clear path to professional development, sales enabling, people want to know what the future of their career is, and they want to make sure that that's available to employees, and employees want to know that. That's how we started to see that we were onto something.
Liam Bogart:
Then we came up with this nice tight positioning statement for teams who connect the dots between coaching and success. 360 Learning is the only learning suite that drives scalable business impact. We enable anyone from your team to share knowledge faster so that you outsmart the competition, people-led growth. I always liked the brand essence part at the end, because it's a sort of mini tagline. So, we started to have something good. There were there some areas now looking back six months later that it's not exactly where we're going, but we got 95% of the way over the line of where we wanted to go, and we felt like we were starting to tell a story that represented us and it felt right.
Liam Bogart:
We started having these inspirations for ideas that came from there that felt true. Outsmart the competition. Never stop learning. Never learn alone. Right? We wanted to be compassionate. We wanted to be curious. We wanted to be something you could trust. We wanted to bring people together, right? We wanted people to experience learning together. In fact, that's what ultimately came out of all of this, was the realization that what we wanted people to do in the workplace was experience learning together, which ultimately came out of this experience. So, once you've gone through that process, and I cannot stress this enough, I think it took us eight weeks to go through that process. It's long. Take the time. If you're not ready to share it to strangers six months later or even on the spot, then you probably aren't done yet. Just keep going, keep digging. If you like an area, challenge it.
Liam Bogart:
The next thing you do now that you have an idea of who you want to be, now you need to put it onto your website. I do the same thing every time, because every 18 months, or when I need to, or every three years when a website redesign comes up, the game has changed. I always think about who's crushing it? What stands out, and what's iconic? Some of those are historic players, and some of those are new players. Some of those are in our space and we look at competitors, but oftentimes I'm not really excited by what competitors in our space are doing, and I don't want to set the bar that low. I want to set the bar as high as what are the leaders in other spaces doing and how can we learn from them? I'll share a little bit about what we try to get out of that.
Liam Bogart:
Now, you're going to see some pretty default things. I am a big fan of Apple's brand. You're not going to find a lot of surprises. Maybe you aren't. Maybe you like Google, or maybe like Microsoft. What's good here is to articulate what is appealing? What's iconic? What do you like about it? Try to distill that down, right? We're a big fan of Adobe because they create an entire suite of solutions each with their own identity that fit into something bigger. They position themselves around a person, around a function. They own creative. That's a powerful subsection of the org chart.
Liam Bogart:
What we like about Slack is that they bring unity. They don't describe themselves around the thing you do on the product. They describe themselves around how using the product affects the workplace. That's a very strong relationship to create. Firefox, I mean, as a product, great, but what's really great is the unity in the individual aesthetic. You always know when you're on a Firefox tool, and also they take their values and they put them into their products. Going forward, Google, great, a default collaborative tool. We ultimately fit into a similar space and integrate with Google, and so understanding how they describe collaboration is key for us. I'm a huge fan of Stripe. In 2016, they basically reinvented the website game for SAS companies with their website. So, I'd comb over it.
Liam Bogart:
I'm also a big fan of Clearbit as a tool, and I actually like the way they organize their nav bar. So, you can go check out their nav bar, but I'm a big fan of the way they organize how a tool that has many use cases and many subsections of it, how they organize and explain that to people. Lastly, Zendesk, from a design perspective, very interesting, the way they tell their story, the way they connect these different products together, and how they really put the user at the beginning of the story and at the center of the story. Once you done that, you've looked at what the pro's done, I honestly do not recommend innovating on the website game, unless you're looking at all of those and saying, "I can do better." But I have tried to reinvent the wheel, and I have never really been satisfied with doing it.
Liam Bogart:
At Algolia, we thought about making our website a search bar, and we trashed that idea when we realized that our website needed to be a website. I typically look at, "Okay, what do I like about nav bars today? Okay, that's what we're going to do. What do we like about the homepage? What are the different blocks that a homepage... what's the order of the story. Okay. How does our brand strategy canvas fit into that?" I feel starting there is already so much better than what most companies have. That is what I aspire to. I aspire to deploying the SAS playbook, because ultimately the website is not where you're going to innovate. It is the story around it that is going to ultimately create the impact. Right?
Liam Bogart:
So, having the default structure that works, that is set up, having a product page and enterprise page if you sell to enterprise as a different segment, having a pricing page, having use cases, dependent pages, a careers page, having your home page link for different primary and secondary CTAs based on where you want to go, these aren't things that I invented or anyone else... someone did, but these are key to creating a website that functions. Ultimately, the most important part about telling a strong brand story and deploying that are three things. One is create internal momentum. We told our company we are going to launch a new website, and it is going to be a brand new 360 Learning. Starting that day we are a different company, and we will all know exactly why we're proud to work here.
Liam Bogart:
I's really like a defibrillator to the chest if your heart isn't beating, I guess. It's really a shock to the system. Externally, we sought uniformity. I Google 360 Learning and look at the top 50 image results and the top 50 search results, and look at where is our brand today? Where are people discovering us? And how do we make sure that no matter where they find us, that the first impression is the same? Then we set a date that we launch. We ultimately set a date for last quarter, and we launched. When we launched, we launched with a video. I'm a big fan of using a company called Vidico, an Australian based video agency. I've used them at Algolia And I used them again for 360 Learning. Big, big fans of their work.
Liam Bogart:
I find a 90 second video is a very good practice for basically telling a linear version of your website. They ultimately come out to the same thing. You've got emotional Kickstarter, the problem, the core personas, the product, the illustrations, the everything. You get the whole pitch all the way through, and I'm a big fan of that. We ultimately put our video on the homepage of our website. I can even take a second to show you our website. We ultimately took all of that learning and experience that we had, and we built a website that, again, doesn't necessarily reinvent the wheel, but we tell you exactly what we care about. We tell you what our values are, we tell you what the impact that we're seeking is, and we tell you, and we tell you what we believe in, right? We use validation from analysts like Gartner, who have identified 360 Learning as a leader in the learning experience space, we tell you about our pricing.
Liam Bogart:
Again, we're not reinventing the wheel around this. What we're doing is making it very simple for you to understand what we do. We have a product page, we've got a pricing page. We've got clients, we've got an explanation of the category that we're in, and that helps us lay down the foundation for introducing you to us. Right. The next thing we did is we did a product launch. I said we set a date, and I find product launch to be a great way to say hello to the world. Oftentimes, they're a very website sensitive audience. It's a really good way to test whether your messaging is solid, whether all that work you put into your brand ultimately worked. Also, it's a great way to get everyone on board. The whole company gets on board, your community gets on board. We had customers posting about us, we had investors posting about us. It just creates a general momentum around this new story.
Liam Bogart:
Lastly, I'm a big fan of creating consistency on LinkedIn. We did 180 revitalizations of LinkedIn profiles, a new profile photo for everyone, new banner, new company description, new tagline, everything. That way, no matter who you know in our country, wherever you go, you will come across a consistent experience. We have colors that tell a visual story. We have taglines that tell a brand personality story. We have a cover photo that tells you what we believe in and what our core value proposition is and differentiation. Ultimately, that comes together inside the website because people are going to see you. They're going to go to the website and they're going to have the exact same feeling, right? You're preempting them coming onto the website with this. So, I hope this has been helpful. I'm super happy to answer any questions on every slide.
Liam Bogart:
You saw my URL, my Liam Bogart tagline. You can find me on Twitter at Liam Bogart, on LinkedIn /iam/liambogart. My email, liambogart@gmail.com, or liambogart@360learning.com. I'm very easy to contact. If you're in the process of redesigning your website, if you're in the process of exploring your brand, I'd love to talk to you and help you out if you think I can be useful, I hope this was helpful for you. I hope this helps you build a website that not only converts, but also compels people to love you, to tell their friends about you so that you drive more organic traffic, so that you convert more people for free so that you create that positive momentum. Thank you guys very much and enjoy the rest of the summit.
Liam Bogart:
How to weave a compelling brand story into your website. I've worked at a number of SAS companies. I've done a number of rebrands, a number of launches over the years, and I'm going to try to distill down everything I know really quickly. Let's jump right into it. Really quickly about me, if you're wondering why I'm legitimate to talk about this, I originally started as a founder of a blog. I moved to Paris from California when I was 21 and started writing in English, telling stories about startups in Paris. I got really lucky, it was at a really explosive time for the Paris startup scene. A lot of companies know Algolia, know even companies founded by French founders like MadKudu, but at the time, there wasn't really a lot of visibility, people weren't writing in English about it, and I found that there was a huge value for me in writing stories about these companies that I found exciting that people hadn't heard of.
Liam Bogart:
Because the founders were often engineering founders, especially the ones that interested me, and they didn't speak English natively, I often had the job of storytelling for them. I wasn't always nice, hence the name, but I told a story and I told a story that I liked. When I finished doing that, I found that what I really wanted to do was go to those companies and work on telling their stories in the inside. I took my experience telling stories through content and events, and I brought it into companies, and pretty quickly found a comfort zone in this thing called brand. I've spent the last three years going on four years, really, just honing this skill and trying and learning and going again. I'm going to try to teach you some things today. Here's what you can expect to learn over the next couple of minutes.
Liam Bogart:
One, I'm going to ask the question, why should I care about brand and website? Isn't the goal just to get people to click through, and don't I just need to put unique value prop, CTA, schedule a demo? I'll talk a little bit about that, to how can you go about uncovering that brand story? Maybe you've done it. Maybe you did it a while ago and you're not happy with it. I'm almost never happy with anything that I did over 12 months ago, so if you haven't done this in the last year, you're probably thinking about doing it right now. When we're talking about telling a compelling story, that's a big visual exercise, so we'll talk about that, and then how do you make a splash with your supposedly new website? What can you do? How do you leverage the fact that you put in this energy?
Liam Bogart:
In doing so, I'll talk a little bit about my recent experience with 360 Learning. I just joined six months ago, very large company, 200 employees, series B backed by 40 million in revenue, but not a lot of visibility and not a lot of historic investment into the kinds of things that I do. The first thing I said when I joined is Brand has a metric, it's not fluff, and I want to own that metric. That metric that I always want to own is organic pipeline. This I think is the number one thing to get, especially data-driven companies and product-led companies focused on why brand is important. Companies with strong brand acquire more than half of their customers for free. Maybe they aren't exactly for free because you still hire employees, but your MQLs are free and your traffic is organic, right?
Liam Bogart:
Why is that? That's because if your brand is well-known, people think of you on their own when they have the problem that you solve, and they go to your website and they sign up. From your perspective, that looks like, "I have direct traffic, I don't know why I have direct traffic, but I have it, and they signed up. I can go and ask them and they say they heard about us. Maybe they read an article about us." Those are great to know touchpoints and campaigns and what works. But overall, what you know is when more than half of your traffic is organic, that means your brand is strong, strong relative to other initiatives, right? Maybe your traffic is more than half organic, but it's not a lot, and then there's a problem about making the pie bigger, but this is ultimately the metric that I was looking at.
Liam Bogart:
Today, my team, which consists of content, communications, website, design, and a dotted line connection to even field marketing is measured entirely on organic MQL, so organic pipeline and organic traffic. This is what we care about. What do people who came here of their own accord think about us, and how do we do more of that? This I think is... I cannot overstate the importance of aligning around a metric. I have done the opposite. I have thought brand was just, "Let's tell a great story. We know when it's a good story. You'll know when you're telling a great story. Who needs a metric? There's demand gen for that, there's growth, there's sales." What I found is that in the long run, the momentum that you will need to keep a brand aligned, to stay focused, to say no at times where you really want to say yes to doing the easy thing, that only works if you have a number to back it up. The best number I have found today is a number that looks a lot like an SEO metric, which is organic pipeline.
Liam Bogart:
So, with that in mind, I'm going to assume that you're convinced of that already, and I'm going to show you a little bit about what the first thing I do when I join a new company. First thing I do is I pull up the same PDF that I've pulled up for the last four years. I Google the same thing that I've Googled for the past four years. I Google brand strategy canvas, because I never seem to save it and it's always on the internet. I've actually turned this entire form into a type form or Google form, and I send it out to the entire company. I probably do this within the first week or two max. I think at 360 Learning, our onboarding is very intense as we're a learning tool, so I think I did it around week four once I had sort of come up out of our initial intense onboarding.
Liam Bogart:
But over the years, I've discovered different ways of going about uncovering your brand. You might know one, you might have some sort of framework or positioning tool. I discovered this one when I was first doing this exercise, redoing the website at Algolia and rethinking the brand, and over the years, as I've been exposed to smarter people in the space with different methods, I've never found a method that was so radically different that I couldn't continue to use this, so I continued to use it. A tool is only as good as the person who's using it, so I've customized my relationship to this product over the years, and I'll show you how I use this particular tool. I've left the URL there, you can pull that up and follow along. You can even Google brand strategy campus SlideShare, and there's actually an entire presentation where they show you a section by section what the questions are and sample answers for Zappos, which I have over the years found very useful.
Liam Bogart:
I actually share the sample answers in the type form that I send out to employees every time I sit with them. When I get all the answers, I encourage a 100% response from executives and leaders, especially founders. There's no way you can do this without founders participating. I typically want to get 50 percent, about 60 responses in a 200 person company is where we were at last time. That's a pretty good response rate. Eventually, you get to a point where more responses won't give you more information, but what you want to get as a combination of veterans, early employees, and people who've been here for three months. What you're looking for is not the best answer. There's no right or wrong answer. What you're looking for is convergence and divergence.
Liam Bogart:
In areas of convergence, do you like where you're converging? Maybe your answers are converging on the old you. Maybe the company's evolved, but the understanding of that evolution hasn't been communicated, so people still know the 18 month old pitch, and they don't know that the product roadmap has been updated and the vision has been updated and the sales deck has been updated, and so they're still pitching the old story. So, you want to ask yourself, is that what we want? Then you want to look at divergence and say, "Why is there divergence? What do we want it to converge to? Who is right and who is wrong? Who is going towards the place we want to be going to and in a place where we're going from?" Then you try to fill it out and you go through each section. I typically follow the order of the letters. So A, B, C, D, E, to go through the customer company competitive.
Liam Bogart:
Then I try to plug all of that into the brand positioning statement and come out with a nice tight phrase that I can then delineate and build key messages, which are essentially brand campaigns on top of it. Then I stress test it. The question is, do I like it? Do I like the response I get? If it doesn't feel right, it means you probably messed up somewhere in the insight. You probably haven't yet found the competitive edge. Maybe your emotional benefits are too vague, and so at the end, you don't really have that hit because the emotional benefits don't actually align. So, you go back and you repeat. At 360 Learning. We did it four times. It was exhausting. We probably did it like nine times, but micro iterations and four major iterations.
Liam Bogart:
I'm going to run you through really quickly our brand strategy canvas. I won't read out everything, but you can pause this or rewatch it later if you want. What we're really looking for here is to distill down those nuggets of truth that just feel like, "Wow, that distills it down." In our customer section, we really got hung up on connecting the dots from learning, from training to business impact. That was big for us. In the competitive edge, we talked about this, we noticed this idea of generating scalable impact. We focus on the idea that it takes a long time to create a learning material, and they're deployed in silos by dedicated trainers. There's no two way dialogue in there, and therefore there's no engagement between the people who are meant to be the users of that content.
Liam Bogart:
We started to come up, we started to notice the things that really we felt summarized what made us different, and we started talking about deep collaborative workflows. This is something that historically 360 Learning had invested a lot in, was making sure that the learning experience was a two-way street. We started to notice that. From there, we moved on to rational benefits, emotional benefits. I find that company value and brand personality is typically where you get the least aha moment, mainly because tech companies and modern companies tend to have that set in stone very early. Your company culture defined by the founders, you don't really innovate that much here. I found emotional benefits to be the hardest part, one, because you stumble onto a lot of default emotions like they struggle to or they feel great because, and you actually really need to dig deeper.
Liam Bogart:
On our end, we started with two different answers. One was content creators, and the other was content consumers. Then we actually found that the benefits emotionally were the same, and that was how we knew that we were onto something. We knew that confidence in the curriculum of material is something that both content creators like a sales enablement manager care about, and also an SDR, right? Excitement about the clear path to professional development, sales enabling, people want to know what the future of their career is, and they want to make sure that that's available to employees, and employees want to know that. That's how we started to see that we were onto something.
Liam Bogart:
Then we came up with this nice tight positioning statement for teams who connect the dots between coaching and success. 360 Learning is the only learning suite that drives scalable business impact. We enable anyone from your team to share knowledge faster so that you outsmart the competition, people-led growth. I always liked the brand essence part at the end, because it's a sort of mini tagline. So, we started to have something good. There were there some areas now looking back six months later that it's not exactly where we're going, but we got 95% of the way over the line of where we wanted to go, and we felt like we were starting to tell a story that represented us and it felt right.
Liam Bogart:
We started having these inspirations for ideas that came from there that felt true. Outsmart the competition. Never stop learning. Never learn alone. Right? We wanted to be compassionate. We wanted to be curious. We wanted to be something you could trust. We wanted to bring people together, right? We wanted people to experience learning together. In fact, that's what ultimately came out of all of this, was the realization that what we wanted people to do in the workplace was experience learning together, which ultimately came out of this experience. So, once you've gone through that process, and I cannot stress this enough, I think it took us eight weeks to go through that process. It's long. Take the time. If you're not ready to share it to strangers six months later or even on the spot, then you probably aren't done yet. Just keep going, keep digging. If you like an area, challenge it.
Liam Bogart:
The next thing you do now that you have an idea of who you want to be, now you need to put it onto your website. I do the same thing every time, because every 18 months, or when I need to, or every three years when a website redesign comes up, the game has changed. I always think about who's crushing it? What stands out, and what's iconic? Some of those are historic players, and some of those are new players. Some of those are in our space and we look at competitors, but oftentimes I'm not really excited by what competitors in our space are doing, and I don't want to set the bar that low. I want to set the bar as high as what are the leaders in other spaces doing and how can we learn from them? I'll share a little bit about what we try to get out of that.
Liam Bogart:
Now, you're going to see some pretty default things. I am a big fan of Apple's brand. You're not going to find a lot of surprises. Maybe you aren't. Maybe you like Google, or maybe like Microsoft. What's good here is to articulate what is appealing? What's iconic? What do you like about it? Try to distill that down, right? We're a big fan of Adobe because they create an entire suite of solutions each with their own identity that fit into something bigger. They position themselves around a person, around a function. They own creative. That's a powerful subsection of the org chart.
Liam Bogart:
What we like about Slack is that they bring unity. They don't describe themselves around the thing you do on the product. They describe themselves around how using the product affects the workplace. That's a very strong relationship to create. Firefox, I mean, as a product, great, but what's really great is the unity in the individual aesthetic. You always know when you're on a Firefox tool, and also they take their values and they put them into their products. Going forward, Google, great, a default collaborative tool. We ultimately fit into a similar space and integrate with Google, and so understanding how they describe collaboration is key for us. I'm a huge fan of Stripe. In 2016, they basically reinvented the website game for SAS companies with their website. So, I'd comb over it.
Liam Bogart:
I'm also a big fan of Clearbit as a tool, and I actually like the way they organize their nav bar. So, you can go check out their nav bar, but I'm a big fan of the way they organize how a tool that has many use cases and many subsections of it, how they organize and explain that to people. Lastly, Zendesk, from a design perspective, very interesting, the way they tell their story, the way they connect these different products together, and how they really put the user at the beginning of the story and at the center of the story. Once you done that, you've looked at what the pro's done, I honestly do not recommend innovating on the website game, unless you're looking at all of those and saying, "I can do better." But I have tried to reinvent the wheel, and I have never really been satisfied with doing it.
Liam Bogart:
At Algolia, we thought about making our website a search bar, and we trashed that idea when we realized that our website needed to be a website. I typically look at, "Okay, what do I like about nav bars today? Okay, that's what we're going to do. What do we like about the homepage? What are the different blocks that a homepage... what's the order of the story. Okay. How does our brand strategy canvas fit into that?" I feel starting there is already so much better than what most companies have. That is what I aspire to. I aspire to deploying the SAS playbook, because ultimately the website is not where you're going to innovate. It is the story around it that is going to ultimately create the impact. Right?
Liam Bogart:
So, having the default structure that works, that is set up, having a product page and enterprise page if you sell to enterprise as a different segment, having a pricing page, having use cases, dependent pages, a careers page, having your home page link for different primary and secondary CTAs based on where you want to go, these aren't things that I invented or anyone else... someone did, but these are key to creating a website that functions. Ultimately, the most important part about telling a strong brand story and deploying that are three things. One is create internal momentum. We told our company we are going to launch a new website, and it is going to be a brand new 360 Learning. Starting that day we are a different company, and we will all know exactly why we're proud to work here.
Liam Bogart:
I's really like a defibrillator to the chest if your heart isn't beating, I guess. It's really a shock to the system. Externally, we sought uniformity. I Google 360 Learning and look at the top 50 image results and the top 50 search results, and look at where is our brand today? Where are people discovering us? And how do we make sure that no matter where they find us, that the first impression is the same? Then we set a date that we launch. We ultimately set a date for last quarter, and we launched. When we launched, we launched with a video. I'm a big fan of using a company called Vidico, an Australian based video agency. I've used them at Algolia And I used them again for 360 Learning. Big, big fans of their work.
Liam Bogart:
I find a 90 second video is a very good practice for basically telling a linear version of your website. They ultimately come out to the same thing. You've got emotional Kickstarter, the problem, the core personas, the product, the illustrations, the everything. You get the whole pitch all the way through, and I'm a big fan of that. We ultimately put our video on the homepage of our website. I can even take a second to show you our website. We ultimately took all of that learning and experience that we had, and we built a website that, again, doesn't necessarily reinvent the wheel, but we tell you exactly what we care about. We tell you what our values are, we tell you what the impact that we're seeking is, and we tell you, and we tell you what we believe in, right? We use validation from analysts like Gartner, who have identified 360 Learning as a leader in the learning experience space, we tell you about our pricing.
Liam Bogart:
Again, we're not reinventing the wheel around this. What we're doing is making it very simple for you to understand what we do. We have a product page, we've got a pricing page. We've got clients, we've got an explanation of the category that we're in, and that helps us lay down the foundation for introducing you to us. Right. The next thing we did is we did a product launch. I said we set a date, and I find product launch to be a great way to say hello to the world. Oftentimes, they're a very website sensitive audience. It's a really good way to test whether your messaging is solid, whether all that work you put into your brand ultimately worked. Also, it's a great way to get everyone on board. The whole company gets on board, your community gets on board. We had customers posting about us, we had investors posting about us. It just creates a general momentum around this new story.
Liam Bogart:
Lastly, I'm a big fan of creating consistency on LinkedIn. We did 180 revitalizations of LinkedIn profiles, a new profile photo for everyone, new banner, new company description, new tagline, everything. That way, no matter who you know in our country, wherever you go, you will come across a consistent experience. We have colors that tell a visual story. We have taglines that tell a brand personality story. We have a cover photo that tells you what we believe in and what our core value proposition is and differentiation. Ultimately, that comes together inside the website because people are going to see you. They're going to go to the website and they're going to have the exact same feeling, right? You're preempting them coming onto the website with this. So, I hope this has been helpful. I'm super happy to answer any questions on every slide.
Liam Bogart:
You saw my URL, my Liam Bogart tagline. You can find me on Twitter at Liam Bogart, on LinkedIn /iam/liambogart. My email, liambogart@gmail.com, or liambogart@360learning.com. I'm very easy to contact. If you're in the process of redesigning your website, if you're in the process of exploring your brand, I'd love to talk to you and help you out if you think I can be useful, I hope this was helpful for you. I hope this helps you build a website that not only converts, but also compels people to love you, to tell their friends about you so that you drive more organic traffic, so that you convert more people for free so that you create that positive momentum. Thank you guys very much and enjoy the rest of the summit.
