We’re experiencing a lot of exciting change as of late at Rapt Media as we continue to grow our company. From improvements to our interactive video editor – now called the Rapt Media Composer – to an updated version of our API, we’re continuing to evolve. We felt now was the perfect time to also update the Rapt Media website. Launched this week, we’re thrilled to announce the latest version of RaptMedia.com.
If you’ve watched our recently released interactive video series, “Storytelling 2.0,” you know that we’ve been busy raising awareness and building demand for our product – using our own product. The second episode focuses on a decision that many companies, including Rapt Media, face: hire an agency to support your marketing efforts, or build a team to do it all in-house? Spoiler Alert: we chose not one but two agencies – and one of those agencies, Good Apples, a Boulder-based brand identity and graphic design studio, was hired to help us redesign our website.
We’ve been very candid about our journey as a growing startup in the “Storytelling 2.0” series, so we thought we’d keep that honest and collaborative spirit alive by sharing some of what went into our website redesign.
GOALS & OBJECTIVES
It’s critical to set goals and objectives for your website before you start building. For us, our two main objectives were:
- Increased traffic through SEO and mobile optimization
- Increased leads through an enhanced website experience that entices visitors to respond to CTAs and encourages them to learn more.
We took those objectives a step further with an aim to increase the lead conversion rate into more sales opportunities. We wanted the website to act as a virtual sales rep, helping bring leads further down the sales funnel by providing an experience that guides our prospects into taking that first step towards The Future of Video: creating their first immersive, website-like video experience with us.
To do this, we knew our overarching goal was to rethink the site’s messaging based on our personas, and to make it easier for people to understand what Rapt Media does, the benefits, and how our product works.
GUIDING PRINCIPLES
Again, before you set off on redesigning your website, you need to have a clear idea of your guiding principles. This will be an enormous help to the team working on your website, as these principles may be obvious to someone who lives and breathes the company, but might not be apparent to an outside agency. For example, some of our guiding principles included “showing more than telling whenever possible”, and “breaking conventions between video and website where appropriate,” just to name a few.
PRIORITIES
There are a million things you can do when redesigning a website, but we found it useful to list out our priorities to make sure we’re getting everything checked off the list that absolutely needs attention. Then, you can move on to what we call “the nice-to-haves.” Some of our top priorities included:
- Updating and creating new website messaging and impact statements throughout the entire site to reflect Rapt Media’s positioning, target customers, and personas.
- Optimizing our site for lead generation using Hubspot, our marketing automation system.
- Creating a new Resources section to house all gated and non-gated content that aims to both educate and inspire*. (THIS HASN”T HAPPENED YET EITHER) Maybe we can speak to our continued iterations in teh opening paragraph?
- Enhancing our Free Trial experience by redesigning and placing it so that it blends well with the overall site experience*.
*See Learnings below.
LEARNINGS
Above is just a taste of the thought process we went through when planning for our website redesign. For those of you embarking on a redesign, one of the most important lessons we learned was that iterating is okay – and even preferable! We went into this project thinking we have X number of things to do and that all of those things need to be completed by our proposed launch date.
It took us some time to realize that it’s okay to release in phases. If your priority is to get your homepage done first, then get it done, ship it, and move on to the next phase. We took a leaf out of our own interactive video book and realized we should look to our interactive video Composer, which allows for easy testing and iterating, as an example of how we should treat our redesign.
Though we launched earlier this week, we plan to launch in phases, analyzing the site’s performance and making updates as needed – just as we would with an interactive video. As you can see, the last two priorities in our list above are still in the works and will be launched in Phase 2 of our redesign.
So, go ahead and check out our new site and let us know what you think. We can always iterate on it!
