We launched the AZoNetwork site in 2007 to tie together our expanding portfolio of sites, products, and services. The Marketing Science Webinars, Podcast, and Blog all followed, with content created by our scientific marketing specialists aiming to support and inspire our community of digital marketing professionals working in the scientific, engineering, and healthcare spaces.
With so many new areas, products, and aims created for the website, it’s easy to forget the critical points of any website:
- Communicating a brand message
- Reflecting the aim of the website
- Providing a great user experience
So, how did we work to improve the AZoNetwork website to ensure we met our objectives?
Communicate our brand message better
Brand messaging helps to communicate your business's who, what, when, where, and why. If a prospective customer can’t work out who you are and what you do from the homepage, you will lose them immediately.
After much discussion on the AZoNetwork brand message, including a company-wide survey, we needed to find a way to get that message across in just a few sentences. The wording needs to grab the user's attention and for that user to know who we are.
The approach here was to consider the features of AZoNetwork and the benefits. Both features and benefits have a place in your product messaging. If we think about a traditional marketing funnel, then in the awareness stage, we might be running an ad, and leading with a benefit will more likely lead to the type of impact we are looking for (impressions, CTR, etc.).
As a customer moves down the funnel, they are likely to be more aware of the benefits of your product and will now want to understand how the features solve their problems. They will also want to compare the features against your competitors.
We wanted to make the features and benefits of AZoNetwork clear and concise on the homepage, which led to the new tagline: reach new audiences, generate better leads. The feature is our large audience, and the benefit to the user is better leads!
We took this approach throughout the homepage, highlighting who AZoNetwork is, what we do, and why we do it to ensure that our strong brand message is communicated effectively.
Improving User Experience
The website has multiple aims, from assisting sales to providing resources for marketing professionals in the science, engineering, and healthcare sectors. The AZoNetwork site needed to guide users to the right place.
The aim of any website needs to tie into its content strategy; three key points to consider are:
- Can your customers easily find your content?
- Does your content incorporate calls to action?
- Can search engines find and index your content?
Our marketing team has several strings to the #MarketingScience bow, with a blog, webinar series, and podcast consistently updated with the most relevant content for our audience.
This inspired the new ‘Learning Hub’.
A clear menu option for marketing professionals to locate our blog, webinars, podcasts, downloadable eBooks, view upcoming and past events, and access the AZoNetwork content calendar.
The content calendar is an interactive calendar where you can view upcoming AZoNetwork newsletter editions, events, trade shows in the scientific community, and world days to note for your social media and content efforts.
So for customers and search engines, the learning hub is a clear place to locate the content we create to provide marketing professionals with as many resources as possible.
The next point is the calls to action, which, when creating a blog, may have been added with an upcoming trade show or webinar in mind. These links become outdated quickly. We have made a conscious effort to revisit our content to update sign-up links to on-demand content, digital marketing reviews at trade shows to take you to upcoming events, and so on.
Simple things like this can be the difference between a starting conversation with somebody and missing an opportunity.
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