Patrick has been content marketing since 2009, back in the days of Dreamweaver and FTP clients. Since then, he’s written or developed websites for health services companies, comic book publishers, fitness labels, financial services, and more.
Homepage redesigns
Before & Afters
A homepage has to speak to the widest audience possible while being precisely clear about what its value is. Inbound marketing works best when content is self-explanatory and easily discovered.
MDLIVE
MDLIVE catered to four different audiences, each with their own sense of urgency and expectation of value. Saying it all at once wasn’t working.
Before
Their top navigation made it harder for prospective clients to find the information they needed to make a decision. The design attempted to put everything immediately in view as soon as you landed on the page. In terms of content marketing, this creates a lot of visual competition for the action the client wanted the user to take.
See what happened next, step by step.
After
A simplified top navigation drives the eye to clear points of action. The static hero image conveys they are a telehealth company while more meaningfully engaging the eye with multiple points of direct eye contact.
It’s B2C audience was driven to action because of pain or discomfort. They wanted to be able to take immediae action as soon as they made up their mind. The B2B audience wanted to know their plan members would be able to easily use the website. A plethora of CTA’s was determined to be the solution to both problems.
Cost of care was a huge point of curiousity for the target audience. Reducing excess verbiage and eliminating photopgrahy as a design element here allowed pricing to be easily seen and understood, even on mobile devices.
Featuring accepted insurances reduced the B2C’s hesistancy towards action pertaining to cost.
Featuring the website’s four services not only communicated value to the B2B audience, it allowed for the opportunity to link to content hubs, increasing time on site.
In order to establish legitmacy, the photo of the Chief Medical Officer Eric Weil helped put a single face on an a website and organization that otherwise features many. This conveys a sense of accountability and trustworthiness.
Instead of linking people to the mental health service page, we linked to mental health information. This provided a value-rich pathway to the service for users who self-selected to go that direction.
Less is often more, especially with testimonials. By reducing excess text in this area, and the amount of testimonials displayed at one time, each review is easier to read and its content is thus worth more.
The page closes with driving traffic to the app, which will itself be a portal for account registraion.
Ringmaster
Ringmaster wanted to make clear their status as revolutionaries in the stop-loss marketing field. However, they struggled to clarify their messaging.
Before
The original page featured an over abundance of text, none of which told a story or made salient the risk/reward proposition. It also lacked a human element, which helps people connect to material longer.
After
By adding a scrolling hero, not one but several human faces greet the audience at the top of the page. The core value props stand out better and the CTA’s are easily found.
Placing their story beneath a rotating carousel of CTA’s helped weed out audience members who weren’t looking to read but rather to act. It allowed for more quality time to spent reading.
Ringmaster’s value offer was more readily understood when given space to be seen.
We presented the value of their products by placing them side by side, which allowed the audience to determine the best match for themselves.
By creating a dedicated spot on the home page for social proof, Ringmaster had a spotlight for press releases it wanted to feature, while drawing the eye to whatever their most treasured review was at the time.
Having established their vision and social authority, this section captures their value offer to potential clients.
Much on the site is visionary, “Just imagine a world…” or “Stop-loss is in our DNA” for example. This low pressure, lead-gen CTA allows the audience to take a meaningful action, convert to lead, without having to overcome the risk/reward analysis that comes with picking up the phone or entering a credit card number. It allows a person to begin a more nuanced discussion specific to the individual that might not have begun were the micro copy a pressured “Act now” rather than “Submit”.
SlideGenius
SlideGenius’s website needed to speak to two meaningul audiences. Enterprise clients would support the company’s long-term growth. Start-ups helped build the company and still kept the lights on. Creating a website that spoke to both was difficult.
The static hero image did not feature or convey their design capabilities. The red and white color palette was intense and alarming. Image of Powerpoint slides were given depth, giving the impression they specialized in printed materials. CTA’s looked like self-destruct buttons.
SlideGenius had to appeal to multiple industries and companies at various degrees of success. The H1 strategy was designed to appeal to start-ups looking to raise capital. The supporting text attempts to address the wide range of audiences and deliverables that could be accomodated.
Many accounts began with marketing teams reaching out unable to make a deadline. For that reason, the phone number for the sales team and a lead-gen CTA were place immediately below the hero image. For those who are not ready to take immediate action, the company’s thee value props are immediately featured by a rotating carousel of their high-profile client’s logos.
This lead into a rotating carousel of testimonials from other high-profile clients. Following the lead-gen CTA was ”Trusted by over 3,000 international clients”, followed by logos, supported by specific testimony with names and faces, social proof is established by setting a very general tone and boiling it down into great specificity.
The direct appeal to enterprise clients is actually intended for both their audiences, as start-ups often see themselves on the path to being an enterprise themselves. This made the H2 word choice all the more effective with the start-up audience because it connected to both their short-term and long-term goals.
This apporach front-loads trust and credibility, so that whe the audience finds what they’re presumably looking for (the portfolio), they’re not only blown away by the design, they’re already convinced they trust SlideGenius to deliver.
Having proven the company’s design capabilities, the various presentation services were collected and demonstrated onpage before clicking off to specific landping pages.
The bottom of page showcases the avarious deliverables the comapny can provide, linking off to relevant landing pages showcasing portfolios. This helped increase time on site and session duration.
Anchor Trading
Anchor Trading was in corporate trade, and helped companies liquidate their assets more quickly. But they wanted to avoid any sense of urgency or high-pressure CTA’s.
A scrolling hero leads the page with the company’s central value props. The means of liquidating these assets was vast and somewhat imaginative. Opening at the highest conceptual level allowed us to reach the widest audience.
Having conceptually introduced the company, we move more into specifcs in the second module. This linked off to a list of assets the company purchased and how. Regarding “risk/reward” analysis, the “Learn more” micro copy is low-pressure, which matches the lack of clarity and specificity to this point. In essence, it’s okay to not understand because there’s little to lose.
The company truly had its own identity early on and the client very much wanted that reflected on the homepage. By linking to these posts we increased session duration for new visitors.
The second to last module is typically a sales-driven CTA. But the client preferred to continue educating the audience until they were compelled to use the contact information at the top and bottom of the page. This meant fewer leads but those of greater quality.
Ending the page on their commitment to working with Veterans rather than making a plea for new business exemplified the client’s integrity.
Landing pages
Obesity Research Institue’s Lipozene
Lipozene relied entirely on television advertisements to drive traffic to its website, even though the commercials mostly drove people to “call now”. Their largest purchaser did so somewhat impulsively, so they wanted page to facillitate those that were willing to buy the product, but not pick up the phone to do it.
The landing page begins by explaining and illustrating the product’s central claim, that Lipozene reduces body fat. Lipozene true profitability was that it was essentially a subscription service. So making the first delivery of the product seem like a good deal was essential.
The landing page begins by explaining and illustrating the product’s central claim, that Lipozene reduces body fat. Lipozene true profitability was that it was essentially a subscription service. Making the first delivery of the product seem like a good deal was essential.
Here, we were able to expand upon claims and how Lipozene worked in order to improve perception and understanding, while driving sales.
Even with two-minute spots, explaining gluccomannan, Lipozene’s chief ingredient, was a difficult task considering legal nuances. The landing page allowed us to expand on that messaging more.
The landing page also allowed us to better feature before and after photos, adding to the social proof and legitmizing Lipozene as a means of weight loss. By adding a mini-navigation to the bottom of page, exploration was encouraged and time onsite was icnreased.
Express Scripts’ Mobile App
Promoting the transition to digital and telehealth was a major short-term goal for the company.
We facillitated fast action for audience memebers who find the page with their minds already made up. We added a QR code to the top of the page for desktop users, and store buttons for mobile users to go directly to the app’s page. We created a warm tone with our choice of photography, which communicates value with a happy expression turned towards a mobile device.
Leveraging existing marketing material, we added an explainer video right after the top and the first CTA, to educate audience members who were not ready to take action.
We addressed common medications by adding them into our demo-images and designed the page to focus on value-props without competing with other design elements.
“At-home delivery” being one of the app’s greatest value-adds, we addressed that not only in explanatory copy, but by making that convenience clear through imagery.
Highlighting the millions of reviews and the app’s 4.8-star rating, we established social proof that app was a good investment.
Having developed a strong argument for action, we placed a second CTA at the bottom which captured the demo imagery from earlier in the page and connected people to the app store.
This final CTA is minimize bouncing at the bottom of the page. In order to keep people on the site who have already passed on two CTA’s, we felt the next best step was to educate the audience on Express Scripts’ corporate identity.
Evernorth’s Muscloskeletal Skeletal Resources
Evernorth struggled to find its voice with so many different partners and so many various solution. The trick was to find the audiences with the most relevant overlap between those two things.
As opposed to the Lipozene audience, this was not a reactive crowd. Potential clients could take 18 months to take action and they often wanted to be well informed before they did.
One of the greatest areas of overlap was for individuals who required musculoskeletal (or “MSK”) treatment. As such, the word was essential to our H1 strategy. Unfortunately, given the site’s style guides, we were not able to effectively pair it with imagery as the “musculoskeletal” tended to intrude on the selected image in mobile view.
As a solution, we placed the desired imagery next. This allowed us to pair it with humanizing the text that connected the content to the user.
This page allowed Evernroth to appear as an authoritative source on the subject, establishing trust with the audience.
The homepage struggled to speak to a specific audience. However, this page allowed us to speak more specifically to the value proposition that served the MSK-related audience. This meant more salient reasoning for the benefits of working with Evernorth. This section itself adds to the authority and sense of authenticity by linking to a new page focused specifically on providing care to this population.
Evernorth sought to blend empathy and technology into its brand. By explaining how their care was human-focused and data-driven, the largest purchasers (human resource decision makers or health plan leaders) who easily visualize how they would improve outcomes and lower costs.
Given the value the target audience placed on being informed, this page spends more time detailing how it delivers success.
Without a lot of CTA’s on the page, value propositions seem to have more value. Being hit with routine requests to “Act now” cause the reader to have their guard up, always asking, “Is this really worth it?” Without forcing the audience to ask that question by barraging them, they may more organically come to that decision.
Nearing the bottom of the page, the CTA feels more genuine. The micro copy “contact us” is inviting and without time-constraint.
As the target audience, human resource decision makers or health plan leaders, will likely not make a decision based on solely on the MSK-needs of their population, the bottom of the page links off to various service clusters within the organization to allow relevant exploration.