EdTech company overcomes backlog with website overhaul that refocuses strategy on targeted journey mapping.
Labster is an education technology company that develops interactive virtual labs to bolster STEM teaching in high schools, universities, and colleges. When I joined Labster’s marketing team, the company had recently acquired UbiSim, a virtual reality (VR) teaching platform focused on training nurses. Both platforms were category leaders to the credit of exceptional engineering, vision, and company leadership, however, the company websites struggled to keep pace with our ambitious marketing efforts.
The two sites were under two distinct management processes, with separate CMS systems, lengthy backlogs of requests, bare-bones templates to support campaigns, and frequent disruptions to our tracking and forms. On the strength of the tight collaboration I enjoyed across teams, the websites were centralized under my strategic leadership.
A year later, with a team of talented and committed colleagues, we rebuilt our web presence from scratch on a centralized platform. We not only restructured our foundations, but completed a full-scale rebrand, deployed best-in-class automation, and re-oriented our journey mapping around conversion.
Discover how we finally got ahead of our technical problems, and pivoted to a strategic focus on driving revenue.
Key Highlights:
When I joined Labster, neither website was on solid ground. There was limited support for spinning up campaign pages, performance tests were rock bottom (scoring as low as 19/100), and web content was mostly managed outside of the Marketing team. Labster’s website specifically was on a custom-built CMS platform, managed by a product team of over 6 engineers with a turnaround that was insufficient to meet the growing backlog of cross-organizational needs. That core development team was also the most impressive group of developers and engineers I observed in action, yet our custom CMS became a burden to the extent that the UbiSim team had decided to remain isolated on Wordpress, where forms and tracking broke with regularity.
This left us with a Labster site that was improving at a snail's pace, with limited capacity to respond to new requests, and a UbiSim solution that could barely maintain core functions, let alone envision a competitive roadmap aimed at revenue. Thankfully, our teams lacked neither the will nor the skillsets, and everyone was on board to revisit our approach.
"Under Mark’s direction as website owner, Labster was able to increase the number and quality of MQLs...Mark proved to be an exceptional leader through his collaborative approach. He frequently collaborated across functions, particularly with Marketing and Creative teams, fostering a culture of teamwork. Mark's creation of internal training materials further empowered our team, equipping them with the knowledge and confidence to excel in their roles."
My role in the website initially began as a Content Manager. I had been tasked with leading our K-12 content roadmap and had already identified key personas, pain points, and messaging hierarchies for our high school market. The natural next step for me was to isolate how these audiences engage with our website through behavioral analytics, and then propose ways to fold k-12 prospects into the broader lead generation strategy of our website. As I began working closely with the web team, I soon became the voice of broader marketing needs, and collectively, it became clear that we would never get ahead under the current technical constellation.
Based on the strength of our relationship and my experience in leading website migrations in previous roles, we agreed that I would become the principal stakeholder and work with the team to lead the transition. We migrated off of our custom CMS and into Webflow, which became our system of choice (also the CMS that this website is built on). Once the transition was successful, the website rested squarely within the marketing team. I then hired an agency to support our development and design needs long-term, enabling our engineers to transition back to product development, where they were sorely needed.
After our successful migration of Labster.com, the UbiSim team gave us their blessing to take on their site as well. For both websites, I configured our tech stack as follows:
Each tool was carefully chosen to serve a strategic objective and optimize impact on our website loadspeed and budget. I also built a consistent and accurate bank of tracking data to inform strategic planning, deploying several creative approaches to journey mapping that are worth mentioning briefly.
Using Goals (Key Events) to Isolate Persona Journeys
Through Marketo automation, we pushed different users to different destination pages based on how they self-identified when completing forms. This meant that we could isolate distinct users during moments of high purchasing intent (like a Dean completing a pricing form) and then work our way back to discover where they were coming from, how they engaged, and what content was most relevant to their conversions. We could also compare segmented website conversions with Salesforce conversions to evaluate which types of website users were most likely to translate through the funnel into revenue.
Leveraging Surveys for Qualitative Audience Insights
Because we had isolated high-intent audience personas on critical pages, we could also fire automatic surveys to ask different personas about their unique challenges and needs. In this way, our website automation also produced qualitative insights to inform our positioning. Everyone on the marketing team was invited to test any thesis, and help shape our next survey.
HotJar and Anchor Links
While there are many ways to test high-level value propositions, we also found novel ways to isolate key questions and hesitations inhibiting conversion. By structuring interactive FAQs and tables of contents to include key questions that might be holding users back, we could leverage our heat mapping to identify high engagement with key topics of interest. Topics with high volumes of clicks were, for example, addressed through new core pages, campaigns, or sections.
"I have leaned on Mark countless times over the past few years to help brainstorm creative solutions to the challenges I’m facing in my role. Overall, Mark is incredibly talented, hard working, and everything he delivers is always top notch. He goes the extra mile by building reports and digging into data to help inform strategy, as well as offering up any and all expertise that is asked of him, whether that expertise is directly tied to his role or beyond. Any team or organization would be lucky to have him as a member."
With our technical foundations rebuilt, we could shift our focus to supporting digital marketing in earnest. These efforts are too numerous to account for here, but several key projects are worth noting.
Both Websites Redesigned
Working with our designers, content leaders, and campaign managers, I designed and led a process of creative workshops to methodically rebuild each website, one page at a time. We rolled out new brand messaging and positioning, bolstered by market research carried out by a consulting firm. We also sharpened our positioning by correlating market research with audience data from our analytics and qualitative interviews with stakeholders in Sales and Customer Success.
SEO Taken to the Next Level
As the strategic leader of our SEO strategy, I steered our keyword research and writing towards opportunities that maximized potential for ROI, and baked sophisticated automation into our backend. Our organic multi-media content was cross-linked together by markers that automatically produced relevant content clusters, which bolstered SEO topic authority. Top-performing sources of organic conversions were aurtomatically surfaced on key pages, and lessons from successful pages were applied across larger categories to replicate conversion success.
Empowering Teammates with Standardized Templates
Our team had formerly been limited in terms of our ability to quickly deploy new webpages for campaigns and outreach. In former roles, I used platforms like HubSpot to facilitate a flexible system for outreach, but with Webflow, we were able to pursue much more ambitious automation. Below are several dynamic templates that we created:
Quickly Turning Around Large Scale Requests with Excellence
Once our website strategy matured, we were able to not only get ahead of our technical backlog, but also tackle large scale requests that we could never have supported before. For example, when a retention-focused user conference was planned by leadership, we were able to produce a dynamic, no-compromise virtual conference website in under a month, with flexibility to support multiple post-conference digital marketing efforts.
"Mark is an outstanding colleague who prioritizes getting things done quickly and well. At his time at Labster, Mark held a series of different marketing roles, always working on some new initiative to try to better center the customers' voice, improve the website, or optimize digital marketing results. He is a tremendous source of energy for the team, constantly learning, proposing improvements, and seeking the next big win for the Marketing organization."
In the end, our efforts drove improvements across the board, increasing organic traffic by 36% and organic conversions by 186%. These two data points only begin to demonstrate the transformational increase in marketing output that we were able to generate as a team, once we had solid technical foundations, processes, and strategies in place.
Moreover, leading the cross-functional behemoth comprised of the respective websites for Labster and UbiSim was immensely gratifying. It is genuinely fun to work with almost everyone across a company, fielding requests and leading high-stakes projects with teams that become friendships where everyone has each others’ backs. In professional life, few things can compare to great collaboration. It is a reward in and unto itself, and what motivates me to tackle the next peak.
Boston, MA
