Redesigning a B2B blog
Building success into a transformation project
Infor is an enterprise software company with tens of thousands of customers globally. Its websites receive millions of visits a year. And its blogs, while fueled by the smart thinking and insights of the company’s industry experts, were not building substantial followings or contributing to the business in a concrete way.
As the head of Infor’s internal creative agency, I led the team that worked to turn the blogs from an afterthought to a flagship asset.
The problems we set out to solve
Disconnected contributors maintained over 20 unrelated blogs for various product lines, industries and geographic regions — a structure which splintered Infor’s audience.
The audiences that did exist were small, of uneven quality and rarely made the leap to Infor’s corporate website.
There wasn’t a unified strategy for utilizing thought leadership to generate web traffic and build brand equity for the company.
There was no centralized editorial authority, planning or overall standards.
The blogs featured an antiquated design with poor UX across all devices.
The business didn’t see much value in the blog or have much appetite to invest in improvements.
In short, my creative team saw a huge opportunity to apply our skills and help the business by transforming its blogs to make them more relevant, findable, usable and ultimately more valuable to the company and its audiences.
What we did to set the project up for success
We defined the problem in a way that would minimize hard costs to solve and maximize the value of internal resources. This meant we would not lobby for a new CMS or any other tech upgrades, the costs of which to license or implement could kill the project.
We established success metrics that would engage the business. As part of the project we would start tracking the share of audience passed to the corporate site where visitors could learn more about Infor’s products and services.
We involved stakeholders from the get-go, and earned their enrollment in the revamp to help ensure responsiveness through the process and support of the finished product. Because blogs at Infor were created semi-autonomously in discrete departments, this got a range of voices and eyes engaged in everything we were doing. And it imbued our work with the diverse viewpoints necessary to authentically serve all contributors and audiences.
We set and stuck to an aggressive yet achievable timeline which included competitive research, multi-disciplinary planning, documentation, design and development. None of our work would be worth anything if we didn’t ship.
Our vision
A single, converged publication with a modern user experience across all devices.
An engine for lead generation and brand building.
A relevant publication that adds value to conversations about technology and business.
Success Metrics
We outlined how we would track performance at the outset. The metrics were simple and would produce actionable insights for individual blog contributors and business leaders.
+ Organic traffic
+ Engagement metrics
+ Crossover traffic to infor.com
+ Subscriptions
+ Return visitors
Demystifying how the blog was performing (both in comparison to its historic performance and highlighting differences from section to section within the new blog) would help publishers hone their content and delivery, and give executives a clear view of the blog’s value to the company. This focus on performance would result in a win-win-win scenario: better content for visitors, greater investment in the blog from the company and more opportunities for the business. A virtuous cycle of improvement.
Our process
This blog overhaul was designed to be much more than an aesthetic upgrade. In order to drive meaningful change we needed to address counterproductive organizational norms which culminated in a substandard UX, irregular and undocumented internal procedures, and low overall appreciation within the company for the power of thought leadership content to grow the business.
We built a foundation based on reality
There’s nothing more real than data
Our 6-month analytics overview provided a summary of traffic quantity and quality across all the blog properties.
It showed which blogs were getting visits, which were getting engagement and which seemed to be going nowhere.
The report gave stakeholders across the business a new appreciation for how data could be used to do more effective planning.
And it set the stage for a healthy competitive mindset. Blog contributors would now be able to compete against each other and themselves — striving for personal bests and raising standards among peers.
We articulated a strategy
The unified blog strategy brought all blogging activity at the company under a single banner and mission. This was designed to both support the productive activity already taking place on each individual blog, and provide a framework for deeper planning and higher expectations from everyone involved.
We showed how a properly executed blog would add exponential value to Infor:
Increasing brand awareness in a cost-effective way
Building brand equity with specialized audiences through industry-specific thought leadership
Helping to drive business development by providing relevant new audiences with straightforward routes to learn more about Infor products and services
And we described how a more effective blog would better serve visitors:
Helping prospective customers become more informed
Sharing specific insights and points of view on industry trends, technology breakthroughs and globally relevant topics
Providing high quality content through a beautiful, modern interface that works seamlessly on every device
It set universal goals for performance that could be shared up and down the business.
We recruited contributors from across the org to make it as accurate and comprehensive as possible, and improve the odds it would actually be adopted rather than gather digital dust.
We codified sensible guidelines
By unifying Infor’s approach to creating and distributing relevant and uniquely valuable content, the company would be better positioned to compete with the best business blogs on the internet and meet our goals of building an audience, sharing our ideas, and driving progress.
To this end, we drafted a content guidelines doc to provide recommendations and best practices for the creation, management, and publishing work-flow of the Infor Blog.
It was designed to empower blog contributors, content owners, marketers and strategy leads to ensure their content was relevant, findable, consumable and shareable.
The document provided guidance on content creation:
Style
Titles
Heads and subheads
Article length
Keywords
Metadata
Linking
Imagery & video
Resource assets
It also provided guidance on content management:
Publishing frequency
Category and tag usage
Use of featured stories
Content lifecycle
Publishing checklist
Sharing & promotion
Design
The design team employed an object-oriented UX approach to map the new blog structure.
Wireframes were produced at four breakpoints to ensure content consumption, and navigation would be effective on all potential devices.
The designs were iterated on internally, shared with the extended team for feedback, and tested through clickable prototypes.
This process made it easy for a wide range of contributors to see how new editorial and user experience concepts would work so they could contribute useful input and refine the ideas.
The vision, made real
By freely sharing their expertise with the world in a more productive way, the people of Infor will add greater insight to global conversations, attract a growing audience to their ideas, demonstrate the value they represent, and ultimately build their business.
The new blog is currently in dev production and editorial planning, with a launch scheduled for spring 2018.
Thanks to an industrious team: Manisha, Anne Marie, Jennifer, Josh, and Vanessa.
My role: creative director & project sponsor
Learn more about me at my website
