Founded in 1998, Oxford Creativity offers public TRIZ training and bespoke problem-solving consultancy. By 2018 Oxford Creativity’s website, had become sprawling, confusing, hard to navigate, and did not support Oxford Creativity’s business growth plans. Approaching D2e for a redesign, particular focus was placed on lead generation, simplifying core processes and supporting and powering their sales process.
D2e used a Growth Driven Design approach to design a new website which was easy to use, helpful and appealed to their scientific audience. Following launch their website went from generating no online contacts per month to 90 and an overall conversion rate of 3.4%!
Oxford Creativity’s complete website redesign delivers one system for generating and managing leads, whilst simplifying core process and supporting business growth.
Oxford Creativity are the leading TRIZ (The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) trainers and problem solvers in Europe. Founded in 1998 by Karen Gadd, with the mission of making TRIZ accessible to everyone, they developed Oxford TRIZ, which whilst true to classic TRIZ is a faster and simpler way to learn and apply it.
Oxford Creativity have successfully delivered and embedded TRIZ capability, innovation and problem solving in major global companies from a wide range of industries.
By 2018 Oxford Creativity’s website, which had evolved over many years, contained a great deal of excellent content but was like “Medusa’s hair”, sprawling, hard to navigate and not at all intuitive to use. As a result, it rarely generated online contacts, and absolutely did not support Oxford Creativity’s business growth plans.
In addition, Oxford Creativity did not have one single system for managing leads. creating a long and complex sales process and in fact many of their core processes, such as signing up for webinars and training courses, took a huge amount of time which could have been better spent elsewhere.
D2e began working with Oxford Creativity in late 2018. We began by understanding Oxford Creativity’s corporate goals - ultimately what did they want to achieve? – and how their new website could help deliver on them. Oxford Creativity wanted to increase numbers on their public training courses and grow their long-term pipeline for customised in-house training and problem-solving TRIZ programmes.
After evaluating these goals D2e and Oxford Creativity decided on three major goals for the website re-design, these were:
In addition to this we agreed it was important that the new website should retain Oxford Creativity’s distinctive branding and that it must be easy to edit, allowing Oxford Creativity to quickly and easily add new dates for training courses and webinars and remove old ones.
D2e recommended that Oxford Creativity build their new website on a HubSpot CMS. The HubSpot CMS is a great CMS for many reasons (read our top 8 here), but we suggested it to Oxford Creativity for the following four reasons:
D2e used a Growth-Driven Design approach to redesigning Oxford Creativity’s website because; it has a much quicker time to value compared with a traditional website design approach, it gives you time to learn about your website visitors through data delivering better results and it supports and is supported by the CMS Hub.
The Growth-Driven Design approach consists of three stages:
The aim of the strategy stage is to develop an empathetic understanding of your ideal customers, and their underlying needs. This stage develops a solid foundation on which to build your website. Next we deliver a Launch Pad website, this is a website looks and performs better than the old website but is not the final product. Once the Launch Pad website is live, we move onto the Continuous Improvement stage, where we identify and implement the most positive-impact actions, based on real user data.
Strategy
D2e started by understanding Oxford Creativity’s audience and their needs. This was done by both workshops with Oxford Creativity and interviewing current and former customers and working to develop buyer personas and an empathetic understanding of their ideal customer.
D2e learnt that Oxford Creativity’s customers’ needs broadly fall into two categories:
With this knowledge we could ensure the content on the website was tailored to these specific needs, making the website helpful for the customer and maximising lead generation.
By considering Oxford Creativity’s three main goals for the project D2e and Oxford Creativity then created a website Wishlist with all of the elements that we wanted the website to contain.
The website Wishlist included:
Once it had been generated the Wishlist was divided into ‘essential’ and ‘nice to have’, the essential list became the scope of the Launch Pad website and the things on the ‘nice to have’ list stayed on the website Wishlist for the Continuous Improvement stages.
Launch Pad
D2e designed a website which incorporated the colours from Oxford Creativity’s logo and used their signature cartoons and diagrams to ensure their distinctive style was not lost. However, by adding in more photos of real people, a cleaner white background and a clear navigation we created a great user experience for website visitors.
Additionally, we ensured that the website architecture made it easy for visitors to find the information they needed, with each page answering one question at a time and guiding visitors to the content that is relevant to them. This way the website guides visitors through the buyer’s journey while answering their questions, making visitors more likely to become leads and, ultimately, customers.
.png?width=600&name=Emma%20Quote%202%20(2).png)
D2e paid particular attention to the webinar and training course pages. These pages in particular needed to be flexible and easy to edit as Oxford Creativity add new webinars monthly and add and remove courses often. In order to achieve this, we created several templates and modules so the Oxford Creativity team could easily create, edit and delete well designed website pages. These pages also needed to help with registration, saving time and simplifying the process. D2e achieved this by creating landing pages for each training course and webinar Oxford Creativity offered.
In order to register, customers simply fill out a form, following which the relevant e-mail is automatically sent to them, requesting invoice and dietary information. Once this is returned it is simply a case of manually sending the invoice and joining instructions. This has sped up the sales pipeline, simplified the process and saved a huge amount of time.
The website launched very quickly, with no hiccups and was received very positively by Oxford Creativity’s existing customers.
Continuous Improvement
D2e and Oxford Creativity started the continuous improvement stage by focussing in on two goals:
Firstly, focusing on lead generation, D2e sorted content not already included in the Launch Pad website, into the two categories of Problem Solving and Innovation and into stages of the buyer’s journey. Once this had been done, we updated and re-branded the most relevant and helpful content for the new website.
Website visitors must now fill out a form to access this content, once they have done this a contact is created in HubSpot’s CRM giving Oxford Creativity a database of leads, segmented based on the actions they had taken.
A ‘Structured Innovation’ pillar page was also developed, which tied together relevant case studies and articles. By creating a topic cluster around Structured Innovation, D2e drove more traffic to Oxford Creativity’s new website, which in turn generates more online leads.
In other cycles of continuous improvement we put our efforts into lead nurturing, leveraging the contacts created in the CRM to create workflows to power the sales process. Initially D2e created three types of lead nurturing e-mail campaigns: one for webinar registration, one for customers who had attended training courses and one for visitors who had downloaded offers. These emails included links and videos recorded in Vidyard encouraging recipients to take actions which encouraged them along the buyer’s journey.
More recently we have revisited the website to update it in line with Oxford Creativity’s move to online training and problem solving.
Oxford Creativity had three major goals for the website re-design, these were:
Oxford Creativity’s website has achieved all these goals.
The website went from generating no online contacts per month to 90 and an overall conversion rate of 3.4%! These contacts are automatically entered into the CRM, segmented using lists and added to lead nurturing workflows. Oxford Creativity’s website has helped them to create a complete system for generating and managing leads and customers which requires very little management from them.
.png?width=600&name=Kate%20Quote%202%20(1).png)
By automating the registration for webinars and training courses D2e helped to simplify Oxford Creativity’s core processes, saving the team a huge amount of time and increasing their capacity.
Oxford Creativity’s website has been created and optimised to support business growth through maximising lead generation and nurturing customers through the buyer’s journey. Using the extensive traffic analytics and testing capability of the CMS Hub, D2e and Oxford Creativity can ensure they are delivering the right content at the right time. The website powers and simplifies the sales process, decreasing the time to customer and increasing the conversion rate. Additionally, the website is flexible, allowing Oxford Creativity to easily expand their offering as their business grows.
In conclusion, D2e transformed Oxford Creativity’s website into to a website which generates and manages leads and customers, simplified core processes and supports business growth.
