Increasing client conversions through a portfolio website

We built a website that presents TAYO's services, portfolio, and story to aid them in securing potential clients and partners for projects and events.

Organization

TAYO Creative Consultancy

Duration

Oct 2020 - Dec 2020

Scope

UX Research, Wireframing, Prototyping, UX Writing, Interaction Design, Usability Testing, Project Management

Role

I was both the project manager and a UX designer for this project. I worked with another UX designer and two software engineers while building this website.

Results

Since the launch, client acquisition has doubled, with the consultancy securing more projects and partners.

TAYO lives by its mission to to cultivate collaboration and innovation amongst people for positive impact and sustainable change.

TAYO prides in its being run by youth who advocate for a better tomorrow — one where people and planet live together harmoniously and in unity. With corporations and organizations continuing to search for better ways to function in a sustainable and aware manner, TAYO positions itself as the bridge that connects them to the next generation of world leaders, dreamers, & thinkers.

While a network and connections have effectively placed TAYO in the market as a go-to partner, the company struggled to differentiate itself as a consultancy for hire, with people confusing TAYO for its subsidiary non-profits like Kids for Kids PH, Kamalayan, and Habilin. The question of, "NGO or enterprise?" would come up with potential clients and partners. At the same time, the youth aspect of the consultancy also brought a few barriers and hesitation from bigger companies, bringing credibility and reputation into question.

With these in mind, we thought...

How might we make the website digestible and informative enough for potential clients to see the consultancy's credibility and experience, so that TAYO may secure more clients and partners?

Designing the website

Talking to past and potential partners

We wanted to gain an understanding of the behaviors, needs, & motivations of representatives from companies and organizations when considering partnerships with other groups or consulting agencies. By doing so, we could also get more context on the dynamics of their management and decision-making, allowing us to find points to tackle and touch on in the website's design and content. We also made an assessment of how clients understood and perceived TAYO with its current presence on social media, to aid the consultancy in the positioning of their company website.

Some key takeaways we got from these conversations were:

Our research allowed us to conclude that the potential users of the TAYO website need to be as straightforward and concise as possible. We had to present TAYO as a consultancy for hire through existing projects, past clients, and a portfolio that clients could use to assess the fit of TAYO with a company's campaign needs.

These new insights led us to ask...

How might we set TAYO apart from its subsidiaries, so that the company is seen as a consultancy and not a non-profit organization?

How might we present TAYO's past projects and client work, so that experience and credibility is clearly shown?

Identifying what the website needed

As with most projects, the most difficult part of building the TAYO website was balancing the needs of both the users and the business. Our stakeholders at TAYO brought in a lot of requests and needs that we had to balance out with what we uncovered in our research. We did this by placing said requests and findings on a prioritization matrix, allowing us to identify what to include for this iteration of the website in the short amount of time we had.

Past Projects and Client Work

Potential clients need to see a portfolio, so we created a whole section on the website dedicated to showcasing the past projects and client work TAYO has engaged in since its start. We separated client work from the TAYO projects under the subsidiaries to create a distinction and to avoid confusion, while still showing that these are the things and services that TAYO can do.

Detailed Services

Potential clients were unaware of the different services that TAYO could do, with their perception being limited to the company's event management and execution. To clearly present what TAYO offers, we created a section in the home page that showcases these services on a surface level, in addition to an entire page in the navigation that dives deeper into TAYO's offerings and unique selling propositions.

Social Validation

To add to the credibility of TAYO as a consultancy, we added a section to show TAYO's community of partners and clients, or as they'd like to call it — their Barangay. Our research showed that companies usually look for past clients as part of their assessment on partnerships with consultancies. Together with these logos, another section of the website presents the number of partner communities and social media reach of TAYO to add to the social proof of the company.

TAYO's Unique Selling Propositions

A big question that came from our research was, "What sets TAYO apart from other agencies?" TAYO positions itself as unique in terms of being youth-driven and planet-driven, and we had to communicate that throughout the website. Besides the copywriting spread out through the website, we dedicated an entire section to present what TAYO does differently from traditional agencies and consultancies.

Iterations made after usability testing

The usability tests uncovered problems with the copywriting of the platform, which were easily resolved after speaking more with the stakeholders and the potential users. For example, the "Our Barangay" section initially did not have a description that went along with it, which caused some confusion for users due to the lack of context. We solved this by adding rephrasing it to "Our Community" and adding a short description of who the companies are under the section.

The biggest issue we got was the lack of a direct means to request for TAYO's portfolio. Initially, users had to use the "Contact Us" page to request for the portfolio, but a lack of a clear call-to-action to do so caused confusion with our test participants. This issue led us to ask...

How might we aid potential clients in contacting TAYO for its services to guide them into securing TAYO as a consultancy to partner with?

Portfolio Request

To aid interested clients in reaching out to TAYO, we decided to create a separate portfolio request form to allow them to directly send an email with TAYO's needed information. This lessens the friction and steps needed, as clients won't need to manually create an email on a separate platform. The submissions for this form were connected to a Google Sheet and were set to automatically send emails to TAYO's account. We added a clear call-to-action on the hero section and a link to this form in the footer present in all pages to direct users to this page.

Results

After close coordination with our engineers and the deployment of the site to production, we were able to help TAYO gain the following since the website's launch:

Key Learnings

While we consider the project a success, there were still a few things we could have improved on to work on the website more efficiently:

Special thanks to Franz, Renzo, and Beli

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