You may have noticed our Hub had a bit of a makeover. We’re still the same old Uberflip, but we’ve had a little work done ;)  I mean, we’re nothing if not ever-evolving.

It’s a project that’s been in the works for a while (we’ve been making small changes since January of this year!). And we’re excited to finally show off our new look.

Our changes aren’t superficial. They’re not change for change’s sake.

Instead, we looked at visitor data, best practices, and the results other B2B marketers were seeing to guide our changes. Our decisions are based on data, and our solutions are based on educated assumptions that will be tested in the weeks and months to come. So without further ado...

Let’s Break Down Our New Look!

(Click and drag your mouse from side to side on the image below to see the before and after versions of the Uberflip Content Hub.)

Beyond aesthetic changes like upgraded tile images, the improvements we’ve made optimize our content experience for those visiting our site and for the business. Some changes you’ll notice right away and some are much more subtle. But our top improvements centered around three main areas:

1. Site navigation
2. Featured content
3. Customer stories

We Switched Up Our Topline Navigation

Take a look at our old navigation. We had eight menu headings and extra-long drop-downs with as many as 10 items! That’s a lot. And it worked for us when our goal was to expose as much content for as wide an audience (of marketers) as possible. It also helped us rack up content views.

BEFORE

But when we looked at the data we saw the top-performing menu headings included topics, resources, events, and customer stories. While we had a long list of drop-down items, a lot of people were clicking on the search button. People weren’t finding what they needed in the current navigation. Could our extra-long list of options be too intimidating? It’s a fine balance between exposing content for discoverability and overwhelming your audience with too many (and irrelevant) options.

Our new topline nav is cleaner, clearer, and highlights what our users look for most. It prioritizes topic-based discovery over resource type, keeps the most-clicked-on sections up top, and removes what’s no longer relevant from our menu and drop-downs.

AFTER

What’s more, our target audience has shifted, and so too should our Hub navigation. Based on our updated buyer personas, we removed topics that were no longer relevant to our target personas (and subsequently had fewer clicks) and kept what made sense for our updated target demographic.

The search bar stayed put, of course, and we added a single field email signup form to collect information from the traffic we were driving to the Hub.

We Featured the Most Relevant Content “Above the Fold”

Ahhh back to my newspaper days with that “above the fold” reference :)

The home page (or stream as we call it) had a high bounce rate. A lot of visitors weren’t getting past the first two rows of tiles on our Hub, what’s referred to as “above the fold,” and they weren’t clicking into articles. In fact, the heat-mapping tool we used showed us that a whopping 90 percent of visitors dropped off above the fold. We weren’t capturing their attention.

So what were these visitors seeing? A mix of thought leadership content, super top-of-the-funnel stuff, podcasts, and guest blogger articles. A really strong asset or two, but it wasn’t as optimized as it could be. And with the exception of that first piece of content, each tile was given equal weight, meaning each piece of content was given equal importance.

BEFORE

Instead of a smattering of latest content with each one as important as the next (as seen above), we zeroed in on the four most important topics to our prospective customers (lead generation, sales enablement, ABM, and content marketing) and put those front and center. Then, to show them more on those topics, we listed out additional titles to provide more options and surface more content than the tile format would allow.

AFTER

This new design allows us to lead (always) with our foundational or pillar content first—the topics we want to be known for—while still including content relevant to marketers more generally “below the fold,” or in the section below.

Our hope is that the new home page of our inbound Resource Hub will help us capture the attention of those with pain points we solve for. Reducing bounce rates is nice, but only if we are capturing the right audience for our business.

We Sprinkled Customer Stories Throughout

Our customer stories Stream is one of the most popular on our Hub, with high views and high engagement. I know, I know. We’re pretty lucky. But while our amazing customer stories were prominent in the topline nav of our old Hub, they weren’t organized by use case or pain point and you had to actively seek them out to find them.

BEFORE

At the same time, we wanted to find a way to connect Uberflip the product with our Resource Hub, while still providing quality education and value to those seeking it. Our customer stories were the perfect middle-of-funnel content, we just needed to be more targeted with our best stories, and ensure they were in view for the right person should they want to read or watch them.

The answer (for us) was a new kind of tile for our topic streams—one that looked similar to a banner ad and would stand out against the other content tiles. We didn’t want to be too in-your-face with our MOFU / BOFU content so we put the new tiles below the fold. That way if visitors read a few pieces of awareness stage content and were considering solutions, they could be enticed to click into a customer story to see how other marketers had solved similar challenges.

AFTER

Customer stories are a nice, non-intrusive way to tie your product back to your content or resource hub. Yes, they help you sell your product or service, but they also offer real value to those looking to learn from their peers. Who doesn’t love a good look under the hood of our peers’ best-performing marketing campaigns?

But That’s Not All

Beyond the above changes, we created even more contextual CTAs, ditched the website navigation, moved the demo request to the footer, the list goes on and on and on…

Can you spot the differences? 👀

One thing to note is that these Hub changes would not be possible without:

• Research and data from Google Analytics, our Hub metrics, our buyer journey map and persona research, the heat-mapping tool Hotjar;
• UX design principles to consider the user experience at every turn and what makes the most sense for the end user;
• Front-end development to turn Uberflip’s Hub into an alternate version of itself; and,
• Patience as our team tagged (no joke) 2,000 pieces of content and created smart filters to automate and scale the creation of these super targeted experiences.  

In the end, we’re overjoyed with the new Hub experience and hope you love it as much as we do. After you take a look around, we’d love your feedback! As we mentioned, we turn to data and our users to influence our decision making.

What are you waiting for? Go take a peek at Uberflip’s brand new Hub