When turning to us, most customers want to improve the external appearance of their IT product. Many of them do not understand that only presenting beautiful graphics is not enough to generate leads and new customers. It’s better to solve the problem in a more complex way — to present the business in a new “package”. I will illustrate this idea through our client’s case. We helped him to increase sales by 25% and created a universal structure for a landing page, which became a reference for later landing pages. In this article, you’ll read about our deep immersion in the activities of the customer and solving his problem with the help of “business packaging”.

Immersion in ISDEF

To begin with, let’s conduct a small experiment. Click and look at the screenshot of this site. Try to guess what is at issue, for 30 seconds:

Sure, you might learn something about the software developers’ conference. But what impression did you get?

The ISDEF site looked like this in 2013. Anyone who got saw it for the first time then closed the tab lost a chance to learn about a unique and interesting niche conference in the CIS. Now click and look at the next screenshot for the same 30 seconds. Ask yourself the same question: “What is this site about?”

This is the packaging we created for the ISDEF spring conference, which allowed us to increase the number of participants by 25%

Here’s more about how we made it.

A few words about the conference and the customer’s problem

The ISDEF Association is a forum of independent producers and suppliers of software and services. For more than 15 years, once a year, this association gathers owners and top managers of IT businesses, the people who create or are starting to create software products, applications or services.

Since the site did not bring in customers, the conference participants mostly learned about it through the interest club — a place where people gather to discuss a certain common interest — which was organized by the ISDEF. Every year, the number of participants decreased.

In 2014, when the number of participants reached a critically low level, I, as an ardent admirer of this conference, volunteered to help the organizer and create a new package for the upcoming event.

Packaging a business means working on how to talk about your business so that a potential customer has a desire to buy. The task of packaging is to work out all the advantages of the business to identify its most powerful aspects. After that, you can correctly present them to the client with the help of high-quality and understandable graphics.

Simply put, we should not only create beautiful graphics, but plunge also headlong into the customer’s business problem, understand the reasons why the site does not generate leads, develop a concept, prototype, add triggers and marketing chips, and wrap it all up in a quality design. In this case, it involved creating a landing for those who knew nothing about the conference and convert leads into real requests.

Concept development

The first thing we had to do was to identify the conference’s advantages and distinctive features. Usually we call up the customer or his best salespeople and ask 101 questions about the business. But this time it was different. I was a member of the ISDEF and knew its strengths well. I felt its atmosphere — from the moment I registered an application for participation until the last glass at the after-party. So I did not have to pester the organizers with long questions about their business, talk about who participates in the conference, how it operates, what is beneficial about it, etc. The task was only to highlight the main thoughts and collect all this in the prototype of the landing.

Writing text

Our copywriter has written clear and understandable texts that convey the basic idea for the landing.

1. Emphasizing importance

We stressed the importance and frequency of the conference in the descriptor itself, on the first-page spread.

This made it clear that the spring conference was the 11th edition, which gave the event more value in the eyes of the newcomer

2. Explaining what it this

On the second slide, a new user could quickly find the answer to the question of what the conference is about and who it’s meant for.

This slide provided full information about the aims of the conference and its participants

3. Dividing the participants into categories

We painted in detail who would be interested in taking part in this event, so users could easily relate to one of the categories and not doubt that participation would be useful to them.

4. Adding values to speakers

All the skills and achievements of the speakers were detailed to increase the credibility of each of them in the eyes of potential participants

5. Allocating 10 advantages of participation

We described 10 advantages of participation in plain language, understandable by the target audience. For example:

Slide with 10 reasons to go to the conference

Quality Design and Usability

1. Clear design

We chose a simple, understandable and user-friendly design in the color gamut of the conference logo. Now all thoughts became structured.

2. Calls to action

We added a call to action by highlighting the CTA (call-to-action) buttons in contrasting colors. Earlier, there was no explicit call on the site, and the user did not understand what to do next with the received information.

3. Icons

Special icons were created to make information visually perceived and easily remembered.

Icons were also created in the logo’s colors

Marketing and trust triggers

We added a number of marketing chips to the site to increase the conversions from the landing. Here are some of them.

1. Form for collecting email addresses

On the first screen of the landing, in the upper right corner we placed a button and a sign-up line for the opportunity to subscribe to conference news

We thought like this: A user, for whom this conference is still new, is unlikely to make an instant decision about participating in it. After he enters his email, he will be reminded of the upcoming event and will be able to reconsider his participation.

2. Reference to previous conferences

One thing we wanted to convey was that that the conference has been held for several years. We had already emphasized this in the text, but I wanted to add something else.

We placed links to previous conferences in the upper left corner

Now newcomers would understand that this is an annual serious event, and be able to click and see how it usually goes.

At the end of the landing, we also added materials from previous events so we could dig deeper into the conference topics

3. Feedback from participants

On our own initiative, we have filmed video reviews of previous conferences. So, on the landing site, there was trigger content and stories about the event from participants.

Another trust trigger: video reviews

4. Price policy

Earlier, all conference participants could buy a ticket at a single price, regardless of the date of registration. We suggested that the organizers to split the cost of participation into three prices, depending on how close the user’s registration was to the date of the event.

We wanted to increase the number of users registering in advance by using a three-tier pricing structure

Now there was a new trigger that prompted users of the site to make a decision faster and not to postpone it.

Why does business packaging work better?

After the creation of the landing, the 11th conference was the first spring conference; the number of participants began to grow. The percentage of visitors in 2015 grew by 25% compared to 2013.

We certainly cannot argue that such a successful outcome is only our only merit. However, this landing became a template for subsequent landings about the ISDEF conference. Since then, the number of participants at this annual event has continued to grow.

Little things have changed in 2017. Check it out it here http://2017s.isdef.org. The design is a bit trendier, but the concept and marketing chips remain in place.

This is the advantage of packaging a business. Trends in design change, and fashion trends change, but the users who come to your site are always the same. From the first second, they want to understand who you are, what you offer, what is different about it, and how to order or receive it. It is the semantic framework and the packaging of your business that has been thoroughly worked out on the basis that will remain relevant for many years, regardless of how its forms will change — be it a landing page, presentation, marketing kit or other promo materials. Effective packaging is not just beautiful graphics. It really can solve the problem of generating leads.