Wordland Design is a digital content strategy agency with talented team members across the U.S. We believe strategic content is essential to meeting business goals.
Wordland helps organizations decide what to say and how to say it.
Case Study: SharesPost.com
A high-tech financial marketplace connects with new audiences
Website by CarbonFIve
“The end result was a clear value prop that appeals to multiple user groups.”
Redesigning a website for many audiences
SharesPost wanted to redesign their website to create a content-driven platform to attract new investors interested in buying and selling private securities. At the same time, SharesPost was ready to introduce new trading capabilities—cryptocurrency—in their marketplace.
In 2018, brought into the project by our long-term design and dev partners Carbon Five, Wordland started working with the SharesPost leadership team to prioritize the key audiences they were trying to reach.
They educated us about SharesPost’s history and deep expertise as we refined the financial services branding attributes and competitive positioning together.
A clear new architecture
Once target audiences had been established, as well as the business goals for the site, we focused on restructuring the information architecture of the new site, which needed to address many audiences and bridge the gap between investors already interested in trading cryptocurrency and large conservative financial firms who were less interested.
We collaborated with SharesPost and CarbonFive to reflect the financial services brand strategy in every element of the site: from the marketing pages; to the global navigation; to thought leadership; to the content investors see when they’re signed into SharesPost.
What do people get for signing up?
While determining how best to restructure the site, one of the main challenges to navigate was the issue of a content “paywall.” Membership in the SharesPost Marketplace is free. The question was, how much should be viewable without signing in? What content should be available only to registered users or accredited investors?
Wordland tackled this challenge by creating a strategy and member benefits grid for tiered content. We clarified the calls-to-action to guide new audiences through the site into the SharesPost product, encouraging them to sign up for the next tier at each step.
Content to attract and retain new customers
SharesPost has fantastic research, analysis, and marketing teams, so the previous site was rich with useful information. The challenge was: How to organize blog pages, research articles, and reports so they reflected the updated brand–and were easier to read and navigate?
After defining shared topics through a series of collaborative card-sorting workshops with different SharesPost teams, we recommended a clear set of content themes. You can see these tags reflected in the filter drop-down on their Insights page, and in every article and report across the site.
We 💜 conversions
With proof points to reassure at every step, the new site gives SharesPost a platform to reach investors who will love the private market insights and analysis available in the SharesPost marketplace.
Before
After
