How website redesign drove measurable business value for a leading artificial intelligence company.

An Ironpaper Client Success Story.

Arago (www.arago.co) has an underlying mission to give people back the time they are currently spending in mindless processes—helping to drive more value from human endeavors. What they do with operations automation is reminiscent of what Ironpaper does for its clients using the HubSpot platform to drive business results using Inbound Marketing and Growth Driven Design.

Arago, fourth in Crunchbase’s list of top artificial intelligence startups in the world, uses their leadership position to help unlock innovation in B2B enterprises. Originally founded over twenty years ago, Arago builds artificial intelligence that automates enterprise IT operations to an extent not seen before. The company’s HIRO™ product is an AI engine with human problem-solving skills taught by experts. This provides actual humans the capability to focus their valuable time on the pursuit of furthering innovation in the enterprise.

Similarly, Ironpaper’s approach to inbound marketing and growth driven design uses HubSpot to give our marketing team and the client the skills and abilities needed to move lead generation, lead qualification and sales enablement forward.

The Challenge

Although Arago is a pathfinder in the world of enterprise machine learning, the company is competing for a massively expanding market with other dynamic players. According to Tractica, the enterprise AI market is estimated to be worth around 360 million U.S. dollars worldwide in 2016 and is expected to grow to $31.2 billion by 2025. Monetizing machine learning is an explicit challenge for the industry. Arago struggled to use their website to attract the right types of prospects and drive them to convert on the site.

Simply having an attractive website didn’t help. Arago needed its website to drive business opportunities so engineers could focus on building its AI engine.

Another challenge further hindered Arago from deriving sales opportunities from its website. The website was hard coded and lacked the ability to run marketing experiments, drive dynamic personalization, and benefit from frequent updates. Arago provides their customers with an agile product, so it only makes sense that they have an agile website.

The Design

The original website missed the power and value of Arago. For such a ground-breaking AI company, their website needed to be a reflection of their value to enterprises. The website needed to inspire, educate, explain and convert. We needed to tell the story of a complex technology's benefits and possibilities, without sounding too prosaic or heavy handed.

We decided to use visual content alongside streamlined messaging and the core written narrative to present Arago to enterprises. The new website would need to make an impact, while utilizing the dynamic marketing features of HubSpot to drive qualified leads.  

Process Matters:

Growth Driven Design Aligns Design and Marketing Efforts

Rather than employing a one-and-done approach to website design, we felt a Growth Driven Design methodology would allow us to be more adaptive and generate sales leads faster. We have found the more Ironpaper embraces a Growth Driven Design mindset, the more our clients benefit. Growth Driven Design is built upon on the “launch fast; launch often” mindset, which reduces the risk associated with a highly exhaustive design process that can lead to a poor performing site.

Key points for the website redesign:

• The first version of the website launched within a month.
• The new website had to conform to German privacy standards, as the company is based in Germany but serves a global enterprise business audience.
• The website needed to use SSL encryption, which HubSpot COS supports with great ease. The security protocol is important to Arago’s target buyers, as it demonstrates trust, security and privacy.
• Based on conversion assist data from HubSpot reporting, we rolled out additional features, content, calls-to-action and updates to messaging in subsequent “launches.”
• HubSpot's COS for content management allowed for dynamic personalization, powerful analytics and the ability to run agile marketing tests.
• The streamlined navigation used for phase one was later expanded to include a more robust offering to better educate buyers.
• HubSpot served as the marketing infrastructure to drive improved reporting, lead acquisition, lead vetting, nurturing programs, and detect lead behavior on the website.
• The simplified value proposition created for the initial launch was later enriched to more clearly align the company’s mission and its target persona value proposition.
• A lean site spotlighted benefits for two core audiences: technology buyers and business buyers. This approach was later expanded to include more specific business cases: IT Service Providers, Banking, Telecom, and Enterprise IT.
• The website's style and design evolved to inspire buyers by helping them envision the opportunities present with machine learning and AI.

Business Value Driven by the New Website

By designing a website that ‘speaks’ the language of Arago’s target personas, the site became a top lead generation source for the company. Lead generation has increased 1600% since the site launch. Additionally, leads generated from the site are more specific and relevant to Arago’s sales pipeline—fortune 500+ enterprise IT buyers.

The website now quickly presents a case of how Arago outpaces competitors with its script-based run-book automation.

Knowing how important numbers are to Arago’s target audience, we highlighted key data points while utilizing CSS transitions. This allowed us to clearly showcase the business impact of Arago’s technology, calling direct attention to the points that are the most significant to potential customers.

Speaking the language of the target audience has prompted site wide conversion rate to increase from 0.2% to a more healthy 1.8%, and the conversion rate continues to climb.

We are proud of the website, but as is true to any Growth Driven Design and Inbound Marketing practice, we view this site as a continuously improving platform. We foresee even greater success for the website and our client, Arago, in the months to come.

Please feel free to take a look for yourself: www.arago.co.