Background
After 40 years of commercial lending, the pioneers of loan origination software (LOS) at Baker Hill were ready for an upgrade. Having lasted through three iterations of the company, remaining open through the 1980s markets, 9/11, and the housing crisis, Baker Hill has always found ways to adapt, helping their customers, and communities succeed.
Baker Hill provides technology for a seamless and efficient lending process to drive banks’ and credit unions’ continued success and profitability. In order to continue providing a superior experience for their clients, they recognized their website’s vital role in communicating their value and growing their audience—and reached out to Solid Digital for help.
Approach
Baker Hill was ready to redesign the website to better communicate its value proposition, engage their key audiences, and drive business growth. Since the previous site had been built on a proprietary CMS platform that was being sunsetted, Baker Hill’s move to migrate the site was one of necessity and function. Moving to WordPress for their CMS creates flexibility and supports the storytelling and lead generation they desired for their next era of growth.
After creating a website revision plan full of whats, whys, and responsible parties, Baker Hill was ready to evolve into the latest (and better) version of themselves.
The team at Baker Hill continuously challenges themselves to improve, to better serve their employees, clients, and communities—and specifically wanted to focus on making their clients the heroes in their website messaging.
Strategy
To continue their evolution, Baker Hill desired to accomplish these overarching strategic goals:
- Optimize back-end workflow and CMS to empower the marketing team;
- Streamline site architecture and navigation to support key user journeys; and
- Deliver targeted, persona-based content through the power of storytelling.
Along with client-centric storytelling, Solid Digital worked alongside Baker Hill to accomplish the following outcomes:
- Easy-to-use CMS: Optimized back-end workflow and CMS to empower the marketing team
- Streamlined site architecture and navigation: To support key user journeys
- Persona-based content: Ability to deliver content using storytelling
- Improved visual design: More engaging, interactive elements
- Insightful analytics: Along with dashboards to measure content performance
- Scalable and adaptable platform: To accommodate future growth and provide a foundation for marketing efforts
Process
With the new site, a refreshed brand identity was needed. And along with that came better user journeys, defined content pillars, focused landing pages and messaging that zeroed in on Baker Hill’s expertise.
A Fresh Identity and Strong Content Pillars
Baker Hill needed visuals to showcase their personality, keep their voice and tone consistent and communicate their values. To that end, Solid’s team helped Baker Hill put together content pillars—themes throughout the website messaging that would tell Baker Hill’s story along with visuals to go with them.
As Baker Hill wrote their content (and Solid Digital aided with copyediting and recommendations throughout the process) they focused on the community impact, approachable expertise, client-centric solutions, innovation and evolution, trusted partnerships, and helpfulness for their target audiences – community banks and credit unions. Through showcasing Baker Hill’s positive impacts and detailed priorities, clients should be able to see themselves in the story Baker Hill continues to tell.
Along with client-centric storylines, Baker Hill also focused on how their differences help their clients, with customizable, cloud-based lending software on an all-in-one platform.
Baker Hill took on much of the image creation, while Solid Digital helped guide with wireframes to show where and what kinds of images were needed. Solid’s team also provided image export best practices to help ensure the site backend was as clean as possible.
Focused Landing Pages
On the previous iteration of the site, the rationale behind using loan origination software (LOS) created by Baker Hill wasn’t always clear.
So Solid Digital recommended creating hyper-focused landing pages to identify the Why, as well as who and how Baker Hill helps. With two different audiences in mind, two unique “why” pages were used: The “Why Baker Hill?” page differentiates Baker Hill from others, encouraging potential clients to switch (for the audience that is already using something similar), while a “Why Use an LOS?” page targeted those less familiar with the software in general. Baker Hill included the client experience to show their understanding of clients’ pitfalls and showed off their powerful ecosystem as the solution—with measurable results and outcomes from those stories.
To better engage visitors, the visual presentation was vital to keep users’ attention while they took their new pathways. The bulk of the visuals landed on vibrant green and deep blues, and were aided by a few eye-catching patterns and details, including a fun homage to banker-style argyle-patterned socks and cut-out notches that referenced manila folders.
With specific colors and patterns assigned to particular resources, users will have an easier time creating associations in specific categories. The Baker Hill design team chose the icon library, ensuring they’d be able to expand the icons as they add new software and capabilities.
Expertise on Parade
To best show off their software and put the client at the center, Baker Hill worked to showcase their expertise in ways that were helpful for website visitors. Using thought leadership throughout their resources (which was mostly migrated from the previous site, with some parts recreated) aided this effort.
Additionally, in order for users to discover the content, Solid Digital carved out a stronger SEO strategy through competitor analysis, helped guide better messaging with customer and stakeholder interviews, and crafted a targeted content strategy with keyword research. Through highlighting customers in case studies and testimonials, the content continued to show Baker Hill’s trustworthiness along with its shared success with past and current clients.
Clear(er) Journey Paths
On the new site, a variety of calls to action throughout the pages and overall site bring users to the request a demo page. Additionally, the Solutions mega dropdown navigation provides plenty of options for site users to obtain the exact info they need. With the previous demo page, external landing spots had complicated the journeys, so Solid Digital reworked the wireframes to standardize those pathways and make them more consistent.
By crafting clearer user journeys, Baker Hill could show off additional solutions to specifically defined user roles—furthering their helpfulness and versatility.
Challenges
Throughout the project, Solid Digital and Baker Hill worked together to solve a variety of challenges. One such difficulty: The visuals. With a large team at Baker Hill with collective decision making, it took time to dial in the final visuals and hero graphic, but with the help of Solid’s team the visuals were refined to communicate just the right message.
Another particular challenge was focusing on Baker Hill as a whole host of solutions, rather than only software. In combining their technology and banking expertise, the website update reflected the change in products and their restructured solutions. This is where the new user journeys came in—for both larger and smaller institution bankers with particular roles. Solid Digital helped create pathways for users seeking out-of-the-box products as well as specifically tailored solutions.
Results
Baker Hill is excited with the new website’s flexible CMS and the way it centers its clients in the story, whether through the messaging, the user pathways, or through the new architecture focused on the solutions (rather than just the software).
To make it clear to the entire Baker Hill team just how big of a deal a new website is for the organization, there was a company-wide event in which Baker Hill’s CEO, marketing team and the Solid Digital team joined forces in a website presentation and toast to the new website and hard work of everyone involved.
It was a great way to cap off our website project together and prepare for the next phase of Baker Hill’s growth as our partnership continues through Digital Growth Marketing and Website Maintenance and Support.
