leaselab: Reinventing a brand online

leaselab is all about premium service. Founders Al and Jules are passionate about extending truly exceptional, high level service to everybody — not just the elite. And they offer something with the potential to be truly life changing: novated leases that save people eye-popping sums of money on getting a car, a necessity for many.

There are lots of novated lease providers, though. So what piqued our interest about leaselab? Other than their passion, down to earth approach and clear expertise, it was their reputation that resonated most. We reviewed feedback from some of their clients and the overwhelming consensus was that leaselab’s bespoke attention, and reassuring and patient guidance, put them at ease and made them feel informed. In an industry where most competitors are corporate, good at sales, but not so great at the customer experience beyond, it makes a huge difference.

But let’s rewind a bit. When we first started working with leaselab, they were called My Car Co. My Car Co. had a solid reputation with a loyal client base, but they were struggling to gain leads online and understand what was working and what wasn’t with their website. After all, they’re experts at novated leasing, not digital strategy. So they got in touch to find out how we could help.

How we helped leaselab

My Car Co’s digital transformation into leaselab was tackled across seven key stages. We’ll focus on each in turn (but feel free to click the links below to skip ahead).

1. A digital strategy to meet My Car Co’s challenges and goals — audience definition, a content strategy, customer journey map, a plan for search and everything else to follow

2. A strong body of new useful content — articles and guides to help My Car Co’s existing and future clients

3. A new brand identity to better match what the company stood for

4. A better user experience with consistent design and clearer page layouts

5. Consideration of some critical elements for conversion, including bespoke photography to aid relatability 

6. The new website, pulling everything together, with a seamless transition from the old site

7. A measurement plan and dashboard to ensure clear focus on ongoing optimisation

8. The results (so far)

Stage 1 — We started with a digital strategy

A good strategy, before diving into the ‘doing’, can be the difference between success and failure. If you don’t fully understand what you need to do and why you need to do it, there’s a good chance you’ll get lost along the way. 

Over some face-to-face sessions with the company founders, we got to know the business — how the product works, how the company started, what they thought they did well, what they wanted to do better and goals for the future. This was our orientation into the company, so we could form a deeper partnership and make their challenges our own.

We explored what competitors were doing and discussed the findings with My Car Co. We gauged how My Car Co. felt they were differentiating from the crowd and we started to unravel what My Car Co. really stood for — what qualities Al and Jules most valued and wanted the brand to embody — and ways they could have a unique presence in the market.

Digital strategy key actions

1. Utilising the reasons Al and Jules gave us for offering their services — and the moments where their eyes lit up and they got really excited — we pinpointed key brand values that would help steer thinking and keep it on course to be true to what really mattered. These would also be used to ground all content and keep it consistent across all channels and touchpoints, to always bring the user a sense of familiarity and comfort.

2. We conducted in-depth keyword research, which (alongside conversations with Al and Jules) informed a content plan of key articles to be written. This ensured that content produced later would not only be great for users but also met search demand and matched users’ search intent (what they were looking to learn about)

3. We defined a tone of voice for the brand, to echo the people the brand represents. This helps anyone writing content for the company to immediately understand the brand style and know what the brand stands for. Furthermore, it helps ensure that clients and prospective clients reading content from the brand will get the same experience they would in a conversation face to face with Al or Jules or anyone in the leaselab team.

4. We conducted a UX audit to identify what users might be struggling with and consider how their current site could be improved for user flow.

5. We mapped out a clear information architecture — a full map of the proposed new site structure and navigation, including recommended new content and where this content should live on the site.

We had as many sessions as were needed as a team at this stage, to walk through the plan and make sure everyone was comfortable with the direction. Once the plan was approved, we were ready to tackle content and brand.

Stage 2 — We crafted a body of compelling, persuasive and relevant content to meet user intent

We believe in creating content first. Getting your messaging right and crafting the content that your users are looking for is critical. When words are hastily assembled to match a design framework or technical limitation, results are rarely rewarding for anyone. So the first step in building the website was chipping away at the content we knew was needed and starting to consider key messaging on the site that would make the user experience clearer and more enjoyable.

Key actions

• Using our content plan (informed by keyword research and feedback from Al and Jules), we wrote and edited brand new articles to cover the topics users would be searching for. We used our tone of voice defined in the strategy stage to stay on track and build a body of information that would be consistent and familiar to the user.

• We defined clear briefs, and depending on the technicality of the content, we either directly wrote the articles (leveraging the knowledge we’d gained from our period of orientation with leaselab), or we gathered the key points from leaselab and then edited their work to formulate it into full copy.

• We ensured content was optimised for SEO (including Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions and URLs that are search engine and user friendly) and managed a content workflow to ensure the collaboration all ran smoothly.

Alongside our content production workflow, we got stuck into the tricky bit — the new brand name.

Stage 3 — We workshopped a new brand name and identity

It’s always a little nerve racking to come up with a new brand name, let alone change one. Understandably, a lot of focus is made of brand and what it immediately conveys to loyal users, prospective customers and company culture. And it is important — in a world of ever-decreasing attention spans and fiercely competitive markets, you want to stand out, with a name you can be proud of that accurately reflects who you uniquely are as a brand.

To us, brand strategy is a lot more than just a name. Names can sometimes seem random, or perhaps they look great on paper but are hard to convey in a verbal conversation. Some brand names are forgettable or too reminiscent of something else. But ultimately a brand will become synonymous with what the brand does. What does the brand stand for and does the brand act consistently on those values? How much do the people driving the brand care for team culture or customer experience? 

We love helping brands to find the right name that feels like a fit, and ultimately it needs to get everyone in the team excited that this mere ‘label’ can be much more — and accurately represent the real, hard work they do day in, day out, to make things better. 

My Car Co. had a nice enough name — it was friendly and helped convey quickly which type of service it offered (albeit not specifically). However, as we’d come to learn, Al and Jules stood for not just great service, but premium service for everyone, whoever they were — going the extra mile and providing a truly human experience in an industry that too often left the customer cold. In short, something fresh in the market. They also were excited by technical and product evolution, future thinking and what the novated lease experience could become in time. That is, innovation. My Car Co. didn’t convey these key facets of the brand identity, but a new name could potentially capture it better.

Our process for finding a new name:

1. We used creative exercises to brainstorm ideas — we ran a branding workshop to formulate name ideas, informed by the approved brand vision, purpose, difference and pillars (this was the fun part, leading to 120 brand name ideas).

2. We returned to the competitor landscape to determine where our brand should be positioned in the market from a strategic point of view and checked the viability of selected names to ensure we were choosing a name that was not only memorable, but also unique.

3. We refined our list to a selection of 10 viable names and put forward our preferred three (...and held our breath in anticipation of their decision).

On the journey, our partners really discovered who they are as a brand and what they stood for. The initial names weren’t quite right, we needed to pivot to work in a new direction. It was back to the drawing board. 

Collectively as a team we brainstormed again, looking for that elusive, perfect name that would capture the hearts of their customers’ searching minds. 

Finally — after much deliberation and many calls and sessions to get this right — we got a call from Al. Al and Jules had been inspired. The new name was born. 

It was leaselab. 

It’s fresh, stands apart from the crowd, speaks to their innovative nature, and conveys the novel premium service they offer. What’s more, it feels like the name of a company that will offer a customer experience for today. 

We were thrilled that the hours of effort and brainstorming exercises helped our partner to make their own decision on a brand name. The ultimate outcome is that a company is excited by a new name that encompasses everything they stand for and everywhere they want to go.

Stage 4 — We wireframed a layout and defined a digital design system

With the site’s content well underway and a new brand name locked in, we were able to turn our attention to forming the website itself. The main focus of this was the design (including a colour palette that would powerfully reflect the brand values and new name) and the user experience. 

User experience is a consideration of every element of the user’s interaction with the website — how easy it is to find what they’re looking for, how clear their path is to achieving the action they want to take, and how the experience feels: is it frustrating? Is it pleasant? Is it confusing? Is it simple? 

How we shaped the user experience for leaselab

Here’s how we ensured that existing clients and prospective clients could journey through the site with ease and get to know the new brand:

• We created wireframes — basic blueprints, with representative content blocks on the page — so that leaselab could view proposed layouts and content hierarchy for key pages before they were built on site.  This resulted in a better solution in terms of featured content and page flow, and allowed us to explore competing concepts before development. We were then able to apply leaselab’s feedback and update wireframes quickly, saving us valuable time in the site build stage later.

• We created a website design system to define visual aspects of the website.  This included a colour palette, menu and button styling and typography (font styles and font sizes) definition for the website — essential for complete consistency that can encourage trust from leaselab’s customers.

• We briefed a Perth-based design team on logo design for the chosen brand name. We reviewed options and provided feedback until the logo produced was a great fit with the identity we’d crafted for the brand.

Stage 5 — We got sunburnt coordinating a highly ambitious one-day photography shoot with 18 people across 7 locations

When it came to images for the website, we discussed the possibility of using stock photos in order to save time and budget for other focus areas. We can certainly work with stock photography, and these days it’s of a much higher calibre than it once was. However, stock will only get you so far and can’t possibly compete with the tailored and authentic results of a local photographer and local folks in the shots. We made the case for this to Al and Jules, certain that beautiful bespoke imagery of situations that very closely match the real experience of their clients — with Melbourne backdrops — was the right match for the carefully captured brand identity and new brand name. 

Alongside valuable content and clear messaging, authentic and relevant images are a critical aspect of conversion rate optimisation. This isn’t about forcing a user through your funnel to a sale they may or may not want. This is about trying to accurately represent what you can offer the prospective customer and conveying the true experience as best you can, so that you gain advocates of your service and the customer gains a true reflection of the service they can expect. Stock imagery can’t convey that and, if stock imagery is detected, it can erode trust before you have the chance to prove you can do what you say you can.

The guys were on board with bespoke photography and eager to see what could be captured. So we got to work planning a fairly ambitious day of shooting.

How we made it happen

• We sourced locations making sure to find areas across Melbourne where we could showcase not only the people, but a range of nine different vehicles. 

• We compiled a shot list to ensure we captured enough imagery to be used throughout the site.

• We briefed the photographer to help them understand the brand, target markets and key goals for the images they produced.

• Shoot day. What a day. We organised for talent to be on time throughout the day, and to make sure the right cars were in the right place, at the right time. We ran the shoot and handled creative direction to our plan for the website Our partner in crime, talented, respected Melbourne photographer Wren Steiner helped to make sure we got the most we could in the lens.

• We didn’t put enough sunscreen on, and paid for it that evening.

• We reviewed the images and chose the best shots to use on the site, and after they were edited by the wonderful Wren, we ensured they were optimised for digital and uploaded them to the site.

If you love beautiful photography (like we do), check some out on the leaselab site.

Stage 6 — We pushed a big red ‘make website live now’ button (just kidding… We built out the site, then went through our series of checks and we deployed)

Sometimes a fully custom website build can be justified. If there’s a lot of complex functionality that’s needed to represent your service or product, it might be the right choice. But it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is a tough cost to justify when out of the box websites (which allow custom code) are so affordable. In addition, sometimes you pay a design and development team to build a custom site on a platform that isn’t overly intuitive once you get the keys. 

Even if budget wasn’t a concern, we like out of the box content management platforms because they’re easy for everyone to use (whatever their technical knowledge), look great and stay updated automatically. 

leaselab didn’t need a complex custom website. Some custom forms and workflows were needed, but otherwise it needed to look great and be easy to use. Squarespace fitted the bill perfectly. 

So we set up the site, following our new architecture. We built out the menus and pages and entered the content and metadata. We briefed a Melbourne-based developer and worked with him to complete some of the custom elements needed on the site (our novated lease calculator).

We synced form submissions into a CRM so that leads could be easily managed by the sales team. We went through a few rounds of review with the leaselab team and made changes where needed until everyone was happy with the site. 

Once we were ready to launch, we made sure that leaselab were prepared. We talked through the changes from a holistic point of view — how the new site might affect current clients, and made sure that all of leaselab’s relevant business processes and systems were aligned and ready for launch. We helped them draft communications to their clients so that the transition was as smooth as possible.

We made sure the site migration didn’t impact users, and mapped all of the existing website page addresses (URLs) to the relevant equivalents on the new website, so that users who were visiting the old site (from bookmarks, for example) would be taken to the new equivalent page without getting lost.

We did our prep for launch checks and switched the new site over to the live domain.

Stage 7 — We mapped out our measurement plan and built out some snazzy dashboards

That’s when the fun began. Something we see all too common is businesses spending a lot of time and funds on a new website — and then forgetting about it for several years until it’s no longer useful and needs a complete rebuild. We’re huge fans of continuous improvement and ongoing optimisation, and when we have a new website set up perfectly to utilise great analytics tools, it’d be a huge missed opportunity not to use them.

We like Google Analytics, which can tell us invaluable information about our audience — number of users on the website at any time, number of those users who completed our chosen goals (for example, completed a form submission), what the most popular content is, how quickly people are leaving the website (and from that, whether they were likely to have found what they were looking for or not), and a whole lot more. These kinds of free insights are what every business should be taking advantage of.

We like understanding what’s working — and what isn’t so we can improve it and try to deliver a better experience for customers, who in turn will be more likely to recommend our partners’ services. 

How we set leaselab up for continued success

• We mapped out a structure for ongoing site measurement and data analysis. 

• We then talked leaselab through our Analytics Measurement Plan, which defined how Google Analytics would be set up, including Goals and Events to monitor traffic, measure conversions (e.g. form completions) and micro-conversions (e.g. click to call). We incorporated any feedback from Al and Jules, to make sure they would be able to see the metrics they needed post-launch.

• We configured Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and built out a Google Data Studio dashboard for leaselab to check whenever they like. Our dashboard automatically sends to leaselab on a frequent basis so that they don’t need to mess about in the analytics platform if they don’t want to. All the key information is visible in one place, updated in real-time in the cloud.

The results (so far)

The new leaselab site has been live for a short time, so it’s early days. However, already there’s been a marked improvement. Together with the leaselab team, we’re gradually putting measurements in place ongoing, to continuously lift the brand’s online performance.

In the first 3 months since site launch leaselab have seen a 90.91% increase in organic traffic and are now ranking for over 400 relevant keywords. Their conversion rate has increased by 133.04% meaning more leads driven by the site.

By partnering with The Searching Mind, leaselab have not only improved their online performance metrics, they’ve defined a clear position in the market and strengthened their brand message which puts them in good stead for ongoing continuous improvement in the years to come.

Feedback from leaselab