Double Trouble: Creating Space for a Two-sided Marketplace

Bec Purcell

December 13, 2018   Follow

Hands up! Who wants to know how we tackled Weploy's two-sided market and increased their lead flow by 97% (and won an award while we were at it)? 🤩 

 

Weploy is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering catering to a two-sided marketplace, connecting businesses looking to hire short-term staff directly to an extensive candidate network.

Due to the success of their minimal viable product (MVP), Weploy saw themselves in a phase of rapid growth and quickly realised the quick wins they had adopted during their initial phases would not be suited to scaling. Weploy’s website needed a freshen up as the current site was not visually communicating their two-sided marketplace, which resulted in the sales team chasing unqualified and irrelevant leads. The team were getting lost in a rabbit warren of code, making it incredibly difficult to make minor changes to the website. Operating in a competitive area, Weploy needed to be able to move quickly and independently without needing constant agency support for minor updates.

You & Co were brought on as we are experienced HubSpot CMS developers, meaning we had the capability to provide a thorough website strategy for their two-sided marketplace and build a website with enough custom functionality to support their needs. As Weploy wanted to stand on their own two feet, our HubSpot experience allowed us to offer training to upskill the Weploy team to work autonomously, and get the most out of the HubSpot website tools.

Weploy needed a website that educated and qualified users; they needed a website that was branded to a two-sided marketplace, and they needed a website that worked for them.

weploy_after_1
weploy_before_1

The Challenges

Weploy were entering a fierce marketplace with a great MVP that needed supporting marketing tools that allowed the team to react and continue to align with their growth as a business.

The approach and solution were shaped by the following challenges:

1. Weploy’s branding did not demonstrate a definitive user flow for a two-sided marketplace.

The website did not present a user flow that took their ideal personas through a considered journey, making their branding unclear and confusing. Without a clear user flow, Weploy leads weren’t qualified, costing their sales team wasted time in qualifying with manpower over allowing the persona to opt in. 

2. The website experience did not match the value and quality of their services.

Weploy appeals to multinational companies such as Lonely Planet, VICE, and Slack, though their website looked and felt cheap and failed to convey legitimacy. Their unique selling proposition and overall services were not easily understood by users arriving on the site, causing confusion to their audience resulting in loss of prospects and qualified leads.

3. Their website was rigid - updating information and navigating the back-end was confusing and near impossible to do in-house.

Weploy’s website was riddled by broken templates and persisting stylesheet issues, the backend was a code tangle from multiple templates purchased at varying stages of growth for the business. Rather than making life easy for the in-house marketing team at Weploy, the CMS had become impossible to manage. The team were spending copious amounts of time trying to navigate through a broken backend. 

The Approach

Keeping Weploy’s key personas front of mind, we knew our approach to tackling this two-sided marketplace would be an interesting challenge.

Our website redesign focused on:

A Solid Website Strategy

The website strategy focused on a detailed information architecture that would cater to a two-sided marketplace effectively. The structure and layout of the website ensured users pre-qualified themselves before reaching sales through the considered user flow for both sides of the marketplace.

Customisable Page Templates

New customised templates were built in the existing HubSpot portal to allow the team autonomy in creating new pages and in updating existing pages. Their new branding for both sides of the marketplace was carried across the templates to allow Weploy to focus on scaling up, not hacking code.

A Responsive Web-Based Style Guide

For simplicity for the user and the business, the web style guide was built to direct this project and future works. Brand alignment was easy to manage and it was clear to see how the brand would be represented on the website as one of their varying mediums.

 

 

The Outcomes

We loved setting Weploy up for future success not only by fixing their core problem but by making sure that this problem never happened again.

  • Their overall conversion rate has almost doubled over the first 90 days since launching the website, which has also seen a 97% increase in the number of leads.
  • Clear and considered user flow is now across all components on the site with clear thought for which side of the market they’re addressing.
  • Weploy has autonomous control over updates to their website so they can continue on their upward growth phase in-house without having to enlist an agency for ongoing support (for the small stuff).
  • Their website now visually communicates their two-sided marketplace, to pre-qualify leads, saving time for the sales team.

Want to hear it from Weploy themselves?

 

 

weploy_case_study-2

Weploy - Problem Solved!

Solving the problems of a two-sided marketplace helped us build Weploy a considered website that works for them - not the other way around.

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