The Talent Labs are a membership organisation, supporting in-house recruiters and HR Professionals, offering training and consultancy, hosting events and compiling research.
We're a small, growing business; we didn't have a huge budget for a big, complex solution. The tech review Rigorous did for us was really important, articulating the issues in a way that made them clear. They proved they knew us and understood our problems, their proposal delivered what we needed, and at the investment level, we could afford. We liked that you were realistic at every stage, assessing what we could do. Rigorous Digital also came with recommendation from others.
Ted Miller, COO
The Difficulties:
The previous site for logged-in members was sluggish, resulting in an off-putting user experience. There were also issues for non-members accessing content, with all gated content resulting in one “Access Denied” page rather than being able to see previews, which would offer a more inviting experience. This was also negatively affecting SEO performance. There were several ongoing issues with the operation of the previous site due to bugs. For example, events were hard to sign up/pay for. With Google looking at sites mobile-first, and most site traffic coming from mobile, it was important to prioritise the experience on small screen devices for website visitors and members.
The previous site’s features were mostly implemented via the customisation of themes and plugins. There was a substantial number of plugins; overall, there were 64 plugins on the site, 56 of which were active, and many of them were large. A lot of plugins had been used for off-the-shelf functionality, which slowed the site down dramatically. Additionally, plugins were interacting with each other, causing issues over time as they were updated.
Web presence and functionality were both critical to our success. Our service offering was becoming much more complicated. We needed to diversify and rebrand. Our overall strategy and structure have changed. We'll be bringing together all services into one offering. That's happening over a 12 - 18 month timeline and requires support. The original site was getting lots of member feedback, it was a struggle to manage and didn't work as a sales tool.
The Solutions
Rigorous Digital completed a Headless WordPress Design and Build to reflect The Talent Labs three new key areas of focus and ensure consistent functionality for members. We recommended a “Headless WordPress” site rather than relying on themes and plugins, enabling the client to continue using WordPress to administrate the site, as this was a platform they were familiar with from their previous site, but to increase the site's performance. It has been able to cope with the higher membership numbers and is much more secure than the previous setup. This has ensured it is scalable as the business has grown. This method also means that you can share the same data across multiple platforms; so if, for example, The Talent Labs launches a mobile app in the future, it would be able to use WordPress so that information would be the same across both platforms.
Members now have a personalised dashboard as the first page they see when logging in, and so can immediately see content based on their individual user type, lab subscriptions, seniority, role and time they’ve been a member, boosting user experience. Invitation-only events have reduced the friction in event sign-up, highlighting events to specific users based on their profile information.
We are looking at how we market our services and will transition to a new CRM (HubSpot) and work with different providers to create new campaigns for our updated service offering. We will also be looking at increased data management, new functionality, and automation of the membership journey. We still need a data collection and management plan to collect location and role data on all members to segment effectively.
By automating processes, including targeted emails, this has reduced the load on staff as well as improved engagement, user satisfaction and revenue. For example, through the implementation of the above-mentioned personalised dashboard. The CRM (ActiveCampaign) needed to be more robust to ensure it automatically updated with the latest customer information. This has enabled reliable reporting and forecasting, as well as being used for efficient marketing purposes, by targeting specific segments of their database.
Talent Labs has a wealth of content, so using this as teaser content has helped encourage sign-ups for new visitors and in areas where there was crossover for existing members. This also enabled a better user experience than the previous “Access Denied” page. With the new site, it was possible to build in lead generation tools to identify areas that Talent Labs could help organisations with. Organisations can then access this content in exchange for their email or contact details.
The Results
Subsequently, website users have increased by 243% in the year since the launch (2023/24 vs 2024/25). Meanwhile, the number of members increased by 352% and revenue has increased by 75%.
