Dr. Dale Henry

Overview

Dr. Dale Henry is a motivational speaker, teacher, author, and businessman who uses humor as a staple of his storytelling. Operating under Your Best Unlimited, most people know him simply by, “Dr. Dale.” His business manager expressed the need to audit their website and sought recommendations for refreshing his online presence.

The Problem(s)

Audit results showed the website was experiencing many issues, ranging from missing images to nondescript page metadata. Warnings indicated deprecated properties in CSS and elements in HTML 4.01. It was a website designed in the early 2000s, and for browsers at that time.

But the year was 2017 and a lot had changed. Moreover, the majority of Dr. Dale’s speaking requests came from third-party vendors. Although great for discovery, they were consuming a percentage of revenue through fees. Two questions drove my contributions:

1. How might we upgrade Dr. Dale’s brand for today’s audiences, making it meaningful and memorable?
2. How might we augment his online presence to entice more bookings and sales?

Process

My own adaptation of the double-diamond process with systems-thinking frameworks guided cadence of the project. Systems-thinking helped us maintain awareness and agility while Automattic was preparing for Gutenberg, and YouTube was poising to becoming the second-most popular search engine.

1. Discovery

• Content audit of current website and assets.
• Conducted secondary research on motivational speakers.
• Interviewed business manager to identify existing business processes and capabilities.
• Conducted interviews for six qualitative personas based on previous booking experiences.
• Conducted primary research to discover opportunities for the brand.
• Assembled a system map to identify environments of, and feedback loops for, Dr. Dale’s services.
• Distributed a synesthetic survey and analyzed results.

2. Definition

• Defined six brand attributes to guide design decisions.
• Established goals of the website with benchmarks.
• Established goals of the brand with vision.
• Identified and established omnichannel marketing campaigns.

Brand

Six brand attributes formed a prescription for how we wanted audiences to think and feel when experiencing Dr. Dale and his services. They are what make him timeless. The attributes permeated all touchpoints of the website and marketing campaigns, as well as executing artifacts for the identity system.

Snapshot of six attributes from brand guide.

Identity

Dr. Dale touched the hearts of many people over the years. The challenge to echo that familiarity while instilling engagement among new visitors. The identity system was designed with respect to research findings and brand attributes. It included a primary color scheme, iconography, and a typeface. A handful of experiments were conducted to reach finalization.

Presence

It was (and still is) the attention economy. Thought leaders needed to be vocal and visible everywhere at once – especially LinkedIn. We knew the personable and humorous qualities of Dr. Dale’s style exhbited high potential for resharing/reposting online. We also knew from research there were three distinct segments:

1. Recurring Bookers (loyalists, who have heard him speak and buy his products),
2. New Bookers (comparison artists, adding him to a list of potential speakers),
3. Browsers (heard-ofs, curious to know his topics)

Qualitative persona with stock image and fictitious name.

3. Development

Wireframes set foundations for structuring content along suggestive user journeys. Hi-fidelity mockups aided in visualizing the processes of scheduling and purchasing. Service blueprinting helped find gaps and ripples along existing and potential journeys. We carefully evaluated themes and plugins to select for those ready for the future changes to WP Core. Rapid prototyping of content and features was followed by testing across browsers and devices.

4. Delivery (Deployment)

We coordinated release of the brand to take place over night. It entailed:

• deploying across multiple channels
• activating security measures
• submitting updated sitemaps to search engines

We wanted it to be quick; so we standardized the announcement content to be published across all channels, which reduced the number of tasks per channel. We prepared graphics for quick placement on banners, headers, and email signatures. Google Analytics and Tag Manager were prepared for collection.

By 8am on a Tuesday, Dr. Dale fans across the US and Canada visited his new website and read social media posts.

Website content and campaigns use his phrases and idioms–supported by quick sharing features. For the New Bookers and Browsers who want to find a match for their conference, they filter his talking topics for easy sharing and discover samples on YouTube. For Recurring Bookers who want to stay close to him, we prioritize the newsletter and blog subscriptions, and promote related products. At every step, we maintain a quick way to book or buy when people find relevant content.

Dr. Dale’s stories humorously illustrate how he found himself in precarious circumstances.

Results

Within the first year following deployment:

• Increased bookings 70%.
• Gained 5K new users; 1.9K returning users.
• Sharing on social media increased 112%, and included identity and brand elements.
• Followers on LinkedIn increased 79%.