Building trust through storytelling to deliver better leads, and more of them

Mount Anvil, a London based residential property developer, approached Dare in 2018 with an ambition to develop a new market leading website that would deliver them ‘more and better leads’.

The first action was for our Experience Planning team to lead a structured discovery phase, taking a deep dive into the brand and a diverse set of audiences from investors to estate agents and eventual owner occupiers. Through client workshops, customer research and site visits we uncovered the primary motivating factors behind each audiences’ decision making process. From this we uncovered that a large proportion of users were approaching the site with an apprehensive mindset, which made it vital for the website to reassure and build confidence at each stage of their journey.

Knowing this allowed us to build out a robust experience strategy which helped to focus our efforts around ‘better storytelling’ across the experience, establishing an effective content hierarchy to deliver the right depth of message at the right time, ultimately surfacing the ideal conversion points throughout the journey.

This focus on storytelling for the customer was key when stepping into the wire-framing and design phase of this project. This focus meant space was kept very open, with an editorial feeling and use of big impactful imagery, while ensuring that key information was easy to find at each stage of the journey to offer reassurance and build trust.

We brought together all disciplines with the Mount Anvil team to work collaboratively at first, formulating ideas into hand drawn scamps. These could then be moved on to more traditional wireframes to develop clickable prototypes to give an accurate representation of the intended experience.

One of the key challenges set out as part of the brief was the desire to have a single site rather than multiple microsites like their competitors.

We needed to ensure that everything through the site felt part of the same family, but also encapsulated the unique personalities of each development.

To achieve this we created one UI system that worked across the whole site, and visually layered the development’s unique patterns, images and motifs, and then told stories from the heart of the area the development was based in. To accentuate the quality and detail put into every home we took inspiration from the small details, such as a soft close cupboard door, to inspire the page loading.

From a technical perspective our key focus was to create a robust yet streamlined CMS which could handle complex functionality but was simple for the content uploader to operate. The CMS needed to handle multiple subbrands that could be fully controlled by Mount Anvil internally, as well as allow them to launch new developments right from the CMS. This robustness and simplicity of the back end needed to manifest in a beautiful and efficient, front end that brought the attention to detail to life through animations that added to the experience without hindering the experience or ability to convert the customer.

Our Data team worked closely with the craft team throughout the project to ensure that we were smoothly driving conversion and measuring it in a meaningful way. A measurement framework was designed in collaboration with the client to ensure we were tracking key user interactions that feed into the conversion funnel. This includes input into the ‘Find a home’ budget and form tracking so that any pain points can be identified quickly. It also included integration with SalesForce to send smart leads and give Mount Anvil more information about their prospective customers.

We will continue to work with Mount Anvil on optimisation, hosting and our ongoing SLA and maintenance schedule.