CASE STUDY: GL SOLUTIONS

GL Solutions delivers cloud-based regulatory solutions to US governmental agencies, primarily around licensing and permitting, childcare licensing, case management, and firearms permitting and licensing.

Here’s how we helped GL Solutions transform its new website and its messaging strategy into a storytelling approach that resonates with readers and walks them through a journey to understand the need for the product.

The Client: GL Solutions

GL Solutions is a software/SaaS company serving government agencies. Their flagship product, GL Suite, is a cloud-based (Azure hosted) configurable SaaS platform that addresses many issues that agencies commonly face.

GL Suite helps agencies digitize paperwork and paper-based workflows, automate previously manual steps, accept payments via web portal, and more.

In the last year, GL Solutions has launched a full Agency Transformation service as well, taking a more holistic, long-range view of an agency’s needs and then rolling out a full set of solutions over several phases.

GL Solutions has been in business for 25 years and serves state and local agencies across the US.

The Problems

GL Solutions was enjoying a level of success: the company was making sales and exceeding customer expectations, and it wasn’t making any of our top 5 content mistakes.

But its website was dated and lacked detail. Prior to engaging with us, the company had already completed an initial design for a new website, one that incorporates today’s design language. GL Solutions’ CEO led the effort to reimagine the homepage as more of an educational or newsfeed-style page similar to Gallup (in concept, not in content). They also already had a marketing team that took care of those news resources and industry blog posts.

The company came to Content for Humans to build out the evergreen content on the entire site, starting with the homepage. But the bigger need (and the bigger problem) was with a set of services pages.

Renee Mosely, marketing lead and primary contact for the project, put it this way:

“Our CEO feels like the content fails to tell a compelling story.”

We agreed—and we also saw the need to define what that compelling story should be.

Problem 1: Niche Product That’s Hard to Understand

The first problem we identified was the nature of the product:

• It’s complex software that runs behind the scenes.

• It does things that agencies can’t currently do and may not be familiar with.

• Those things aren’t exactly interesting or easy for the average reader to understand.

In a way it’s defining its own category: it’s not like accounting software or project management software, where everyone has a basic sense of what those are and what they do. Even among government agencies, “regulatory solutions” and “agency transformation” mean different things to different people.

So the first problem is that GL Suite is a niche product serving a specific market with specific needs, but those needs are hard to describe and understand (and none of it is the least bit sexy).

Problem 2: The Nature of the Target Market

The second problem was the nature of the target market.

Look— you’ve been to the DMV, right?

It’s not exactly known as the place you go to see bleeding-edge technology or mind-blowing efficiency.

That’s what GL Solutions wants to fix: their services transform an agency’s technology approach and redefine what’s possible in terms of efficiency.

But if you’re targeting a market that you know isn’t the most tech-forward and trying to sell them a complex, tech-forward product, you’re going to run into some hurdles.

The fact that technology awareness and red tape are problems at many agencies is itself the problem in selling a product to fix it.

Because the people who need it most are the ones who understand the solution least.

Problem 3: Contextless Approach

The third issue we identified was an approach that didn’t include much context. Given the nature of the target market and the complexity of the product, readers are apt to need some guidance (maybe even some hand-holding) to make sense of what they’re reading.

The old version of the site was what we call features-first: under “Products” you’d click on “Automate Licensing and Permitting,” where you’d see a row of icons and blurbs.

Solutions Content for Humans Provided

The company came to us initially for help expanding these pages so that they told a compelling story. They also needed additional content to explain other features that were driving sales in person, but weren’t represented online.

In our initial discovery call with the GL Solutions team, we identified the problems outlined above.

We also suggested that part of telling a more compelling story was, well, actual storytelling: because the product was unfamiliar and nebulous to many readers, some kind of easy-to-understand content was needed to lay the groundwork before we got to those icons and feature blurbs.

We recommended using mini-case studies to accomplish this. GL Solutions had a long, long list of satisfied customers with real data on how GL Suite transformed their capabilities. So we recommended rebuilding each of these services pages around a real customer story.

So for the Licensing and Permitting Solutions page, we get to meet Suanne at the Alabama Home Builders Licensure Board. We get to hear the kinds of frustrations and challenges she was facing prior to GL Suite. And we get to see specific, measurable ways that GL Suite improved life (not to mention performance) for everyone Suanne works with (and everyone the Board serves).

Check out how we structured this page:

1. Clear Context Statement

3. Social Proof

Next, we move on to Suanne’s story. We introduce readers to a real customer and the results she’s achieving today. Then we show how things worked before GL Suite, followed by the outcomes Suanne enjoys with GL Suite.

Next up we reached out to Suanne and asked her to share in her own words how GL Suite had changed the game. This kind of social proof is invaluable, showing people in similar roles that even to this day, years later, GL Suite continues to provide the value it claims.

4. Making It Personal

Next we transition to the reader’s persistent operational challenges. Now that the reader has a vision for what GL Suite can do, let’s rub a little more salt in those pain points and remind them of the frustrations they’re living with every day.

Note the link in the final sentence: we included internal links for SEO throughout the pages we crafted for GL Solutions. (Content is for humans, not bots. But it helps if the humans can find it!)

5. Proof of Scale and Call to Action

The Rest of the Site

We took a similar approach to the rest of the site, providing crucial context and empathetic storytelling to help readers feel an emotional connection and understand how GL Solutions could improve their agencies and their day-to-day lives.

You can see the visual results of a few of these pages below: