Healthy website growth

The digital marketing team realised that they needed to keep innovating with their website platform to reflect user trends, such as the explosion of the use of mobile devices. "We started off working with ntegrity," they recall. "They helped us with strategy and design. Then Concentrate came on board for the build. They were always on my radar - I'm a HubSpot fan," they say. "I knew their reputation - it was a no-brainer. The length of time they've been in the industry and working with HubSpot - we didn't even look at any other options."

For the digital team, it was important to have a partner that became an extension of that team. "We didn't want someone coming in and saying, we know best, you're doing it wrong," they explain. "Concentrate doesn't use that approach - it's a partnership from the beginning."

One of the major challenges was the timeline in which to fit a project of this magnitude. The website needed to be completely re-designed, but there was only a very small window in which to achieve it. The Digital Marketing Manager explained the deadline to Concentrate's Head of Inbound Marketing, Achan Bedi, in September 2018. The website needed to go live by the end of January, 2019. "Achan and the team were amazing," they recall. "They were so ‘can-do’ - they just made it happen."

From a Concentrate point of view, the project represented a challenge. “When we saw the initial scope of the brief for a new site, it was impressive,” Achan recalls. “But it had a very hard deadline, and only 25 working days.”

Achan goes on to explain that Concentrate’s success in meeting that deadline was down to several key factors:

• A clear and (almost) unwavering brief.
• A project leader at the client side who made bold calls and responded to requests for feedback and approval almost instantly.
• Both teams working as an extension of each other. The client’s internal resources were dedicated to work with Concentrate as content editors, leaving Concentrate resources to focus on the development, coding and design.
• Shared virtual project management spaces, e.g., Slack, Google Sheets etc.

Looking back over the span of the project, the client recalls Concentrate's positive attitude to the process. "Nothing was a problem for them," they say. "Even when I knew that we were putting the pressure on them, they always had this can-do attitude, no matter what might have been going on behind the scenes!"

The Digital Marketing Manager goes on to say that the team were grateful for the amount of resources Concentrate were dedicating to the project, and their strength as communicators. "That's so important for a project of this size," they explain. "We were meeting weekly, and we had a dedicated Slack channel that was just on fire every day."

After developing a lot of the foundation elements of AuCom’s marketing activities in 2015, Concentrate worked with the company during 2016 to accelerate its digital marketing activity. Focussed entirely on an inbound approach, the company achieved some outstanding results on a year on year basis:

• 32% increase in website traffic
• 20% increase in leads generated by the website
• 700 new leads generated
• A particularly successful campaign based on some legacy content which generated over 200 leads at a 29% landing page conversion rate

As a private company, AuCom doesn’t report its income publicly but derives income from its Low Voltage (LV) and Medium Voltage (MV) divisions. The inbound marketing campaigns over 2016 were aimed at driving sales growth in its core LV segment, and these sales goals were met and exceeded in some geographic markets.

Looking back over the whole process, the team have a few words of advice for other digital teams contemplating a similar move. "You have to do your part," they say. "The reason ours was so successful is we were all working as a partnership. We had our own people working on it as well, and it was important that they met their targets as well as Concentrate meeting theirs. There has to be equal energy on both sides, otherwise you get bottlenecks and risk failure. There was a huge effort from our team and from Concentrate, and that's why it was successful."

Achan agrees, and goes on to note the importance of the Project Leader role. “In this case, the role was like that of a really good conductor at the opera directing specialists, in the end delivering an amazing symphony.”