The Heaton Group Branding, Strategy & Website Design
Case Study
Redefining online presence through meticulous research and inbound-focused development
Helping a property investment company set the stage for business growth through a website redesign focused on the inbound marketing methodology.
How Do You Build an Online Experience That Serves the Right Target Groups and Grows Your Business?
The Heaton Group is a company that develops luxury living spaces to live, rent and invest in, enabling investors and homeowners in the UK and abroad to find their perfect property in the North-West. They contacted Luminate Digital looking to improve their marketing efforts in order to attract more leads and grow their business. They were struggling to generate new visitors, and their website content was tailored towards investors, making it difficult to engage other target groups (buyers and renters).
Attracting and Engaging the Right Customers with the Help of Thorough Research and Thoughtful Development
A plan was devised to revamp their online presence and equip them with all the methods and tools they would need to ensure they fully understand their target groups and are offering them the best online experience.
This plan included several phases - going through user research, building buyer personas, executing competitor analysis, and overhauling their website to guarantee that it is both adequately serving the needs of the visitors, as well as effectively generating the right leads for the company.
Our agency reached out to several current Heaton Group customers and organized phone interviews to gain a better understanding of their challenges and customer service expectations. The interviews were analyzed and compiled into buyer persona documents that focused on the five rings of buying insight.
The documents presented a summary of each persona in an easily digestible format, followed by a deeper dive into their priority initiatives, success factors, perceived barriers, decision criteria, and the buyer's journey. These proved very useful for both us and our client, allowing us to smoothly transition to the following stage.
We ran a competitor analysis to determine the strengths and weaknesses of The Heaton Group and three of their competitors in relation to their online presence. To help identify the competitors, we used information and insights from the interviews conducted as part of the buyer persona study.
A range of free and paid tools was used to compare and measure key marketing metrics in order to address six digital marketing topics: website ranking, traffic, digital content, social media, keywords, and backlinks. By discovering these strengths and weaknesses, we gained a clear understanding of The Heaton Group's place within the property development digital marketplace, an understanding which played an integral role in the production of the new website and future marketing strategies.
The preliminary research combined with our inbound marketing expertise enabled us to design a website that offered guests a new and improved online experience. The homepage diverts visitors to different pages serving tailored content depending on their interests.
Each of the new pages is optimized for conversion, using various combinations of case studies, testimonials, step-by-step descriptions of procedures, >unique selling propositions, statistics, and enticing imagery.
Throughout the whole process, from wireframe to final page, we had periodic calls with our client, getting sign-off on prototypes that accurately depicted first the function, and then the look of their new site.
The redesign also included a brand guidelines document to ensure visual consistency, as well as a set of three email templates in the new style, essential for future marketing purposes.
Improved Engagement and All-Time-High Lead Generation
The number of contacts generated organically over six months increased by 250% thanks to the new conversion paths created on the website.
As a result of our efforts and collaboration, The Heaton Group also gained a much better understanding of their customers, which we used to prepare their content marketing strategy. This increased their blog views by over 230%, while also improving website engagement. Best of all, business is thriving, with the percentage of leads generated by marketing rising to an all-time high of 78%.
