Encore, a part of MPM Products, produces premium cat and dog food with natural, ethically sourced ingredients to improve and maintain the health and wellbeing of pets. The client approached us to audit their website with recommendations on how we could help them increase site traffic and improve conversions.
From my initial investigation it became very clear that the current approach to the website was not fit for purpose, and to achieve their objectives, it would require significant changes to the content approach and visual representation. After an internal review based on my recommendations we ceased work on the audit and consulted with the client with our initial findings.
As an alternative, I advised the client that their budget would be better spent by us recommending a solution from the ground up; based on their short term and long term objectives and KPIs. The client agreed and shared the work they had been doing so far.
Encore had just been rebranded and as such had performed detailed market research on their target audiences. We outsourced our quantitative research to our partner SEO agency to gather usage and online behaviours of the identified audiences.
A social commerce story
There were three main audiences Encore wanted to reach Experimenters, Trend Followers and Worriers. Analysing the provided behaviours of these audiences I determined:
■ All audiences require different levels of advocation of the brand; and success was determined by who was advocating
■ Trend Followers and Worriers had the same behaviour but would require different motives
■ Trend Followers and Worriers would mature to becoming Experimenters
With this in mind I produced a visual story of how we could reach and influence these audiences as they matured from audiences, to users, to advocators. Having shared this story with the wider team and consulting the client with their knowledge and insights, we refined what we considered to be the ideal journeys that audiences would take with the brand. This exercise also helped to identify key touch points with audiences, as well as the involvement required by Encore and external sources to enable the ideal journey.
The digital ecosystem
Working with the Technical Director we took the commerce story and identified what digital components would be required to achieve the outcome of the story and to understand where our solution would sit within the greater digital ecosystem. This also enabled us to advise the client the form that their digital presence should take and recommend services they should use.
Considering the solution as a whole, we started to think about how to differentiate between the users groups to meet their needs. The idea of interpreting user actions during their experience with the website and tailoring content to them was introduced as part of the solution.
The big picture
From our work so far we understood that the initial website was a small part of many other moving parts. We decided to take a step back and work with the client to understand what marketing projects they planned for the future. We wanted to advise the client how to use technology and our digital solution to be part of those projects, as well as ensuring our solution took into consideration those long term goals.
There is no structure
Going through the process so far it became more clear how personalisation and engaging the individual was an important factor. Before considering how to structure content and products we thought about how to deliver relevant content to the individual.
Content should gravitate to the user
We had decided to take the smart content approach and modelled how content would be tailored to individuals as they move through the site. We wanted to gravitate relevant content to the user, not only aggregating relevant products and content; but also taking into consideration website assets such as images and store links. I produced a user workflow to depict how we can use data to determine relevant content to serve.
Taking into consideration Encore’s sister brands under MPM we provided the client with a solution that would allow them to have a pool of products and articles that could be shared amongst brands for any inter-brand campaigns or websites. This also allowed them to use the solution for their international markets taking languages and translations into consideration.
Breaking it down
We collated our concepts and ideas and divided the solution into broad phases, the first being a simple website communicating the brand and ensuring it was a solid foundation for our bigger ambitions.
Our initial solution was based on a fluid content structure; consisting of a number of targeted/topical landing pages which would serve relevant products and content from a content pool. These landing pages would then be advertised through targeted online social campaigns and offline campaigns; driving users to relevant content.
Phase one
With all our concepts and thinking in place I started with taking the initial content and product matrix and put together a sitemap to understand the different types of layouts that may be required.
Working with the designer we decided to start with the product page and determined what would be a good way to communicate details of Encore’s product. We then selected specific content to abstract to create listing pages and spot lights. We repeated the process for child pages within the site, to develop a set of wireframes ready for creative design.
