S4B are an established Engineering Services Consultancy, with offices in Sydney and Canberra. They have delivered some of Australia’s marque projects including the Westfield Pitt Street. They deliver projects across the retail, commercial, residential, education and entertainment sectors. S4B have been growing and expanding their operations, through new clients and the delivery of larger and more complex projects.
As part of their growth, S4B were keen to refresh their branding and digital presence. Finding the time and resources to dedicate to a marketing effort was a challenge, with a growing business. In April 2018, Luka engaged Harper Stone as S4B’s digital partner. The brief was to redesign their website to reflect their status, skill and experience in the Engineering Services sector.
The team at S4B are talented engineers, however their digital experience and in-house marketing capacity is quite light. They were looking for a digital partner who could understand both their business and objectives, listen to their ideas and lead them through the digital development process. With this in mind, the initial discovery phase of the project focussed on defining the purpose and audience of the website, understanding when in a buying journey a user would visit the site and the information they would need to progress their buying decision. This approach underpins every decision that is made regarding the new site, including the required content, the layout and the linking between sections on the site. The Harper Stone approach is data driven, too often websites are delivered and the analytics monitoring thrown on as an afterthought. During the discovery phase the user journeys and the analytics measurement plan to be used to track and measure the these journeys are defined. The purpose is to monitor the content that users are interacting with, to guide the future development of the website and continually increase the conversion of website users to customers.
The design aesthetic of any website is crucial to the user experience and the perception they form of a business. The design phase explored a range of sample sites from within the construction sector as well as from outside the sector, working in a relaxed and collaborative environment with S4B. This gave a clear understanding of the design direction and enabled the creation of the first design concept. Given the time pressures on the S4B team, a consolidated concept at each stage was created, which would be collaboratively iterated with the S4B management team. Within three sessions, the design had been refined and all design elements that would be required across the entire website were complete. In the process of the design refinement, the marketing strategy for S4B had been reviewed and improved and the key content areas being the project case studies and the team bios were outlines with a focus on the user.
The development, hosting setup and content refinement were able to follow with regular check-ins and feedback through the process. The focus of the development phase was to make the content editing experience simple and to ensure content could be reused across the site and automatically related using tagging across projects and news articles. This would minimise the time required by the S4B team to keep the site fresh and up to date.
The site was launched on the 15th August through a Property Council of Australia email campaign. The initial feedback has been positive with a number of existing business partners providing their tick of approval on the design of the site. The site analytics have reflected this with low bounce rates of just 35% and over 4 pages visited by users to the website. The site is also seeing the site conversions being easily completed.
The site activity is tracked through Google Analytics and a review of the performance will be undertaken in 3 months. This will provide enough data to accurately understand the success of the site and also to guide further enhancements to optimise the sites performance.