Web as a solid foundation of marketing communication
PKV BUILD is the market leader in energy consulting. It helps organizations find energy savings and thus contributes to the development of an environmentally sustainable world. PKV needed to create a new online marketing channel that would generate relevant demand.
The project team consisted of four members — two designers, an analyst and a lead designer. Later, we were joined by colleagues from other agencies:
- Content Agency created lyrics for the site and wrote about it own case file
- Don't swing focused on optimizing the delivery of newsletters
- Reasonable updated PKV visual style across marketing touchpoints
Blueprint
- We create a site of minimal scope
- We build it on the real needs of customers
- We connect it with other marketing touchpoints
- After launch, we will measure and evaluate what really works and develop the site further
How it went
Cooperation with PKV began in August 2018. We created a quick hotfix of the original site, did user research, helped revise the PKV brand, created a marketing strategy, designed and built the site on the leased Webflow platform, helped select and we spun off all other vendors.
Hotfix of the original site
The first step was a quick modification of the then PKV site. The reason was simple — it was not possible to tell from the web what industry the company operates in, what it actually does and why it should be of interest to customers. Due to other marketing and business activities, PKV could not wait for user research — instead, through a joint workshop, we proposed a quick change of the site.
The hotfix was created within 2 months. That we did well was also shown in the statistics of the site, and the hotfix thus bought us time for a real redesign, built on data and customer understanding.
Understanding Business
Every website redesign begins with an understanding of the client's business through strategic workshops and internal research. We already completed the first workshop within the hotfix, this time we were able to go more in depth with respect to individual services.
We then interviewed PKV dealers and put together assumptions about customers — how they think about energy and what is really important to them. Finally, we also interviewed HR and began to deal with the preparation of the career section of the site.
- We found out how the PKV business works, what it stands for and what it brings to customers.
- We understood the differences between customer groups and the customer journey through the service.
- We have designed user research to have the greatest benefit.
- We have defined what types of employees we are really interested in and what types of employees we do not want to attract.
Project pause
The downside of the finished web hotfix was that PKV began to focus on other areas of its business and was not pushed into quick action. We did not manage to give the project more momentum, so it stretched for about half a year — plus with a slight increase in the budget.
I can imagine that you would create a detailed schedule for the entire project and then repeat to us that if we don't attend to it, the whole thing will shift. We didn't put enough pressure on ourselves.
~ Jiří Pech, CEO of PKV
We eventually partially caught up with the time by building the site on a leased (NoCode) solution, so we skipped the coding and programming phase.
User research
If a website is to generate business benefits (read “make money”), it must be based on the needs of potential customers and cause a change in their behavior. As part of the project, we went into deep understanding of customers through interviews, we did keyword analysis and analyzed data about people's behavior on the site.
After re-launching the project, we interviewed 12 respondents who have already worked or are working with PKV. They were mayors, technical directors and executives from various sectors of industry, energy, retail chain managers and multinational companies. Thanks to the great attitude of the managers, we also reached people who in the past were not 100% satisfied with the cooperation, which gave us a much better understanding of customers.
We picked up cues about this:
- How people think about energy
- what are their motivations and needs
- What are they worried about cooperation?
- and how the whole project actually went from their point of view
We supplemented the interviews with keyword analysis, which gave us an idea:
- what dictionary customers use
- what topics they look for at different stages of the buying cycle
- what pages should appear in the new site structure
Sense-making workshop
Research data is useless if you do not analyze it and use it in the further process. Therefore, together with PKV management, we did a joint sense-making workshop, which allowed us to find connections in the research data and make sense of it.
Several dozen initiatives for web, marketing, communication, processes and business development emerged from the workshop. The fact that the outputs were useful was also evidenced by the fact that the adhesives from the workshop were still in the PKV meeting room for a few weeks, so that all traders and project managers could get acquainted with them. The client used part of the outputs for various changes in the company even before the new website was launched.
Design of solutions
What do you need to do if the site is to act as a new source of requests?
- It must be visited by relevant visitors
- must want to contact PKV
- if they are not in the right phase of the buying cycle, then they must want to stay in touch with the brand
The problem is that you never know ahead of time what will actually bring the expected result. General principles and lessons learned help in thinking, but at the end of the day it comes down to whether or not you manage to influence the behavior of the people out there. Therefore, we chose the strategy of launching a minimal version of the site and its gradual development.
Based on opportunities from User research we have designed a strategy for online communication of PKV, including related marketing activities at different stages of the shopping cycle, and we have connected the website with other brand touchpoints.
The intervention in brand communication brought with it a revision of the PKV brand — after all, it is no longer a start-up startup, but a confident leader in its market. This had an effect on both the tone of communication and the visual style. The logo remained, but we moved away from the burning gas visual towards the moss logo in the PKV boardroom and a modern eco-friendly approach.
Subsequently, we have created a prototype of a minimal new site that, once launched, will allow us to verify that we are going in the right direction. One of the innovations is the use of the landing page as a large menu, in which the customer identifies himself according to his needs or target group quickly and clearly even on mobile.
We followed up the tested prototype with a graphic design in a new visual style.
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Team buy-in
Throughout the redesign, PKV presented itself externally through our site hotfix. But the team of dealers and consultants was not happy with him. According to them, they lacked a lot of information about individual services and did not want to refer potential clients to the site.
So we organized a prototype presentation for the entire PKV core team and together we figured out how to modify the site to really help them in their work. Thanks to this workshop, we were able to get consensus over the new site across the team.
Launching the site
At the final stage, we all already felt the pressure to launch a new website as quickly as possible. A large part of this was due to a half-year delay from user research. We managed to recover lost time, at least in part, thanks to the technical implementation of the site on the NoCode platform Webflow.
In a matter of weeks, we got the complete skeleton of the site ready for content filling and subsequent technical revision, setting up advanced web analytics, interfacing with external systems and launching.
For many web projects this point would mean the end, for us and PKV it is actually just a new beginning of something much bigger. The PKV site itself will not bring new demand. So we are working on a series of experiments on and off the web, which have the task of bringing more relevant visitors to the site and increasing the amount of requests.
Outputs and results of the project
What has changed
- PKV received a new site on a leased system, which greatly simplifies its rapid development.
- The website is embedded in a new marketing strategy that connects PKV's online and offline activities.
- Structured thinking on the web shifted the view of PKV executives on their business and instead of B2C projects they began to focus on B2B and B2G projects
- User research provided PKV with incentives for further development of marketing and business direction.
- We have shifted the visual style and tone of communication and thus more clearly delineated the PKV brand as the number one in the market.
Impact of changes
- Already at the launch of the hotfix, PKV began to receive new demands, which shortened the payback of the entire redesign.
- The new site is getting noticeably more clicks on mailto and callto action. This means an increased interest of visitors to contact PKV.
- Two months after launch, we have almost doubled the traffic increase compared to the hotfix, and the bounce rate of the main party remains around 30%.
- The email database is only slowly filling up so far. Oh, thanks user testing after launching the site, we know that people are skipping the newsletter sign up element, so we will continue to improve the site.
- Thanks to organic traffic, the new website attracted a comparable amount of visits as a PPC campaign from a performance agency, only with half the bounce rate.
House of Řezáč approach is completely different than that of other web agencies. Workshops and user research forced us to think systematically about our business, and collaboration had more impact than just creating a website. It also helped us that other contractors on the project were assigned for us.
