Case studies
Travis Perkins PLC, a national builder's merchant with over 1800 trade counters, had fallen a long way behind competitors online. I was asked to build a strategy for the self-build division first, so it could be implemented and shown to work before the same approach went to the other divisions. The research established market position, competitors, search behaviour and user journeys, and produced a full set of recommendations.
Travis Perkins PLC, a national builder's merchant with over 1800 trade counters, had been struggling with online marketing and transactions and had dropped a long way behind competitors.
The challenge was to build a strategy, initially for the self-build division, that could be implemented and shown to work before producing similar digital strategies for the other divisions.
A series of research tasks established the market position, the competitor analysis, the keywords being searched and the market in general.
From that came a full set of recommendations for consideration, covering the usage of keywords and phrases, what the target audiences are actually looking for, user journeys, information architecture, online and offline marketing plans, and how the site and its microsites should function to achieve users' needs.
The recommendations were in the process of being implemented when this was written, so the full results are not yet known. What it did do was let the client look at their marketplace in a way they had not done before.
Proving a strategy on one division before rolling it across a group is the cheaper order, and it is the one large businesses most often skip. The self-build division was small enough to move and visible enough to learn from, which makes the case for the other divisions an argument from evidence rather than from a deck.
This is digital strategy work. On why the research comes before the recommendations, see why I always look at the competition.
So the approach can be shown to work before it is sold internally. The self-build division was the pilot, and the intention was to produce similar strategies for the other divisions once this one had been implemented and proved.
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