Project Summary and Client Background
After a successful launch of the MyLandrum intranet portal project, LandrumHR approached Bit-Wizards to help their marketing team correct issues with their highly restrictive website then built on an open source platform. LandrumHR needed to improve their marketing department’s ability to edit and enter content on their website, in turn allowing them to grow their online marketing capabilities. Bit-Wizards took Landrum’s current design and moved it into Kentico version 8.2 and immediately upgraded to Kentico version 10.
The Challenge
LandrumHR’s website was originally built on Umbraco which is an open source website management platform. The website was a marketing liability and causing a build-up of technical debt.
Umbraco is an open source platform, so there is little to no support for the needs of medium to enterprise size businesses. The move to Kentico was a perfect fit for the new LandrumHR website because Kentico provides 24/7 support along with dedicated product engineers that continually improve the product to allow for frequent updates to the platform.
The Bit-Wizards digital marketing team also built blog functionality into the new website. LandrumHR’s previous blog was built in WordPress (also an open source platform, with little to no support for businesses), which was separate and disconnected from their main website. Bit-Wizards built custom blog templates into the new site, which achieved the ultimate goal of bringing LandrumHR’s different marketing tools into one easy-to-manage platform.
The Solution
Business Solution
With this project, the Bit-Wizards digital marketing team fulfilled the need of Landrum’s marketing team with a fully responsive website built on the Kentico platform allowing for ease of content entry and planning for future use of the integrated marketing campaign functionality built within the Kentico platform. The Bit-Wizards digital marketing team is helping LandrumHR fill the gap of marketing overflow tasks that they currently do not have the time nor capacity to execute on their own.
“The Bit-Wizards team brings a high degree of skill and thoughtfulness to our project. Compared to our previous website platform, Kentico has provided us 24/7 support, making the execution of our marketing campaigns a breeze. Kentico coupled with the expertise of the Bit-Wizards team has allowed our marketing team to easily manipulate our website to achieve our goals quickly. This is only the beginning and we can’t wait to see what the future brings for our website! We definitely feel we are in good hands.” -Joni Humphreys, Senior Marketing Communications Specialist and Morgan Milbradt, Sales and Marketing Specialist, Landrum HR
Technical Solution
Using the design LandrumHR had in place on their Umbraco open source website, Bit-Wizards made necessary updates to the responsive template and built out customized templates in Kentico that allow for easier content entry and layout flexibility. Along with the need for SEO improvements the initial site was built into Kentico v8.2 then a quick upgrade was done to bring the site to the most current version of Kentico 10.
This project includes all three necessary website environments including development, staging, and a live production environment. The original LandrumHR website did not have a self-contained blog functionality. So, for this new site, Bit-Wizards built out a blog feed for LandrumHR would include the ability for marketing to assign authors to blogs without the need to log in as that author.
Along with the blog template, LandrumHR’s marketing team wanted the ability to build their own landing pages as required by the need to execute marketing campaigns. Bit-Wizards created custom-built templates for this as well, allowing the marketing team to execute campaigns with highly customized landing pages as needed on their own time and effort within a single search engine optimized site.
In addition to custom blog functionality, LandrumHR also worked with the Bit-Wizards digital marketing team to create custom analytics solutions, including custom event and goals tracking. This analytics feature has given the LandrumHR team, even more, information to use in their marketing plan execution.
The Result
Since the launch of the LandrumHR website, in a single month site visits have increased by 16%, page views have increased by 42%, visit duration has increased by 31%, and there has been a 35% decreased in overall bounce rate. With more SEO improvements made immediately following the launch of the site, along with ongoing updates, LandrumHR hopes to see even more organic traffic improvements.
Bit-Wizards and LandrumHR will also be working together on marketing automation solutions to create custom relevant marketing experiences for their customers, and to free up time for the marketing department to spend on high-level marketing tasks.