Transformation through integration.
2021
You know from our branding work with Hilliard-based Advanced Drainage Systems (ADS) that the global company continues to lead its industry with a growing suite of products. Yet the efficiency those products are known for wasn’t translating to their own site experience. Working closely with our client partners, we uncovered smart ways to integrate, optimize, and deliver the best customer experience possible.
THE ASK
ADS was faced with a common challenge: How to organize unique product lines in a way that’s still easy to understand and navigate while maintaining brand equity. Initially, the company was relying on individual site experiences for each of its product lines. Heather Schreiber, Digital Marketing Manager at ADS, told us this had become “disjointed, inconsistent and unsuccessful.” From our preceding strategy work, we decided that a master-brand approach was the right one—that is to bring all ADS product lines under the same umbrella. “Mindstream encouraged us to look at everything,” Shreiber said, “and helped us question why we were maintaining all of these sites when we could be benefitting from the economy of one.” Far from a bolt-on endeavor, our expert teams performed a true site integration.
What We Did
- Customer Research
- Customer Research
- Enterprise Websites
The Approach
Integrating site experiences meant accounting for diverse audiences. We needed to serve the right information to the right customers at the right times. “Your research helped us thoroughly understand this balance from the very beginning through tree testing and audits,” Shreiber said. “Every decision we made was data-driven and set us up for success to continuously monitor and optimize.”
At the start of the project, Schreiber was honest about why the previous individual sites had fallen to the wayside. “Those working in sales have to sell product first,” she said, “and they have to deal with the website second.” Updates had simply grown too burdensome, so we knew just how important CMS flexibility was to the project’s ultimate success. We gave ADS employees more autonomy when it came to the authorship experience by making content creation easy on the back end and providing robust technical documentation that was easily understood.
“Mindstream was a strong partner who helped our company tackle two large projects—a rebrand and site consolidation—concurrently and successfully.” - Heather Schreiber, Digital Marketing Manager at ADS
The Outcome
“From a cross-sell and upsell standpoint, you put us in a better position to tell bigger stories on a larger stage without customers being directed to multiple digital destinations,” Schreiber said. She went on to add, “Now everyone understands the connection these products have to ADS—and the ecommerce approach we have taken to the site is helping people find and purchase products faster, which can only set us up for future opportunities.”
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