Brave’s Brief

Brave was approached by Scotts of Thrapston to conduct a business-wide audit of their marketing set-up. After holding internal workshops with key stakeholders and members of their team, we produced a completely new marketing strategy for the business.

The business, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2020, was deemed to be too ‘traditional’ in terms of its marketing approach. We found that their efforts were becoming stale and too conservative to cope with the demands of an ever-changing ‘digital-first’ world, so a more proactive, forward-thinking approach was required. The strategy needed to be centred on two things. First, a clear definition between the consumer and B2B arms of their business, and secondly, a more heavily targeted and modern approach towards customer engagement and lead generation.

Our Approach

Brave conducted extensive media research, competitor analysis and a media indexing project which defined the media habits and trends of this new target market and promoted several key touchpoints in which to launch this new website and its customer positioning. The power of a ‘digital-first’ approach was introduced to the company and yielded some outstanding results for the business by generating far higher volumes of quality traffic to the website at a substantially cheaper cost, resulting in both the lead quality and frequency reaching new heights.

Marketing Performance

A performance-based social media advertising campaign was launched on Facebook, Instagram & Pinterest, supported by native ads, programmatic display and video/mobile advertising. This created large-scale, highly-targeted market awareness and education of the brand with a funnel approach towards lead generation that built up a steady pipeline of high-quality enquiries and leads. In addition to this, we also launched a new SEO strategy, press & PR campaigns and national events.

The National Press activity was a core component of the overall strategy designed to drive brand awareness and upper-funnel engagements. The combination of all of these ingredients helped Scotts of Thrapston to have an exceptional year in 2021 with their production at a peak despite a pandemic for the majority of the year. With the new approach and tactics now in full force, they are now much better placed to have more direct control over their marketing operations, strategy and sales pipelines.

Designing a UX-Focused Website

Before starting site design, our team of experienced web designers researched the previous Scotts of Thrapston website and their competitors. Accompanied by detailed client discussion, our research gave us a great understanding of their vision for the brand, website and goals. Our team was able to design a bespoke, high-end website to sit in their landscape.

There were a number of flaws that our design specialists found with the previous site design, the first issue being the templated theme designs. A website that is built using off-the-shelf templates may be an easy option but is not designed with conversion rate optimisation principles in mind. Plus, templates are very restrictive when it comes to adding bespoke content that can tell a story in a tailored way.

Since the website’s main objective was about generating fresh leads and showcasing its quality products, we believed that a bespoke, UX-optimised website redesign was the best route to take. We achieved this with a combination of high-quality product images, an updated colour palette and a clear product hierarchy. With these qualities, the client now has a bespoke WordPress website that is traditional in feel yet contemporary in function.

Bespoke Design

Our team carried out extensive UX and competitor research to better understand what made Scotts of Thrapston unique and how we could utilise that. The website needed to be easy to use but able to have the same attention to detail that Scotts of Thrapston has in their own craftsmanship. We introduced micro-interactions, highly modular pages and bespoke features to make the site easy to use.

Incorporating high-level animations that did not interfere with the UX is always paramount when designing and building a website. It needs to function and be aesthetically pleasing at almost every touchpoint a user interacts with. In addition, when it came to the modular pages, we needed to ensure they were easily editable so the client could have full ownership over the site content and be self-sufficient in-house using a preset ‘lego-bricks’-style construction. Finally, bespoke features are an abundance on the final website and one, in particular, would be the incredibly useful product calculator that saw positive customer feedback.

Vue.js, in combination with Vuex and Vue Router technology, was at the core of this implementation, allowing us to build the website using a traditional toolset but take over the site with the product calculator when needed. This made a major difference when it came to setting up bespoke open-source platforms such as WordPress and ensuring any bloated features which are not needed are refined further for the client.

All of this was carefully planned at the early wireframing stage through to high-fidelity prototyping, where both the designers and the developers group together to discuss these finer details.

Content Implementation

Content was also carefully considered and this wasn’t just limited to photography and copywriting. Video played a part at key points throughout the user journey to reinforce credibility, social proofing and communicate the personal connection. Videos keep people engaged on a website longer and we realised that videos helping people get to know the brand succinctly is the number one priority.

What’s Next?

The strategy that we compiled for Scotts of Thrapston centred on our proven ability to create effective, heavily targeted performance-based campaigns which eliminate budget wastage and maximise the output and ROI of our campaigns.

Early on, we determined that the client was seeing an increase in low-quality leads that were previously coming through to them, either through their website or paid ads. A clear definition of their target audience led to a much more robust approach towards penetrating this highly valuable audience.

With continued lead and target user research, we will be able to continue to boost their ad conversion rates and bring forward a more relevant and better-targeted lead funnel.