E-Commerce Site Design & Branding for Rescue Training Firm
- Web Development
- $50,000 to $199,999
- Jan. 2021 - Feb. 2022
- Quality
- 5.0
- Schedule
- 5.0
- Cost
- 5.0
- Willing to Refer
- 5.0
"We received the best of the best from Takt (Formerly Massive Media)."
- Education
- Smithers, British Columbia
- 11-50 Employees
- Online Review
- Verified
Takt (Formerly Massive Media) designed and developed the branding and website of a rescue training company. This involved interviewing stakeholders, creating branding assets, designing the website's UI/UX, and QA testing them.
The firm was happy with Takt's (Formerly Massive Media) work. The site's direct traffic increased 49 times, while organic search traffic increased 61 times. Session duration and average pageviews also increased significantly. The team's project management style was clear and consistent, leading to fruitful results.
The client submitted this review online.
BACKGROUND
Please describe your company and your position there.
I am the marketing manager at Raven RSM. We bring out the rescue and safety savvy of Canadians across the country with the training they'll remember when it counts, rescue gear that makes sense, and safety strategies they'll use. From professionals with a rescue mandate to recreationalists and workplace employees for whom rescue is a secondary task, our training, equipment, and services will bring out the best in our students and clients.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
For what projects/services did your company hire Massive Media, and what were your goals?
We approached Massive with the ask for a website equipped with e-commerce. In addition, only a few short years prior, we'd split our website into three distinct domains for our different client bases and realized we'd made a mistake. The website needed to unify disparate and disconnected user journeys, maintain our existing online course sign-up experience and drive the new key business offering of equipment sales. As part of that journey, we also engaged Massive for a visual rebrand.
SOLUTION
How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?
We shortlisted Massive alongside one other firm. We initially opted for the other firm based on their client portfolio - they'd worked with retail companies in the outdoor industry and even had staff that was team members of some of our existing rescue clientele. When that relationship fell through because of poor scheduling on the part of the firm, we turned to Massive with a bit of hesitation. We had originally felt we were not urban enough to be a good fit for Massive - we'd gravitated towards the other firm because they felt familiar to us.
But it became immediately evident that our ethos was the same as Massive's - our relentless pursuit of excellence matched their bold personality. Also, it became clear that Massive would never drop the ball in something as fundamental as scheduling. We were both doggedly committed to producing a masterful result. These underlying values closed the deal for us, and we are forever grateful. Staying with something familiar would have kept us within the standards of our own industry. Partnering with Massive raised the bar in ways only cross-pollinating outside the familiar can. Turns out the future does favour the bold.
Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.
Massive began with an in-depth Research + Discovery process where they learned about our business, customers, industry, operations, and technical requirements: these involved interviews over Zoom, interactive workshops and presentations. From there, the project split into two tracks: Brand and web. Branding efforts began by crystalizing Raven's purpose and turning it into messaging that rallies and inspires. Then came the logo and visual ID concepts, which we shortlisted and refined until we eventually landed on our new logo.
Meanwhile, Massive's UX team was planning our new website's content and information architecture around its users' needs. These translated to Figma wireframes that later became the backbone for the new website's UI and visual design. Massive presented us with these designs in Figma via a clickable URL that let us navigate the site to get an idea of how it feels. Copywriting was a collaborative effort between Massive's copywriters and our internal team and was completed in a Google Doc.
With the website's UX, content, design, and technical requirements completed, Massive's developers began coding Raven's custom theme on WordPress, integrating the website with our various platforms and business-critical technologies. Then came testing and QA. Massive did the bulk of this internally before handing us the keys to the staging environment for Client Acceptance Testing. From there, we made final adjustments and tweaks before launching the new brand and website!
How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?
Ten people (2 UX and Content Strategists, 1 Brand Strategist, 2 WordPress Developers, 2 Designers, 2 Project Managers, 1 Art Director)
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?
This data appears fantastical. We know.
- Direct Traffic: Increased 49x between February and August 2022 year over year.
- Organic Search Traffic: Increased 61x between February and August 2022 year over year.
- Avg. Session Duration: Increased 6x between February and August 2022 year over year.
- Pageviews: Increased 94x between February and August 2022 year over year.
We have received more newsletter signups since the website launch, and more form submissions in general. Our online course sales remained strong and didn't falter for a moment during the transition to the new site - courses remain waitlisted and sold out country-wide. As for retail sales, we have nothing to which we can compare our new e-commerce platform - we never had one before!
But we are easing into the new e-commerce reality with the support of a solid UX and ongoing fine-tuning from the team at Massive. Any ongoing challenges we face with e-commerce lay more in our new inventory software and its integration to the website than with anything specifically related to the website design.
Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.
Project management was clear, timely, and consistent. A single Project Manager served as a point of contact for us and provided weekly updates via prescheduled video check-ins and documentation. Our project actually changed hands between 4 project managers over its duration, but despite that, we never felt that information fell between the cracks. An impressive accomplishment! At the end of our project, we were also left with a 100+ page "website training" document - a living google doc where changes to the site can be documented by ourselves or Massive as time goes on.
What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?
We felt that we received the best of the best from Massive; that they'd curated the best takeaways from every client in their portfolio, synthesized them with our needs, and delivered our branding and web design based on the result. Part of this meant that Massive's CTO pushed us to reconsider our entire backend software ecosystem seriously. Massive went above and beyond the statement of work to deliver a brand and website; they guided us to the (admittedly painful) realization that we needed to back up the work they were doing with equally masterful backend software.
They knew that the website and branding they built would never reach their full potential without a better tech stack behind the scenes. Our entire business is better because of their input on this issue.
Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?
Challenges remain in the realm of e-commerce for us. We believe this is due to the new inventory software (Netsuite) and its integration to our Wordpress WooCommerce site, as opposed to anything relating to the site itself. I can tell that Massive had never worked with a client connecting WooCommerce to Netsuite. While building integrations was not at all within the scope of Massive's work with us (that fell to the integration partner we were working with), we obviously would have loved to benefit from any prior knowledge that Massive had of such integrations done for other clients.
We hope future clients will glean tips and tricks because of Massive's experience with us. As I said, we received the best of the best from Massive because they curate the best takeaways from every client in their portfolio. We are proud to add our experience to their already deep well of knowledge.
RATINGS
-
Quality
5.0Service & Deliverables
"Refer to above answers, and go look at our website."
-
Schedule
5.0On time / deadlines
"See "project management" question above"
-
Cost
5.0Value / within estimates
"Budget was accurately forecasted."
-
Willing to Refer
5.0NPS
"I follow them on my personal social media accounts. That's saying something.