Pickfords digital strategy
The client
Pickfords, the UK’s largest moving and storage company provides a portfolio of services to a diverse range of clients. Pickfords has been moving people for generations and today the name is synonymous with moving home or business. As one of the UK's longest established businesses Pickfords have the dubious pleasure of being able to say that one of their stage coaches was held up by Dick Turpin no less.
The project brief
This was just the type of brief we like to receive, the objectives were clear but the solution was for us to determine. This market leader needed a market leading digital presence. We had to unify the different business areas of Pickfords, each with its own separate website, under a single new website structure whilst improving conversion rates, promoting complementary products and improving performance on the search engines.
Key challenges:
- Beat the recession by grabbing increased market share
- Reconcile a diverse range of business areas under a single design
- Deploy a Sitekit content management system
- Integrate the content management system with Pickfords back office systems
- Ensure the design worked for the diverse audience types
Full digital revamp
New website, a Content Management System and an SEO campaign
With the Internet becoming an ever more important channel for Pickfords there was a recognition that the current range of sites were not performing as well as they could. It was time for a major change!
We started our process by identifying each of the target audiences for the site and profiling their requirements, identifying the tasks that they wished to perform and their motivation for doing so. This highlighted a wide range of target audiences, from families moving home to hospitals changing location, all with very different requirements.
Through an understanding of the various audiences, we were able to plan a site structure that quickly funnelled users into the appropriate area of content within the website. The end result was a single architecture that reflected the way users define themselves rather than the way Pickfords structured themselves as an organisation, making it easy to use and navigate.
Technical areas of the project focussed on the deployment of a market leading content management system (Sitekit) and its integration with Pickfords back office systems. This automatically loads enquiries onto the customer relationship management system enabling revenue to be tracked back to lead source.
Another critical project was to provide a site structure that allowed Pickfords to rank highly on geographically targeted key phrases such as ‘Home removals Birmingham’ and to give this nationwide operation a local presence.
The project was always going to be more than just a website. Our process has driven organisational and cultural change within Pickfords as they gear the business towards a huge digital opportunity. We have driven detailed business process and systems analysis discussions to ensure a successful launch and platform for growth. It has been an exciting and challenging project to be involved in and we're justifiably proud of the end product - the results speak for themselves.