SSI

Website

The goal

SSI needed a new website to meet their demanding marketing goals and support a deep list of new features. The company had evolved substantially since the previous website, and as part of the SSI Marketing team my role was to ensure the new site reflected that evolution. The project was going to require an information architecture remodel, a visual update coupled with a unique responsive design, and a robust content migration plan supported by a series of redirects to maintain SEO rankings. The content was to be re-written by my team members in a new outside-in fashion, and a rich authoring experience for multiple content authors in various roles was required to publish it all. The project needed to support and further the existing content marketing initiatives and CRM integration, with all user behaviour being tracked for further analysis. Finally, the site was to be able to personalize itself to the audience and surface relevant content to identified users to improve engagement.

The experience

This was a tremendous project with a lengthy timeline and a substantial amount of custom work. The scale and duration of this project made for some unique challenges around managing scope and direction. An agile methodology was applied and is still utilized to manage this project, enabling continuous evidence-based iterative improvement. This approach also supports the ongoing requirement for new cutting edge features like custom content personalization for targeted audiences. This pushed me to learn and deploy some new skills around working with APIs and modelling data.

The outcome

Months after the website launched, the analytics data was reviewed and the improvement is marked. Organic traffic took a clear leap upon launch which confirms the results of our content marketing approach, and the technical implementation of the SEO. The site feels better, is easier to use, leads users down the marketing funnel, and converts. It allows content creators to author content-rich pages through use of the WordPress Block Editor and custom blocks, and it provides deep analytical data into user behaviour. The content personalization works well to serve unique content to targeted accounts, and identify and track those instances. Coupled with a dedicated content marketing approach other modern marketing techniques like re-targeting, the website contributes perfectly to the modern marketing initiatives of SSI