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With the Sitecore Experience Platform sitting at its heart, website traffic has increased by 50% globally, including from Colt DCS' growing market - Japan and direct business engagements have risen over 30 times, an average of 300 per month.
Helping Colt DCS differentiate itself from the crowd
With ambitious international growth targets across both Asia and Europe, Colt DCS needed a digital strategy that could influence sales leads in the most cost-effective way possible. With the majority of Colt DCS' prospects researching colocation and data centre services online in the first instance, often across multiple countries, its website needed to play a critical part in reaching growth targets.
Despite growing demand for cloud and colocation services, the high costs for any organisation looking to migrate their data centre solution to a new provider means that customers tend to stay put with existing providers, and winning new business is hard. Colt DCS needed to demonstrate to prospects the additional value its data centres could provide, so its new website needed to encourage visitors to complete a form and book a tour at one of their data centres, leading to the highest chance of converting the prospect into a sale.
This was particularly the case in growing markets such as Japan, where the number of sales and marketing employees at Colt DCS was smaller, but prospects expected a personalised experience based on their individual data centre requirements.
Colt DCS' website was created on WordPress, not responsive or mobile-optimised, and did not have local language capabilities. "Local language was essential to engaging local decision makers", explained Brent Dewhurst, digital marketing manager at Colt DCS. "We needed to demonstrate our credibility as a local partner with tailored services for our customers in the regions. Having this functionality would help us not only communicate our value to customers in the market, but also support the building of brand awareness in the region."
Defining a market-leading digital strategy with Codehouse and Sitecore
To address those challenges, Colt DCS approached Codehouse, a digital agency headquartered in London that specialises in customer journey mapping, personalisation, digital marketing optimisation, and marketing technology. The Colt DCS IT team challenged Codehouse to develop the new website in just five months, to coincide with the launch of a new data centre in Japan.
An immediate decision was made to migrate away from WordPress, and the agency focused on a content strategy approach that personalised content for each individual visitor, while encouraging a smooth journey across different parts of the website.
Alongside increasing the number of new customer leads and improving the reach into the market, the new website had to achieve the following KPIs: improve SEO performance around key service areas, increase website traffic, showcase more engaging content that would make people spend time on the different pages, and drive the conversion of those visitors into sales leads.
Following an in-depth consultation, Codehouse selected Sitecore as the best platform to underpin the new website, as it would enable Colt DCS's marketing team to nurture potential customers through their journey thanks to its in-built personalisation and marketing automation tools, combined with content, visitor engagement, and scoring capabilities. A view of each visitor's behaviour to the website would also enable the marketing team to consistently test, learn, and improve the user experience.
The deployment focus on quality
Codehouse's in-house content editors populated the entire site in Sitecore, uploading media, building the navigation, and creating all the required modules prior to populating pages using Sitecore Experience Editor. The site includes icons, infographics, imagery, a home page hero video and a carousel, and is designed to help visitors easily find what they're looking for, whether this be content to educate on solutions and services, forms to download for site visits, or the interactive maps function to explore locations across the globe. The new site is also mobile-optimised to meet the expectations of today's heavy mobile users. Colt DCS's customer relationship management software (CRM) and a live chat capability were also integrated into the new site.
To support Colt DCS' global expansion plans, drive propositions for global focus sites, and provide more flexibility and accountability, the new website was launched in both English and Japanese, with French, Spanish, and German added soon after. Sitecore Experience Platform simplified the process of adding additional languages, meaning the Colt DCS marketing team can directly manage the development, testing, and launch of new web pages in line with further growth plans and services.
Integrated with Google Maps and displaying key information about Colt DCS locations all around the world, clicking a data centre location personalises the journey for the visitor by offering them downloadable information on the specific data centre in their region. The site also informs the visitor of special events they can attend at that data centre, displays other data centres in the region, and provides prompts to book that all-important data centre tour.
Results to-date
Colt DCS has seen a 50% increase in web traffic from across the world, and the Tokyo office has seen monthly inbound requests increase by 12% from the website, not just for quotes, but to talk to a representative about specific business needs. Bounce rates have also dramatically reduced.
Engagement has grown, from an average of only eight enquiries a month on the old website, to nearly 300 a month on the new Sitecore platform. Furthermore, the company has seen an increase of data centre bookings through the online form, and more requests for tours and quotes for specific locations. 80% of these monthly activities have come from downloading location data sheets, with the remaining 20% made up of visitors, booking a data centre tour, requesting a quote, speaking to a representative, or downloading a topical whitepaper.
"Being in the Sitecore world gave us confidence, more dynamic options, the ability to build a page with HTML, as well as the intelligence and the approach to understand our users better. We have a much better understanding of what content is working, and how we can further promote relative propositions and incentives," said Colt DCS' Dewhurst. "It's like having a Ferrari and actually being able to enjoy driving it, rather than just see how impressive it looks on your driveway."
"The results of the project undertaken by award-winning agency Codehouse speak for themselves, and we know our technology will continue to serve Colt DCS in their ambitious growth plans. Our primary focus is helping brands along the path towards digital transformation, enabling them to reach more of their target audience with personalised content at the right time on the right channel. It's great to see a market leader like Colt DCS achieving this through our technology", concluded Craig Talbot, RVP UK & Ireland, Sitecore.
