Digital strategy audit

Beanies Flavour Co

Beanies Flavour Co are a Darlington-based flavoured coffee manufacturer. Established in 2013, Beanies offer over 50 flavours of coffee, and retailing both direct and via third parties.

Marketing Situation

Beanies approached Digital City with a three-fold objective:

  • Consider how to expand digital sales into Europe
  • Reviewing the current digital marketing strategy
  • Outline how an efficient change could be made to the website

The website was not being developed to the extent the business needed, nor was there the flexibility in the site structure to react to new opportunities. Traffic generation costs were also a concern along with the effectiveness of third party activity.

Approach

Stage 1: Digital Audit

Braid conducted an initial digital audit, focusing on service, marketing and functional issues. The methodology involves quantitative and qualitative investigations utilising a range of tools such as Google Analytics, Search Console, Moz, Screaming Frog and proprietary data from Beanies. The analysis follows the Braid audit framework that has evolved over the last ten years. Team discussions expanded the range of information, and informed past strategies.

The resulting report highlighted some strong areas for the business, opportunities for further gains and a range of issues to be addressed to ensure the strategy benefited from better data, tools and direction. Recommendations included:

  • A thorough breakdown of website issues and options for addressing them
  • A breakdown of issues to develop an initial European marketing strategy
  • Analysis of marketing options for growth
  • Resources

This audit was turned round in 4 weeks from the initial brief.

Stage 2. Audit Action Plan

Following the report there was a period of developments at Beanies, with a new partnership launched with a Greek coffee company. In due course the audit was revisited by the Beanies team, who agreed with much of the audit and the recommended steps.

The conclusion was the website issues would take more resources to try and address existing issues than to move to a more portable, efficient and flexible platform. Given previous issues with website build projects Beanies commissioned Braid to run the project.

Braid developed a brief with the Beanies team and developed a short list of potential agencies. Briefings for all agencies were undertaken to ensure consistency, and the submissions reviewed. Identify, a Wakefield based agency were selected to take on the new website build project. The core objectives were:

  • Seamless move to a new platform
  • Retention of existing traffic and conversion rates
  • Provision of foreign language versions (2 specific county sites initially)
  • Improve on existing PageExperience scores, achieving a minimum 50/100 on core pages

The site build process progressed well, with various new ideas being introduced along the way, in addition to new content development. The site launch witnessed a near-seamless change, with no interruption to traffic or conversion.

The audit impact

A key objective was to maintain organic traffic, which was achieved, and improved, with a major increase in indexed pages and in a short time following launch a discernible improvement in traffic volumes. Page experience scores exceeded 80/100 and conversion from a range of sources improved. Research of regular users indicated a strong positive reaction to the new site.

Further elements of the original audit are now being developed. New resources have been identified and appointed to manage aspects of Beanies sales acquisition, with budget savings being made.