Raven Studio

Raven Studio

by | Jul 1, 2017

Raven Studio

An expanding business refreshes their brand.
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Expansion, and new branding.

Mitch and Sabina Dawson of Facility Resources approached Brian at NorthIQ about improving their website presence.  The current website had been built in the early 2000’s, by previous ownership.  Mitch and Sabina had acquired the company in 2012, and had evolved the business into more than a mere office furniture company, taking cues from Herman Miller, they began consulting on creating living offices, places where people not only worked, but could become their best selves.

Their digital presence did not reflect any of the qualities of the new direction of the company, and with an upcoming brand refresh, it was the perfect time to create an incredible digital presence.

Raven Studio - Quote from Mitch Dawson

Strategy First:

Before jumping into the website, NorthIQ created a comprehensive digital strategy, a roadmap of what needed to be done, what the anticipated impacts would be, and how each piece would fit into the whole.

Strategies around website presence, what pieces would be emphasized, and search engine optimization for specific pages were created. A comprehensive keyword strategy was built around making sure that highly visible pages would rank for the search terms they were intended for.  Rather than writing for search engines, special attention was paid to make sure that everything was natural and organic, rather than forced.

Gorgeous Photography, and Brilliant Descriptions:

The hardest part about any website is ensuring you have good copy and text. Sabina provided great descriptive, keyword rich text, and Raven Studio’s partnership with Herman Miller resulted in incredible photography that served to make the site even better.

What started out as a small, 20 page website, soon expanded into an amazingly comprehensive 80+ page website that had multiple layers, and a great depth of information.

Aeron Chair - Raven Studio
Gallery Image - Raven Studio
Living Office - Raven Studio

The Results:

The Raven Studio website saw an immediate 200% increase in traffic which has increased over the initial four months of launch. The site got rave reviews from both internal staff and customers who were happy with how easy the site was to navigate, and how quickly they could find what they were looking for.

Organic search results improved dramatically as well, with Raven Studio in the #1 and #2 spot for important key terms such as “Herman Miller” “Herman Miller London”, “Herman Miller Kitchener”, “Herman Miller Waterloo”, and “Herman Miller Cambridge”.

Raven Studio is now poised for success.  Their recent addition of Kitchener-Waterloo is a massive growth opportunity, and as they continue to execute on their digital strategy, build ongoing content, and promote their brand, they will see amazing results.

Read More about the Raven Studio Project

The Website

Robinson Wood Design

Robinson Wood Design

by | May 20, 2017

Robinson Wood Design

Artisanal Carpentry Projects
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Creating a Brand

When Nate Robinson needed branding for his newly launched woodworking business, he came to NorthIQ.

With a clear vision of what he wanted, and an understanding that he would be committing himself to a lifetime of beard ownership, Brian and Nate sat down and sketched out some ideas. Nate provided a clear direction, and some preliminary ideas, and Brian refined them to a half dozen concepts.

Settling on a bearded, circular brand design, Nate provided a few final refinements, and the Robinson Wood Design brand was created.

A simple website:

Nate didn’t want to do a lot of website upkeep, and was looking for something that could easily showcase his work from his curated Instagram feed.

We put together a simple, flat, web page with a feed for Instagram, and a link to his Facebook presence, where Nate regularly updates new pieces and adds his availability.

Business Cards:

Fine woodworking is a word of mouth business. Nate needed a simple, but effective business card design that could communicate what he did at a glance, represent the business, and clearly communicate his information.

A simple wood design was chosen for the front, while a two-toned, artistic design was selected for the back.

Literally branding the brand:

Vector files were provided to GearHeart Industries, who crafted a custom Aluminum branding Iron for Nate.

This branding iron is applied to every piece that leaves Nate’s St. Thomas Ontario shop, and adds a lasting reminder of his workmanship on every piece of wood work that he creates.

The Website:

Timber Block Engineered Log Homes

Timber Block Engineered Log Homes

by | Mar 21, 2016

Timber Block Engineered Wood Homes

Updating a website and consolidating technologies

Triage, then improve

TimberBlock Engineered Homes are marvels of modern engineering.  The houses they build are engineered in a factory, and have the traditional look of log homes, but modern conveniences including an R36 insulation value.

Showcasing this technology on the internet and generating sales ready leads was an important goal for this Quebec based company. NorthIQ was brought in to fix their internet presence.

The website was built on WordPress, and was using a variety of different technologies, as well as some proprietary plugins that required a ton of work to maintain. The website had not been updated in a number of months, and the site was unstable and fragile.

Timber Block asked NorthIQ to provide ongoing search engine optimization, search engine marketing, lead nurturing, content marketing assistance, and lead generation for their business.

Timber Block Before:

As a bilingual website, Timber Block required two discreet versions of the site to be maintained. The site also featured differences between Canadian and US versions, including the removal of Canadian addresses in the United States and vice versa.

In addition to a website, the Timber Block site also supported an ecommerce store located at an external provider. This store allowed customers to purchase a plan book in digital and physical formats.

This was all wrapped up in a custom theme that required updates to the actual templates in order to adjust basic information such as hours of operation or changes to pages such as the home page. With the added complexity of multi-language, these pages became even harder to update and maintain.

Timber Block After:

Using Divi and WordPress Multi Language (WPML), we were able to create a flexible, user centric website that showcased the most important aspects of the Timber Block brand.

We also improved the calls to action, and created clear conversions paths across the website by introducing the concept of “tiered conversions”, with low friction “Level 1” conversions for basic downloads, and progressively higher friction conversion paths throughout the website.

By combining both the ecommerce and website into one location, and implementing Woocommerce, we were able to improve and integrate the experience. New purchases were pushed into the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software as leads, and were followed up on.

 

The Results:

This new website was incredibly easy to update, which increased the frequency of updates, and allowed the marketing team to take control of more of their website than ever before.

The tiered conversion paths resulted in a 357% increase in leads over the first year and would result in the need for a comprehensive lead nurturing program (which we provided as a follow up project).

Sales of the Timber Block plan book increased 112% in the first year, as a result of the increased presence, and greater search-ability of the plan book.

All of this has led to an increase in revenue for Timber Block.

An Evolution in Sales

Our changes to the website were just the beginning. In collaboration with TimberBlock senior management, we built multi-stage nurturing programs in their newly acquired Hubspot CRM, creating deep, multi-step lead funnels that allowed logged in users to access content in new ways.

We worked directly with sales to improve the lead generation, and created funnels of sales ready leads which sales were able to quickly follow up on and create an inbound pipeline of pre-warmed sales opportunities.

The Website

All New Comics

All New Comics

by | Jan 1, 2016

All New Comics

How Canada's Online Comics Superstore achieved 197% Year over Year growth
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Massive Growth, Realized Potential

Comic books are a $1billion a year industry, and there are more than 3,000 dedicated comic stores in North America.

Even with those massive numbers, many rural areas are without a local comic book presence, and it’s not unheard of for people to travel more than an hour to their local comic shop.

This is an industry in need of disruption, and in 2005, All New Comics was formed.  The company’s stated goal was to deliver a comic book store experience everywhere in Canada.

All New Comics Before

All New Comics Before:

By 2015, All New Comics had outgrown it’s old platform. The website was constructed using a custom installation of CandyPress ecommerce software.  CandyPress itself was using old ASP technology, and was not very efficient.  Despite an upgrade in 2009, All New Comics was still struggling to build fully mobile friendly website even as mobile traffic increased.

All New Comics After:

The new website was built using WordPress on top of the Divi framework, with a custom Divi theme, and a WooCommerce ecommerce back end.

All New Comics was also plugged into the Manage Comics subscription management tool, which allowed store owner Peter to easily track his customers subscriptions.

The Results:

The new website shot up the search engine charts, the fast, searchable, and incredibly usable WooCommerce ecommerce platform allowed All New Comics to dramatically increase their organic presence.  With over 2,500 available products, All New Comics is one of the largest online presences in Canada.

NorthIQ put a strong spotlight on the Manage Comics subscription account that All New Comics uses, and as a result of this, their recurring customers increased by 233%, increasing their revenue 197% with $0 in ad spend.

Today All New Comics continues to be one of Canada’s largest online comic book stores, and keeps on growing.

The Website