Mitsubishi Electric Content Hub
Generating enquiries through a compelling Content Hub
Mitsubishi Electric is a world-leading supplier of energy efficient heating, cooling and ventilation equipment. They help individuals and companies to provide a great internal environment. Cyber-Duck was chosen to craft a Content Hub: the perfect home for reference material, education and industry comment. Exceeding their target, their content has generated over 120 relevant sales enquiries.
Key stats
5,500
visitors per month
115%
increase in page views
Objectives
Mitsubishi Electric supplies an advanced range of products and solutions that heat, cool and ventilate buildings. Their content marketing strategy aims to provide informative, dynamic editorial and guides that help their customers make informed purchasing decisions.
But, they had nowhere to store and promote this style of content. It just didn’t fit alongside the technical listing, options and in-depth spec on their current project pages.
That’s where Cyber-Duck came in. In autumn 2016, we began the user-centred design and development of The Hub from Mitsubishi Electric. Together, we could craft the go-to blog site for reference material, industry comment and education. Our objectives were:
- Demonstrate the passionate USP behind their products: reducing energy use within the built environment.
- House their supportive editorial content strategy and start generating over 4,000 visitors a month.
- Softly generate 60 enquiries through the content provided, pointing to their current dedicated product landing pages.
User-Centred Strategy
As ever, we kicked-off the project with intense audience research and stakeholder interviews with Mitsubishi Electric. We created three personas that dive into the goals, needs and pain points of each target audience.
The Hub is deliberately designed to appeal across the professional, installer and homeowner personas. It provides content that’s tailored to the personas’ different needs and knowledge levels, while softly tying in Mitsubishi Electric’s products and passion for energy efficiency.
Cyber-Duck ran information architecture and card sorting exercises to establish a user-friendly way for personas to search and discover the most relevant content.
Clear colour-coded labels mean all articles can be filtered by persona type at a glance. We can engage and provoke action from users with nice touches, like the estimated read time and featured links.
Users who wish to go further into depth can use additional filters for sector or product, in a drop-down menu or at the side of articles. This helps Mitsubishi Electric reinforce their content strategy, tying in soft sales messages and product landing page links.
Web Development and Analytics
Each element within an article – header, text, images, videos, links, pullquotes and more – was designed and built as a content block in the SilverStripe CMS. This gives Mitsubishi Electric’s team the flexibility to build and customise engaging articles.
Using Google Tag Manager and Analytics, the website has been developed to store anonymised information from user journeys across The Hub. This relates to the content a user views, such as the categories, articles, and pages.
Data helped us decide what content triggers could indicate a user falls into the professional, installer or homeowner persona type.
The Hub is developed to automatically sense, adapt and display articles the personas will be interested in. This powers The Hub’s homepage and the further content suggested at the end of every article. With Google Analytics, we measure user engagement and continue to improve.
The web development behind the homepage and CMS is deceptively complex. We built an adaptive grid system that displays and paginates a variable number of articles, handling blocks that are single (normal) and double (featured content). The back-end development calculates the required sizes to keep the best display before the view is rendered for a user.
Results
Mitsubishi Electric launched The Hub in early March 2017. Now, there are over 150 editorial articles that help customers understand the issues that affect the built environment and the solutions that Mitsubishi Electric offer.
By housing their editorial content strategy, Mitsubishi Electric wished to increase their monthly traffic average to 4,000 visitors within the first 6 months. By July and August, they used the intelligent design and development to build an audience of over 5,400 per month. That’s an increase of 230%, increasing their goal. Page views increased by 115%.
Mitsubishi Electric deliberately chose The Hub to be non-sales focused. They aim to provide supportive content, pointing towards dedicated product landing pages when relevant.
Building service solutions can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds; figures don’t need to be huge to generate a substantial ROI. But with an increase of 230% in their monthly audience, the opportunities for converting leads into valuable projects was increased.
Following our successful work on this project together, we were tasked with redesigning and modernising the company's main website for launch in 2018.
Key stats
5,500
visitors per month
115%
increase in page views