Challenge
Outgrowing a digital Footprint
As a quickly growing company with multiple sub-brands and product lines serving different audiences, Mesa Labs struggled to unite a sprawling set of websites that didn’t reflect the leading-edge nature of their work or the commonalities between their brands.
Moreover, maintaining ten different sites in WordPress, with a total volume well over 1,700 pages, was proving untenable. Making simple edits and updates to the sites often resulted in site crashes, so over time, more and more errors went unresolved. With a below-standard conversion rate, slow site speed, and an overall web health score of 0, the Mesa Labs team knew something had to be done.
After consulting with the Mesa Labs marketing team and business units, we identified several key challenges and opportunities to address:
- Streamline multiple brand websites into one unified digital experience
- Migrate from WordPress to HubSpot CMS Hub
- Integrate siloed tools to create seamless functionality and simplify site management
- Increase SEO domain authority, improve customer engagement, and boost conversion rates
Solution
Migrating from WordPress to HubSpot
As enterprise-level users of HubSpot Sales, Marketing, and Service Hubs, the Mesa Labs team was inclined to choose HubSpot’s CMS Hub for the website redesign and migration, and we found that the platform made sense for Mesa on multiple levels.
- Hosting – As a cloud-hosted CMS, HubSpot offers greater flexibility and significant savings over self-hosted WordPress maintenance, particularly for enterprise-sized sites.
- Security – HubSpot’s built-in security features easily accommodate Mesa Labs’ need to meet both Content Security Policy requirements and GDPR standards. WordPress could accommodate security but requires third-party plugins and oversight, adding expense and risk while slowing the site down further.
- Performance – The option to consolidate into one ecosystem and seamlessly integrate with other tools was a major selling point for Mesa Labs’ choice of HubSpot. The migration to HubSpot CMS delivered advanced functionalities without requiring as much backend development assistance, while increasing site speed and performance.
- Self-service – After creating custom page templates, HubSpot gives marketing teams more flexibility for creating and updating content — including layout changes — without requiring developer input, additional plugins, or more subscriptions.
Building Understanding
During our four-week discovery process, the New Era team:
- Fully assessed the current state websites
- Captured and prioritized requirements from different stakeholders across the business
- Performed a content audit and created a comprehensive content catalog
- Redefined the information architecture into one unified customer experience across the legacy brands
- Developed low-fidelity wireframes to visually outline new page structures
Consolidating multiple brands into one unified website is never a lift-and-shift operation. By taking the time to build foundational understanding and develop a strategic information architecture, we had a more accurate view into the final-state website and the effort needed to put the transformation into effect.
Unifying the Brand
We worked with Mesa Labs to bring their unified brand vision to life structurally, visually, and through core messaging. As we moved the company away from their previous multi-site footprint and consolidated all business units and products under a single domain, we bolstered SEO domain authority, but, more importantly, designed a streamlined user experience that better serves the company’s engagement and conversion goals. Visually, we leaned into bolder graphics and more compelling art, and used more direct and inspiring language to emphasize the company’s core strengths.
Testing Assumptions
Before moving into development, we tested our assumptions against actual user input. Conducting virtual unmoderated testing with customers from each business unit around the world, we validated the site organization and pathways, and gained critical insight into how users progressed through the redesigned site architecture.
Customizing for Flexibility
Our team customized and built out the theme, 11 custom templates, and 30 custom modules into a flexible structure within HubSpot to give Mesa Labs marketing the ability and flexibility to lead creative page generation. We added several custom React apps to the HubSpot environment, including a filterable product component, a robust resource library, on-site search, and a gated certificate finder tool.
Integrating to Streamline Workflows
As we built the new site, we also streamlined workflows. We removed form management from Mesa Labs’ third-party tool, FormStack, and into the HubSpot ecosystem, creating workflows and contact properties to enable the Mesa Labs sales team to act on leads generated by the website. We also developed preliminary architecture to integrate an evolving SharePoint-based asset management solution, Office 365, and the Power Automation platform into the HubSpot instance. And, using HubSpot’s GDPR toolkit, we enabled site cookies and tied and tracked those to communications within Mesa Labs’ Marketing Hub subscription lists.
