Re-platform, rebuild, refresh
Back in 2012, Proactis came to us with an existing Umbraco site. At the time they were looking for an experienced .NET development agency to support them with small changes and updates, as well as maintaining best practices, especially regarding on-site SEO.
In 2014, that Umbraco website was out of support and the time was right for a rebuild. As a part of that project, they were looking for a more modern design, and a more flexible CMS and so the decision was made to re-platform Proactis to Kentico.
This website needed to be multi-lingual, and fully integrated with their Pardot and Salesforce platforms.
Finally in 2021, as part of a multi-agency team, we reskinned their website to the current version you see today. The brief this time was to build on the strong functional integrations already in place and introduce more creativity and bring their brand and UI design up to par with their new SaaS competitors entering the market.
The objectives
From 2012, right through to today, the core objectives for Proactis have always been the same: to generate leads for the business and to improve their visibility on search engine results pages. On top of that, the website needed to effectively communicate and promote their brand identity and functionally, it needed to empower the different regions to edit and publish content, without creating content inconsistencies, diluting the brand and ultimately breaking their internal content review and sign off processes.
What we did
2012 to 2014 – Umbraco website support, updates and maintenance including an SEO and compliance review to bring it in line with current best practice across search, social and cookies.
2014 – A migration from Umbraco to Kentico as part of a full website redesign and build
2015 – We integrated the new Kentico website with Pardot
2016 – An interim design refresh was rolled out to update the look and feel of the website
2018 – The second Proactis website was designed and build to fully introduce their new brand. This was a multi-agency project, and our brief was to interpret their new brand guidelines for their digital experiences.
2019 – A forum was added to the website and a new user group was introduced
2021 – A new interactive spend management wheel and a procurement process checklist were introduced
2022 - The third, and final website refresh (so far) was designed and rolled out starting with the Germany region first, before being applied to the rest of the Proactis regions worldwide.
English, Dutch, German and French
The Proactis website is currently available in 4 languages (5 if you include US English). As a multi-lingual project, we needed to find a way to allow content to be managed page by page, in each of the languages required, but without devolving control too far, and creating inconsistencies and compliance challenges. The result was a hybrid of centrally controlled features including content for their interactive tools, alongside flexible Kentico widgets and rich text editors at an individual page level.
Simplifying spend management
Proactis are world leading experts in their field, and although they know spend management and procurement inside out, they acknowledge from their years of experience in the industry, that their potential clients don’t always find it so straightforward. Recognising this need to better educate and support their target audiences, without being oversimplistic and condescending, we embarked on the design and development of two key interactive tools for Proactis: a spend management problem solver and an invoice processing cost reduction calculator. Both were created with ease of use and interactivity at their core, to cut through the complexity and help users better understand how Proactis can help.
How it went and how it's going
In the first 7 months since the 2018 website redesign was launched alongside a new digital marketing strategy, website sessions increased by 119%, page views increased by 127% and users increased by 106% compared to the previous period. This created the foundations for the future successes of our digital partnership with Proactis. Today their current website supports:
different acquisition channels contributing to traffic on site, including organic search, affiliates, video, email and PPC
different tracked events including specific downloads, different form completions and interactions with preference controls
overall conversion rate for the website, increasing to 6.25% for organic social and 9.38% for email marketing
organic Google search impressions over the last 12-month period
