Thursday 20 October 2011

An essential ingredient... ID of course!



About 3 months ago we were contacted by Essential Cuisine, a high-quality manufacturer of stocks, jus and glace to the food industry.

Their products are used all over the UK in Michelin Star rated restaurants and the best gastro pubs.

They have a great b2b business and felt there was a market to sell to consumers so they could enjoy their amazing stock at home, when entertaining or just cooking that special dish. Foodies around the country were in for a treat!

They had to develop packaging, a business model and an eCommerce website in less than 3 months, so the team they worked with had to be capable and efficient. The Hive were contracted to look at branding and packaging, and they did a fantastic job, see below:



Essential Cuisine took care of the business model and pricing. And the product of course!

Then Preston's digital agency Interactive Dimension took on the website. It needed to be an elegant eCommerce solution which was more than 'just' a shop. Essential Cuisine wanted to become a hub of information so we developed a recipes section and a tips area where they could post fantastic recipes for their customers and give that invaluable professional chef insight on how to deliver top-class food at home.

The content needed to be as prominent as the 'shop' itself to give the right feel to the site. It was important that the site attracted users who were there for information as well as to buy stocks.

We leveraged the Worldpay payment gateway (which has it's own challenges!) and needed to integrate with the Royal Mail labeling system Essential Cuisine used already.

It's a small site in terms of products featured, but the capability is there to grow via the content management system behind it all, and as Essential Cuisine bring new products to the consumer from their fantastic food industry range the site can easily accommodate them and allow them to feature in prime spots on the site.

As well as the eCommerce site, we also developed an email newsletter for them which will be delivered using our Campaign Monitor based system, and we created their social media presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Which is all starting to take shape. We advised on the social media strategy and empowered Essential Cuisine to take ownership of the social media rather than pay someone else to do it, which after all, is what social media is about! They're already running competitions on Facebook too!

Now it's about driving traffic to the site, Essential Cuisine already have a large user base on their food industry site, and a marketing strategy in place for the retail offering... we're supporting them with digital marketing services and are confident that the foodie community will quickly get on-board, after all, who wouldn't want to use the best stocks that up to now only the best restaurants could get hold of?

Most interestingly of all to the customers, is that Essential Cuisine's stocks work out significantly cheaper than the current gathering of 'quality' stocks you can buy in the supermarket. The equivalent amount of Truefoods chicken stock compared to £3.95 of Essential Cuisine chicken stock would cost you around £18.00, and wouldn't be as tasty or versatile either!

We think they're onto a winner, and we're glad to help make it happen.

Monday 3 October 2011

NST Group are going places!



We've just launched a new site for NST Group, a long-standing client.

New business is amazing, but there's something to be said for a client who recognises service and capability from their existing digital agency and doesn't judge them on what they have done 4 years ago... that said, the old site was still working really well for the UK's leading school trips and tours company.

A re-brand and new product portfolio along with high SEO competition in their sector made the decision to rebuild the site an easy one, and working with their existing partner, Preston's digital agency Interactive Dimension, made it far simpler for NST Group as we already knew their business and goals.

The site is a complex matrix of tours offered on a number of different user journeys including subject and destination. And we are bringing back taxonomy driven content on the tour pages using bespoke controls we developed into the Wordpress back-end.

It's a very ambitious site to deliver in Wordpress, but we believe the core product is an ideal starting point for most sites and offers a powerful engine on which to build and tweak to meet the clients exact requirements. And Wordpress offers a really usable CMS interface which the clients love to use.

There are hundreds of products on display, clear user journeys, bespoke forms, secure areas for teacher downloads and lots of other features.

The site went live Sunday night and was attracting inquiries at 7am the next morning... So we're happy with that, and so is the client!

The next phase is integrating reviews and comments and a rigorous SEO activity to make the most of the sites well structured and search optimised code.

You can visit the site on www.nstgroup.co.uk


Following on from this release, here's some client comments:

Hi ID,

I just wanted to drop you all an email with some feedback we’ve had on the website from people in the office. It wouldn’t be fair to keep all this from you!

‘Can I just say WOW! This absolutely blows all the other school travel company websites out of the water. It’s very clear and user-friendly.’

‘Well done – it looks fantastic!!! Worth all the hard work!’

‘Nice looking site’

‘Looks great’

‘I like it - a web site that’s easy to follow’

‘Wow! It looks awesome! You must have been working so hard on this!’

‘Looks amazing – you must be really pleased (and relieved!) to see it live. Brilliant job’

Thanks for all your hard work so far.

Helen