It was clear that multiple stakeholders and differing opinions on service weighting resulted in confusing user journeys. Softcat had a complex offering; it needed to become simple & engaging whilst remaining customer-centric. 

To help them achieve this goal, we set out five core focus areas that we needed to implement:

• Simplify the user journeys
• Provide more insights & data
• Introduce to sales at all key points
• Design a visually-engaging site
• Provide a helpful and useful channel for customers 

After unpacking these focus areas, we defined this is as how we would approach it: 

• Sales orientated User Experience 
• Simplified journeys and reduced number of pages
• Integrated resources, news & insights
• Overhauled service/solution pages with refined copy
• Conversational Marketing tool for assisting leads on their journey
• CRM integration for new enquiries
• Triggered events for database building
• SEO strategy 
• Improved data & insights

Softcat's website had evolved over time, collating a mixture of visuals and styles- creating confusion and lacking clarity as a brand. After running in-depth discovery and proposition workshops, whilst exploring the brand and visual representation of Softcat, we created some visuals to reflect their new bold and exciting direction accurately. 

The creative use of shapes, established from the logo and lines, helped distinguish an impactful and vibrant connection unique to Softcat. The goal was to lean towards untraditional creative within the industry, making them stand out from the other 'IT' sites. 

A refreshed colour palette and modernised font combined to reflect their brand directions, culture and styles. Whilst the fully responsive design and friendly, welcoming images encouraged more browsing and engagement on the site. 

Similarly to the creative, the website has been layered with different technologies over time. This was a great opportunity to strip this back and make sure it’s scalable for the future, leaving the legacy systems behind. Here are some of the additions we made to help the sales and marketing team leverage digital:

• The build's main plan was to lay the foundations for a strong platform for acquisition, so captured leads by the site are sent through to Infor CRM (SalesLogix) to streamline Softcat’s current sales processes. 

• Beyond the CRM, we added marketing tools such as Drift and Sleeknote to help customers at specific parts of their journeys. Wistia was also introduced and integrated through an API, allowing us to add lead capture and content linking within the video players.

• Before, Softcat had to lean on development agencies to create bespoke landing pages for their campaigns, and they sit as stand-alone pages introduced to the site on an ad-hoc basis. Not only did this add to the already challenging technical setup, but it also was a big blocker for the marketing team. We leveraged the flexibility and in-context editing power of Concrete5, coupled with Cloudfront for performance and added security, and delivered a fully administrable, lightning-quick content management solution.

• We also went that one step further to provide the marketing team with complete flexibility on the visuals and the content by creating an extensive style guide for broader customisation within the CMS blocks around the brand assets and colour themes. Now there is freedom to spin up unique landing pages without the external cost, but even more creative freedom.