MEK captures regional Diamond Award for digital marketing
MEK scored a regional (multi-state) Diamond Award for its 2018 digital project for client Smithville. 
Details from the award application and the work performed appear below:
Improving the Digital Customer Experience for Smithville
How does a top tech company react when their online brand imagery doesn’t match market reputation? Known as a leading technology innovator, Smithville’s main website didn’t match its reputation. Visitors complained about Smithville’s web presence as a painfully slow-load with an old look that hadn’t been fully updated in years. The old site led to online brand-bruising, as Smithville held a strong reputation for outstanding customer service and early adoption to new tech like Gigabit-speed fiber broadband in south central Indiana. The challenge? More than a decade ago, former internal employees of the company developed a Drupal-based website and inexplicably incorporated certain features that rendered the website difficult to update. MEK was directed to transform the existing platform and create a foundation for an enhanced and improved online customer experience.
Research – MEK successfully secured a budget for internal and external research that included both primary and secondary research, and also an intense competitive analysis. The interview research included internal employee and key personnel focus groups, where customer-facing staff was able to articulate both what they didn’t like and what they would like to see in a new website. Over the past three years, MEK had developed workaround service-specific web properties as Smithville dealt with internal technology issues to lay the foundation for an all-new Smithville.com. MEK also created a pop-up research tool on the Drupal site (and other Smithville web properties) to determine external perceptions and needs, as well as using Google Analytics and other data sources for user analysis. MEK then provided separate presentations of the completed research to senior management. The research showed a major need for a new responsive and mobile-friendly website with specific improvements for an enhanced customer experience (E.g., smoother log-in for bill pays and other services, an improved capacity to determine service availability, better communication access, and other items). The internal research yielded more functionality requests than were available in a Phase I development, but the research process did positively better manage internal expectations and produced guidelines for a proposed Phase II.
Planning – Smithville had previously standardized with MEK and its web development partner Rare Bird for a WordPress platform for its other websites. That would continue with the new Smithville.com. Driven by the research, a formal Creative work plan was developed and objectives for the new site included: improvement of prior load-times, an attractive and more intuitive web design (clean and less cluttered parallax format), easier log-ins for various customer services, enhanced mapping functionality for service availability, a new capacity for visitors to solve their own problems with extended FAQs and new chat functionality, and the capacity to serve as a central portal for all existing Smithville web service properties (business, security, retail store, etc.). The scope was divided into phases, with Phase I to provide the firm foundation for later enhanced functionality after the abandonment of the old Drupal-based site and the creation of an all-new customized WordPress-driven site. A budget for Phase I development was secured.
Implementation – MEK assembled a team to develop the new WordPress platform and implemented an in-depth process to port over existing content from the old site, now edited and revised with key words and alt phrases to maximize SEO optimization. MEK creative guided the process. Concepts of the new site were regularly presented during development to senior management (and on occasion external contacts) to drive positive development. The GDPR implementation in Q2 was accommodated in the new site. Development was smooth.
Evaluation – The completion of Phase I met or exceeded all objectives. See the new website here.