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:
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.
During our four-week discovery process, the New Era team:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, Microsoft 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.
After four development sprints, a week of QA, and two weeks of user acceptance testing, the New Era team launched the new Mesa Labs website, complete with a robust redirect strategy — delivering the project on time and on budget.
And the results were immediate.
Organic search now drives the majority of traffic to the Mesa Labs site. Engagement rates, time on site, and conversion rates soared.
“New Era’s expertise helped us to drive significant traffic to our website, increase our lead network exponentially, and generate qualified inbound leads within a matter of weeks.”– Megan Wood, Mesa Labs Manager of Marketing Communications
With the design and development of the site theme in place, Mesa Labs is already applying that groundwork to a second migration to the same HubSpot CMS platform for another group of companies they recently acquired. Although no website is 100% future-proof, Mesa Labs now has the foundation it needs to stay current and consistent as its portfolio continues to expand.