Update May 6, 2024: The Make Marketing blog is temporarily closed to new activity. Current marketing focus and processesare shifting to a new experimental project called WordPress Media Corps. Check out the WordPress Media Corps Initial Roadmap to learn more.
Any marketing contributors wanting to participate or follow along with this new project can join the WP Media Corps site and Slack channel.
Work on the Showcase remains open to contributions, and marketing amplification requests can be made on GitHubGitHubGitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/. For any other ideas or discussions unrelated to these contributing areas, you can use this GitHub discussion area.
Multilingual Site Consolidation for Savvii Managed Hosting
The Project:
Radish Concepts was tasked with building a multilingual site to consolidate three sites into one for their client, Savvii Managed WordPress Hosting. The main goals of the new website were first to increase (micro) conversions, then to reduce the time required to manage content and across multiple sites and finally to improve the creative options for multiple landing pages.
The three sites were each originally created for a different language; therefore, multilingual capability was the primary challenge. Next there was a mission critical integration with inbound marketing platform HubSpot in order to truly enable the internal marketing team.
The new solution needed to give their staff the ability to build creative landing pages on the fly without the need for a web developer. The timeline was also a challenge with a deadline of 90 days for the whole project. Finally, a major requirement was to allow Savvii the ability to maintain total creative control and avoid vendor lock-in.
Why WordPress?
The first driving factor for picking a platform was that the Savvii already had tremendous in-depth knowledge about hosting and familiarity in general with WordPress. Both Savvii and Radish Concepts agreed there were plenty of professional-grade plugins available to tackle the requirements of multiple languages and building landing pages in an easy manner. In addition to this, the creative control required an open sourceOpen SourceOpen Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. solution. It became quickly obvious that WordPress was the best choice.
The Obstacles
Since increasing conversions was one of the main goals, a lot of time had to be invested in interviewing Savvii employees, clients, and prospects to distil personas, the main USP’s, and blocking factors. New photography was also needed since the design of the new website would be more light and open. These things required loads of time since appointments with so many people had to be managed.
The Solution
Radish Concepts decided on using a WordPress multisiteMultisiteMultisite is a WordPress feature which allows users to create a network of sites on a single WordPress installation. Available since WordPress version 3.0, Multisite is a continuation of WPMU or WordPress Multiuser project. WordPress MultiUser project was discontinued and its features were included into WordPress core.https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network. in combination with MultilingualPress Pro and Advanced Custom Fields as a foundation for the website. MultilingualPress Pro takes care of managing content in different languages, with the different languages accessible through a subdirectory system (i.e. savvii.com/nl/, savvii.com/de/). Radish decided on Multilingual Press Pro since both teams agreed that it met their lightweight and multilingual speed solution needs on WordPress.
Advanced Custom Fields was used to create building blocks to help speed up the creation of new pages. These custom fields included modules like; content blocks, form blocks, call-to-action blocks, customer testimonial blocks, and many more.
A connection with POEditor was created to make the translation of strings in the theme itself easier. Savvii was already using POEditor to translate their control panel, so no new software was needed.
The Results
New landing page creation time went from multiple hours of development to a mere 15 minutes using the blocks, saving on both out-of-pocket expenses, and time for Savvii’s marketing staff.
Not only were they able to ensure rankings remained stable, early data also shows that the conversion rate on trial requests increased by 15%. Starting with a simple set of goals and discovering challenges in a project that required a quick turn around, Radish Concepts was able to leverage WordPress to help Savvii Managed WordPress Hosting achieve the site they wanted. Now, through a single central site, their marketing team is empowered to address multilingual users much faster and have far greater control over their web properties. Today the team spends far less time managing their technology and can better spend that time increasing conversions to grow their business.