Huddersfield-based digital marketing agency Splitpixel has completed a mammoth six-month website redevelopment project for multinational brand Sodexo, marking the team’s largest assignment to date.
Sodexo Group is the 19th largest employer in the world, operating in 80 countries with annual revenues of more than €20 billion.
The UK division known as Sodexo Employee and Consumer Engagement has been a Splitpixel client since 2009, but as the organisation has grown so too has the complexity of its online footprint. At the start of 2017, the decision was made to consolidate 15 individual sites – attracting over 600,000 visits per year for 11 different brands – into one.
Now – more than 1,500 man hours later – the 330-page, fully-responsive and truly insight-driven website has been successfully crafted and launched.
Commenting on the project delivery, Splitpixel’s co-founder Charlie Herke said: “Sodexo wanted to provide a seamless, engaging and information-rich hub, something that better represented the whole of their product and service portfolio. The site had to communicate with a range of target personas to improve the user experience and, above all, generate leads.
“A project of this scale was – perhaps unsurprisingly – far from straightforward, and not least because of the tight timescales. But we drew upon the expertise of everyone within our 11-strong multi-disciplined team to nail this challenging brief.”
The new site design was carried out in parallel to a two-month digital audit of the 15 disparate domains, which then saw the team move on to user journey mapping and strategic content development. 200 blogs were hand-selected, reworked and optimised for relaunch on the new site, 130 new pages were written as a result of collaborative workshops with Sodexo’s brand champions, and a number of engaging visual elements were incorporated to bring the creative to life.
The WordPress build was complemented with the integration of HubSpot to host the blog and all gated content, making the two platforms work together in ways that the technical community for both tried to tell the team were impossible. Finally, 8,500 pages were manually redirected and a month of testing completed prior to the launch.
On the completion of the project, Ms Herke said: “Despite the site housing a very complex navigation and content architecture, the result is an easy-to-use, results-driven and agency-style website, totally unlike anything they had before. It’s extremely bold, but we’re happy to say the client loves it.”
Splitpixel will now continue to support Sodexo with ongoing ecommerce, SEO, PPC and lead generation projects moving forward.
Jamie Mackenzie, Sodexo’s director of marketing concluded: “Splitpixel has captured the essence of our new branding and delivered it, not just to a market-leading standard, but also on time – and with minimal hiccups along the way. I wouldn’t underestimate the complexity of simplifying our business into one site.”
