APIA generates 3 times more leads with HubSpot CMS

Conquering a B2B niche market with a conversion website

Like any SME operating in a niche industrial market, APIA's challenge is to make its know-how known. To meet this need for visibility, the company has equipped itself with a website capable of generating new contacts and quotes.

Take control of your webmarketing acquisition in the agri-food sector

Company presentation

APIA Technologie is a Breton company that has been an expert in powder transfer and dosing for the food industry for over 30 years. It develops systems dedicated to handling dry bulk products and dosing powder ingredients.

When you're a decision-maker in the food industry, day-to-day life alternates between strategic priorities and budgetary trade-offs. To make their jobs easier, APIA's mission is to equip agri-food plants to:

Make their jobs easier.

• Ensure plant profitability and finance development.
• Innovate to meet new consumer expectations.
• Ensure employee safety and food standards for end customers.

Why did APIA Technologie decide to redesign its website?

Historically, APIA experts crisscross the French territory to visit production sites. In times of pandemic, some of the doors that were once open have become more complex to approach.

The APIA experts are also available to answer any questions you may have.

Not to mention the nichéd and highly competitive physiognomy of the food powder transfer and dosing market. There are many contenders to optimize production lines. As well as several conceivable technologies to meet agro-industrial needs.

To stand out from the crowd, APIA needed to be better identified by plant managers and technical executives. At this stage, the company was already quoted in the trade press and physically present at the trade shows that count. It was to a little-exploited channel that the angle of attack was directed: the web.

When the subject arrived on the table, the observation was unequivocal:

• We have a website that acts as a showcase
.
• This one generates between 0 and 3 contacts per month
• Our content is a few years old and no longer evolves

Neither customers nor sales staff were relying on the website to solve business problems for which they knew the answers. With this in mind, the APIA team turned to our agency, to support them in addressing their market through digital.

How Make the Grade set APIA's marketing contact generation on fire?

The redesign project was divided into three main stages, each key to the design and development of the new website:

1. Definition of artistic direction
2. Creation of page templates
3. Publishing the website

Definition of APIA Technologie art direction

Before launching the design team on the mock-ups, our marketing department carried out an inspirational benchmark. The challenge was to draw inspiration from the best ideas to build a tailor-made website.

There are 3 complementary benchmarks:

• French and international competition

What are direct and indirect competitors doing? Are there any best practices to use? Trends to identify? Etc. Thanks to this exercise and APIA's in-depth knowledge of the business, we were able to draw up a tree structure for the future site. This will direct the right visitor to the right content at the right time. In other words, the web pages that respond to the visitor's stage of maturity  with regard to the act of purchasing: awareness of a problem, or consideration in the face of this challenge, or taking the decision to solve it.

• Required features

We advise the full range of web best practices to facilitate the conversion experience of future visitors. For APIA, we identified the use of an intelligent filter to bring up the customer need in 3 clicks as an interesting feature. You can find this feature on the site's home page.

• Ergonomic and graphic design

The challenge was to offer a visual and memorable identity to make it easier for the target audience to remember APIA. Thanks to this exercise, we created the web graphic charter for the company. This involved creating, defining and structuring all the components of the future website: titles, paragraphs, buttons, colors, fonts, and other graphic elements.

Creation of page templates

In this part of the project, we detail the web design actions undertaken. Then the efforts linked to the front-end development of the website. Each milestone conditions the success of the project, the respect of the budget and the maintenance of the deadlines.

Creation of ergonomic website mock-ups

Creating ergonomic mock-ups of the future site's page models involves organizing, prioritizing and placing content in the best locations. We imagine the best possible user experience  and define the position of elements and functionalities within pages in a conversion context.

Graphic layout design, the charming trump card of conversion

Following validation of the ergonomic mock-ups, we are able to create the graphic mock-ups. This stage consists of deploying the universe and graphic charter on the ergonomic models. The graphic mock-ups represent the final visual rendering of the website and what it will look like once developed.

To design APIA's graphic universe, we started from the key values to be conveyed to priority targets:

• Trust
• Commitment
• Fairness
• Reliable

Technical page developments, to bring the APIA website to life

This involves the integration of page templates, once the graphic mock-ups have been validated. We build the foundations of the inbound marketing strategy with the creation of a dedicated theme  to  CMS Pro HubSpot. The advantage of this technology is that the website is directly linked to the company's CRM. This alignment offers incomparable data quality. Then becomes a solid bridge between marketing and sales efforts for APIA.

During this front-end development, each feature is built within customized modules that can be reused on all pages. This principle results in a site that is flexible and easy to update with total autonomy.

Today, APIA's in-house marketers are autonomous in updating content. Each page becomes a hole-in-the-wall text, so concentrating on the creation of high value-added content is child's play.

At APIA, our in-house marketers are autonomous when it comes to updating content.

Publication of the new website, day of celebration !

Once the page templates are ready for use on the HubSpot CMS, we use them to assemble the site's pages. We take care of integrating text content, creating links between pages, configuring navigation, and compressing and uploading images.

It's also at this stage that we optimize content for SEO and the branding plan: call-to-actions, forms, strategic keywords, semantic cocoons, alternative image tags, RGPD Compliant, redirection plan, etc.

After we've fully assembled the site's pages, we'll carry out acceptance testing before it goes into production. Divided into three categories, the aim is to analyze the conformity of deliverables:

1. Design: ensuring that mock-ups are respected
2. Technical: testing performance and correcting anomalies
3. Marketing: checking content and SEO configurations

Powerful marketing results and a logical sequence of new challenges

Between 3 and 4 months, including acceptance testing, saw APIA's new website see the light of day on Google. The king of search engines, who was quick to understand the company's business and added value in the agri-food sector. In the first quarter after going online, lead volume doubled. Then threefold over the rolling 12 months.

The conversion mechanism is performing well, now the company's new challenge is to bring the right fuel to it. To increase the volume of qualified traffic, then the number of contacts and quote requests, APIA is pursuing its acquisition actions. The playground between our teams is still in full swing, with the deployment of inbound marketing campaigns.