MEPC new brand implementation
MEPC new brand implementation
MEPC is part of the Hermes portfolio with assets comprising eight business communities worth £1.3billion.
Back in 1999 HMA won a property marketing award for a multimedia presentation distributed on CDROM that introduced MEPC's Lakeshore development to the market. Although we continued to work with MEPC on various web and CGI projects, when in 2006 the organisation decided to carry out a complete review of its brand and how it was applied to all digital media the project was put out to pitch.
Lloyd Northover carried out the corporate review and HMA Digital Marketing won the pitch to apply the revised brand across the corporate site, all business community websites, intranet, extranets, emails, onsite digital directories etc.
Previously there had been inconsistency not only in how the brand had been applied to various digital resources but also how they were managed - some internally and others externally. Having carried out a complete digital review of MEPC’s digital resources and that of their major competitors, we agreed a strategy with them.
Consistent application of the new brand
Formally, MEPC had a number of disparate websites, including a corporate site and eight business community sites. The challenge was to provide a solution that consistently applied MEPC’s new brand across all sites whilst retaining flexibility for each business community to retain their individual identity. HMA achieved this by consolidating all the different sites into one integral solution whilst providing the opportunity to manage each business community area at a local level. In order to provide this flexibility and additional functionality we had to completely rebuild our Content Management System, which has now been approved by Microsoft. The intranet and extranets are also powered by our CMS.
Websites, extranets and intranet
All systems had to be reviewed, redesigned and rebuilt to ensure they provided relevant content, navigation and functionality for the various audiences whether internal or external. MEPC had determined that the web was their most important marketing communications platform and so all sites had to be built so that potential occupiers would find them through natural search engine listings. Functionality includes property searches of the whole portfolio or individual business park, virtual tours, occupier searches and localised traffic reports, the solution provides relevant information at the right time and engages visitors appropriately.
More agent interest and occupier enquiries
In order to meet this objective HMA made sure the system was technically suitable to deliver free listings and have continued to develop relevant content on the sites. Pay per click campaigns were engineered to meet immediate needs and now search engine opimisation SEO processes are in place for all business parks. Together with digital PR and email campaigns HMA is working with each of the Parks’ marketing teams to increase and improve their online profiles.
Become more efficient and make savings
An important part of the strategy was to streamline internal processes and become more efficient as well as make savings on external services.
Cost efficiencies were achieved immediately with reduced hosting costs and further savings continue to be made by the utilisation of a CMS that makes updates quick and simple. From an internal point of view efficiencies have improved with the introduction of the intranet, asset management system and brandstore.Also, website visitor numbers increased by 75% in the first 12 months of the site going live, bounce rate from the homepage has much improved and property detail downloads have increased by 150% year on year. The provision of digital information has led to a decrease in paper-based activity company-wide, reinforcing MEPC’s sustainability policy. Extranet (occupier) activity on the site accounts for 20% of traffic and contains information previously distributed in a traditional print format.
"HMA has provided an exceptional service on many levels. The teams understanding of our brief and corporate guidelines has made the process far easier than it could have been - working with HMA on this project has been a rewarding and exciting experience. I would recommend their web services without hesitation.".Amber Kennedy, Marketing Manager at MEPC
