Luis and Clark is the leading manufacturers and designers of Carbon Fiber stringed instruments in the world. We’ve managed their brand and their marketing since 2002. The string world is a tightly-knit one – there are a limited number of places where one can connect to players at the higher levels where these instruments are sold. Like all markets, the web continues to grow as the #1 place where customers are turning to shape their opinions and make their decisions.
We built an ecommerce site for the company back in ’03 and recently relaunched the site built in WordPress. At the studio, we’ve been very focused on the strategic role that web 2.0 and beyond has in transforming how our clients communicate and reach their customers. The evolving interplay between the many different broadcasting tools of the web, including youtube, twitter, facebook, blogs, and many others creates a dynamic fabric of woven connections that connect people to a rich environment.
We develop sites in different ways depending on the needs and individual attributes of the client. In this case, we wanted to capture more traffic in the active conversations that string players have in many places on the web, and to have a site architecture that enabled the client and our studio easy, dynamic ways to contribute. WordPress delivered that quality and the results speak for themselves.
This is our old stats program running on the site. The average number of unique visits in a month is around 300. The spikes at both ends are the result of two events. Last January, Luis and Clark supplied instruments to the entire armed forces orchestra during President Obama’s inauguration events, and there was significant press about YoYo Ma’s decision to play a Luis and Clark Cello at the inauguration itself (he chose not to, in the end). But the spike at this end, December 2009, is simply attributable to the switch in site architecture and the integration of the site into the web 2.0 model. At the time of writing this entry, the site has only been up for less than a month and we are already seeing a doubling of traffic and better. Here’s the analytics:
There’s also been a switch in the sources of traffic, with a significant jump in traffic coming from referring sites and organic search over direct traffic. The analytics will be interesting to watch in the month ahead.
The point is, that a strategic approach to site design and content can and will reap results. It’s also important for organizations to realize that the web is a totally evolving environment. Strategies that we employ today may be completely turned on their head 12 months from now. It’s an exciting time to be in design.
