We’ve mentioned the importance of using a content management system (CMS) before, both in how they can transform a website and how they can transform a business.
Since we’re such advocates, we thought that it’d be good to show how a content management system can help a business rather than just explain the idea.
Enter Teknion and Sitefinity. Teknion is a furniture company that makes high end office solutions for clients all over the world. Sitefinity is the CMS that we used when developing their new website.
Here’s how Sitefinity helped Teknion with their business strategy, and how we deployed Sitefinity to help them expand their customer base.
Allowed the communication of ‘single voice of truth’
Before Sitefinity, Teknion struggled to bring the full calibre of its brand online.
The Teknion site was largely built for developers to manage, and while it was functional, it struggled to deliver a positive experience.
In short, nothing like the refined expertise that the Teknion brand stood for.
What’s more, because there were dozens of smaller websites, each run by a regional marketing team, it was exceedingly difficult to convey a single, cohesive brand message to all of their customers, or even have a cohesive sales experience.
In fact, even uniting all the various pieces of content across the board was a challenge, including products and services on offer, since there was simply so much content.
We worked with the creative agency, Pound & Grain, as well as with Teknion, to develop an architecture for their site that was going to effectively tell their brand story in the same way that they’d been telling it with brochures, catalogues, and other traditional marketing collateral for years.
The Sitefinity platform united Teknion’s disparate websites with a single management interface for multiple websites. By using one interface to control many regional and niche websites, Sitefinity allowed the development and deployment of a single voice of truth.
Now all of Teknion’s communication with its customers had the same tone of voice, focused on the same benefits, and carried the same branded look and feel as every other piece of collateral.
Accounting for regional differences
Of course, this sort of centralized control does have its downsides. Namely, regional teams tend to know what their customers want and what they need better than a head office somewhere.
We understood that requirement, which is why we opted to use Sitefinity. From a single interface, it allows easy page personalization for regional marketing teams, keeping the single voice of truth that is so critical to Teknion’s success, while still giving regional teams the control that they need.
Content organization
The final step where Sitefinity really shines is in its ability to organize and manage content and the asset life-cycle.
First, Sitefinity integrates with Teknion’s digital asset management (DAM) system of choice, Bynder. Bynder is a modular DAM system that makes content searchable, tag-able, sharable, and mass editable.
For an organization like Teknion that has more than 30,000 pieces of content, keeping it all in order and retiring pieces when relevant is an absolute top priority.
As a result, it was imperative that whatever CMS was deployed needed to integrate with Bynder, so that content could be leveraged effectively by central and regional marketing teams, giving them maximum access to the tools they need to close sales.
Using Sitefinity to transform Teknion
All of these factors — developing a single voice of truth, allowing regional customization, and enabling better content deployment and management — worked to help Teknion transform its business services to solve complex challenges with technology.
Specifically, Sitefinity helps the Teknion team:
- Make their marketing more trackable
- Improve their website to be more user-focused
- Connect with customers and staff in exactly the way that they like
By re-positioning the Teknion website to the core of their operations and marketing efforts, we used Sitefinity to change how Teknion does what they do, both at a superficial level as well as in how they approach and solve completely new problems.
