When Horse Side Vet Guide approached Alpha Particle, they had already invested a large amount of time and money into their existing infrastructure and offshore teams.
At the same time, shifting business strategy necessitated the need for their technology to adapt. They had built up users for their mobile app and a following for the website and and social media, but needed to make monetization and strategy changes.
Rewriting and rebuilding the entire platform was out of the question and HSVG engaged Alpha Particle to make the necessary changes while utilizing their existing technology.
The Alpha Particle Approach
From the very beginning, we knew we needed to determine what business goals were really important for advancing the business. We needed to distinguish what was going to move the needle in terms of traffic and revenue from what was just a “nice to have.” To this end, we commissioned a market research study to help HSVG understand the various strategy and monetization options that were available for us to pursue. From this initial survey, we determined that augmenting the existing benefits to sponsorship and engaging more sponsorships would have the most immediate impact on revenue and the sustainability of the business.
Delivering More Value to Sponsors
We moved quickly to build out the ability for editors within the CMS to associate sponsors with certain posts, certain pages of search results, or certain other areas of the site such as the sidebar or the footer of the homepage. We also built out a solution using Google Analytics Events that would allow sponsors to have even greater visibility into what sort of impressions and clicks their creative was generating and how their sponsorship positions were performing on the site. By helping HSVG deliver more value to their sponsors, we hoped to be able to increase both the number of sponsorships and the value of each of these partnerships.
Building Trust with an Updated Interface
Internet users today rely on first impressions as a key signal for whether a brand is trustworthy or not and with an outdated interface, Horse Side Vet Guide was not putting its best foot forward. We performed a UX audit which led to a redesign and redevelopment of key areas of the HSVG website.
This would increase credibility with users and make them more likely to trust the top-quality information that already existed on the site. At the same time, the redesign would make the content easier to access and make the relationships between different pieces of content more clear. In addition, this new interface was much more appealing to sponsors, while supporting all the newly-developed sponsorship positions.
What’s Next
Going forward, HSVG will continue to sign up sponsors and retain them using the new tooling that’s been built as part of this engagement. In addition, they will continue to explore the monetization changes the revenue impact that switching users to a monthly subscription would have. This was scoped out as part of Alpha Particle’s engagement, but is still yet to be implemented.
How Can We Help?
If you want to talk more about this project or how we can have a similar impact on your project, please reach out using the contact form below or send an email to hello@alphaparticle.com