Challenge

Taylor Guitars is the leading manufacturer and brand of premium acoustic guitars in the United States. But their digital marketing had not kept pace with their success in the music industry. Their website was hard to very manage and unscalable. Their e-commerce store rudimentary. And their social media marketing was well behind their competitors. They needed push forward and extend their premium brand into the digital space.

Solution

After an in-depth discovery project with all stakeholders in the company including marketing, sales, customer service, human resources, and finance I concluded that Taylor needed to build a new enterprise level website from the ground up that would act as the flagship for the brand in digital.

The content management use cases were complex with many different relationships between different kinds of content. The site also needed to support diverse marketing channels such as events, social, print, promotions, content, and e-commerce.
Taylor Guitars is an aspirational brand and the customer journey is long and complex with years and many brand touchpoints between purchases. It was important to keep the focus on helping customers through the buying process by providing useful information, keeping them emotionally engaged, and giving them tools to shop. We wanted to help them find the right guitar for them.
The strategy was to engage customers with premium quality content on email, social media, print, and events. When they were ready to start seriously shopping the shopping tools on the website were always a click away. This was effective because it addressed customers at all stages of the buying funnel.

Results

• The new website saw a 47% increase in sessions
• 7% increase in new sessions, 55% increase in users, and a 24% decrease in bounce rate.
• The improvements can be attributed to a more intuitive information architecture, product line and detail page improvements, and SEO. 
• E-commerce revenue for the new store increased 12% compared to the previous store.

Shopping Tools & Features:

• Browsing and filtering by guitar features
• Head-to-head comparison
• E-commerce store for merchandise, parts, and swag
• Event locator
• Dealer locator
• Electric guitar custom configurator