Creating a More Personal Chopping Block Experience
In early 2015, The Chopping Block was looking to relaunch their website to provide a more interactive, modern user interface. A major challenge they faced with their old website was that it didn’t give users an accurate sense of what it was actually like to participate in one of their cooking classes. When Shelley Young, CEO and Founder, opened The Chopping Block eighteen years ago, she had the opportunity to personally meet and connect with every new customer that came through her doors. Having a great customer experience is very important to her as a small business owner. Over the years, she became more removed from the ability to directly speak to every single new customer, but as her school expanded, so did the need for her facilities to grow. She felt like it was the perfect time to reconnect with her customer base in a more digital and scalable manner. Pairing the remodel of the school in Chicago with a brand new website redesign seemed like the perfect time to launch a more interactive experience for their customers both on and offline.
While searching for a web design firm, they found Revenue River Marketing, an Inbound Marketing Agency based in Denver, Colorado. Revenue River, a Platinum HubSpot Solutions Partner, presented a new website concept to be hosted on CMS Hub, content optimization system that far exceeded their expectations.
Aligning the Website with Inbound Marketing
Revenue River utilized HubSpot's robust product to build the entire online ecosystem for The Chopping Block. Their goal was to best represent digitally The Chopping Block brand as a leading cooking school in the country. In addition, they excelled by integrating 3rd party functionalities, such as the scheduling calendar, built by YourITDept. Revenue River created multiple custom feeds through the HubSpot Blogging tool, which were used to communicate to clients updates on cooking classes, blog posts, news and events. HubSpot's Landing Page app was also used to support classroom sign-ups.
By utilizing a modular format offered on CMS Hub, Revenue River was able to create dynamic content for each of The Chopping Block's business personas on the homepage, for example, the in-store shopper, the adult cooking class user, and the newlywed cooking couple.
This helped keep the pages organized and allows visitors to easily identify their desired content and work their way further through the online experience. The Chopping Block’s offerings are constantly changing so this methodology allows their marketing team to easily update specific page information without having to worry about breaking the whole site layout.
In addition, by utilizing HubSpot's CTA app across multiple pages, they can easily update a call-to-action for a new offer or video, changing that CTA across all pages at once; saving both time and coding resources.
The Chopping Block website now can easily retain, update and organize a wealth of content and related cooking offers. Users have demonstrated their high level of satisfaction with the new site, notes Andrea Miller "we've seen a notable influx of class signups, party bookings, catering, and more. It's been very exciting for us here at The Chopping Block."
The Proof is in the Pudding
The Chopping Block has genuinely adopted a new marketing engine, and the results have grown consistently since the site launched in April 2015. They now have a website that acts as a high-performing extension of their business. The marketing team now knows the precise online behaviour of their 25,000 monthly visitors; they can see interest through every exploration across their site as clients find and download outstanding recipes and instructional cooking videos. The website is an aspiring chef’s dream, and the traffic growth and engagement statistics support that.
Within the nine months, since the site went live, The Chopping Block has seen 260K total visits, of which 153K were from organic traffic. This means roughly 59% of the overall traffic to their website landed there through SEO and organic marketing tactics. Organic traffic is the most cost-effective way to drive traffic and leads to a business' website because organic traffic is not paid for. Over these nine months, they were also delighted to see a significant uptick in leads through their site. The Chopping Block saw a 139% increase in leads that came directly from their newly redesigned website.
As they look toward 2016, the marketing team at The Chopping Block is excited for new features in CMS Hub and plan to build out a more extensive strategy surrounding dynamic and smart content. By harnessing the power of dynamic and smart content, they aim to create a hyper-personalized online experience for every customer with the ultimate goals of driving more cooking classes and in-store event registrations.
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