ASRY
Digital Strategy, User Experience Consultancy
Going Digital
Founded in 1977, ASRY is the third largest ship repair yard in the world. For as long as they could remember, their external marketing and communications had consisted of a single advert placed in a leading industry publication. In all the years it had run for, it had created 2 sales leads…maybe. It was time to go digital.
Getting Started
We started by running a workshop with key stakeholders from the organisation. Pulling in management from across the company from Market Analytics and HR through to Ship Repair and Operations, we started to get the team thinking about how digital could help each of them to meet their targets.
These workshops always work best when we have people from all over the company join in. When we’re looking to help define audiences, for example, someone from HR may seem to have different users in mind than someone from Marketing. In a really simple exercise, we ask each attendee to list as many audiences as possible, getting them to list one per sticky note before sticking them up on a wall. We’ll then run through these with everyone, grouping similar audiences together. Doing this prioritises the audiences in a very visual way. The more post-its we see, the more cross over between divisions and therefore, the higher the likelihood that we’re looking at a key audience.
Knowing who your audiences are is important but understanding them could be considered even more so. Pulling out one or two key audiences and running through an ‘Empathy Map’ exercise, we really started to identify some key problem areas. In an Empathy Map, we’ll look at what ‘Tasks & Questions’ a user engaging with ASRY needs to fulfil. We look at ‘Pain Points’ or areas of frustration, ‘What Influences’ they are effected by and what their ‘Overall Goals’ might be. Doing this not only helps everyone to understand the customers better but it quickly identifies areas that the organisation is failing to meet the needs of it’s audiences.
Of course, once we know where the barriers are, we can see where and how digital can start to break these down. We helped ASRY identify key objectives for their first step into digital. We prioritised these based on target audiences, budgets and resources before discussing realistic objectives for each. Everything digital can be measured but it’s what each element is measured against that helps to translate data into performance indicators.
Enter LinkedIn.
One of the audiences that we identified was potential employees. Looking at ASRY’s website in Google Analytics, 20% of all users visited the careers page, making it the second most visited page. A frustration that we helped to identify however was that there was very little information about ASRY as an employer available online. Enter LinkedIn.
Previously, we had successfully set BMMI up on LinkedIn, moving them away from recruitment firms and their associated costs. Career openings published on LinkedIn were filled 3 times faster than through traditional methods and with a tenth of the budget. Knowing this helped us to confidently get ASRY started with a content strategy for the worlds largest B2B social network.
Starting from nothing, ASRY have built up a community of nearly 3000 followers and get some great engagement on their posts.
Going Global.
Another audience was potential customers outside of Bahrain. With no outbound communications program in place, ASRY relied on the same handful of customers getting in touch. With a database of over 4,500 current and previous customers, we were able to get the communications team started with email marketing.
Reaching out across the globe, ASRY’s open and click through rates were all above industry standards.* Open rates for Construction come in at 22.64% with a click through rate of 1.97%. Professional Services open rates average at 20.89% with click through at 2.63%. To date, ASRY has averaged an open rate of 32.28% and a click through of 15.73%.
*Source.
Client Testimonials We’ve worked hard to develop partnerships that create results.
Showing off the awards we’ve won is one way of demonstrating our success but we prefer it when others do the talking for us.
East helped us to recognise the importance of digital to our business. Starting back in 2012, they transformed the dealership’s approach to local marketing and communications. Providing real insight and directing our digital strategy, they set us up with the tools, knowledge, experience and ongoing support to identify and engage with our connected audiences.
As a consultancy, East Innovations are very unique in their offering and have good reason to be proud of their capability and achievements. Through workshops and insight, East Innovations provided an important contribution to the success of digital customer experience across Al Baraka Bank.
Creating Dreamland Golf Club’s digital presence was an immensely rewarding project for our team here in Baku. Working with East Innovations gave us the opportunity to leverage their extensive knowledge and support to create a very special website. I am delighted to see the efforts of all have been recognised with the 2016 WMA WebAward.
East Innovations has supported BMMI across a diverse mix of digital projects, ranging from website design to initiating our digital transformation process. This is no traditional client – supplier relationship. East acts as an extension of our team and remains committed even after a project is completed. Offering a wealth knowledge and experience, one of the most beneficial aspects of this unique relationship has been the transfer of knowledge and enhancing the skills of our own team.
Working with East Innovations exceeded all our expectations. Not only did they deliver a website which breaks ground for an industrial portal in terms of design and functionality, but they administered the large project with clear and constant communication. Most importantly they acted as stakeholders in the project, bringing new ideas to the table, highlighting problems we hadn’t foreseen, and genuinely cared for the new site as if it were their own.