Web & Social Media: Samba TV
Samba TV tasked Design to rebuild the company website from the ground up following a botched launch from an external agency. The previous website, built on Wordpress, ended up being too constraining, limiting and surprisingly difficult to use for most people in the company: it ended up being a bottleneck and time constrain for the marketing team. Design's mission was to rebuild the website on a friendlier platform: to that end, we chose Webflow for three reasons: the endless possibilities it offered for web design, the ease of use for non-technical people, and the stability and strength of its CMS.
To facilitate the transition to Webflow, we started by building and documented the entire website design system with Webflow: typography styles, color variables, layouts, grids and components, set up for all breakpoints.
Documenting it straight in Webflow meant that non-technical people could just come in the Webflow project and copy-paste elements and styles directly in their pages
By setting up robust foundations on Webflow, we were able to accelerate the conversion of the Wordpress pages to Webflow. The website that took our previous agency 6 months to build on Wordpress only took us a month to rebuild on Webflow, while at the same time adding key features like responsive layouts, contact gateways, landing pages system and most importantly, the CMS.
Webflow has a fantastic CMS that we tailored to our needs: unlike our previous Wordpress website, we were able to add a comprehensive resource blog, landing pages, press center, that virtually everyone in the company would be able to contribute to.
The deployment of our own CMS allowed us to improve time spent on the website, and boosted our downloads and shares. Blog pages and landing pages were specifically designed to help meandering users discover and engage with content, and all the blog pages and blogs were built with contact gateways.
As a result, the website went from a static asset to a dynamic lead generator. We boosted shares, downloads and time spent on the website, and more importantly, the website started generating leads.
Blog headers have been given an update: we wanted them to reflect better the energy of television, while retaining the technical feel of the overall Samba brand. The direction chosen intertwines kinetic, colorful rendition of TV moments and characters with the geometric shapes and patterns that carry the technical feel of Samba.
As part of the web presence refresh, social media is also getting an overhaul. We wanted to engage fandoms and found out that the content they engaged the most with was the data that validated their fandom: as a result, we focused our social media visuals on strong, bold insights and numbers that would stand out in the feed and encourage shares and reposts.
Data viz is a pillar of Samba’s external communication: with the refresh, we want the charts to be impactful and arresting. We blended TV moments in the background with high-impact visual charts and numbers at the forefront; we focus on the story the chart is conveying and let the insight steer comments, like and engagement on social platforms.
6 months after transitioning, we were able to learn what worked and what we could improve from the initial website revamp.
We are focusing the next version on these key ideas:
- Less content, bolder messages/visuals
- More proof: numbers, testimonials, case studies upfront
- Create more gateways to conversion
- Reusable and adaptable blocks of content
The main focus is to turn the website into a lean, flexible, adaptable demand gen machine that will allow Samba TV to build and deploy specific landing pages and content tailored to companies, agencies, and industries.
After trusting an external agency to build our website, we ended up with a WordPress website that was a massive struggle to maintain, with things breaking every time someone wanted to update a page. I can't thank Julien enough for taking the initiative to rebuild the entire website on Webflow in less than 3 months. We can now build and deliver content at a much faster pace than before, and non-technical people can now update the website easily. Julien built the entire templates, pages, and CRM and made it as easy as possible for all of us to transition and learn how Webflow works. Since we made the move, our visits and sessions time have gone way up, and so did our downloads. We can now build landing pages at lightning speed and generate more leads through our website; it has been a game-changer.
Becky Calejo
Marketing Director, Samba TV
