PSP Limited is a North Shore-based importer and distributor of high-tech building materials. The company imports plastic sheeting, timber and flooring products for use in high-complexity architectural applications. As well as its headquarters in Albany, PSP has offices in Hamilton Wellington and Christchurch.

“I hate to think what would have happened if we hadn’t updated our website technology to suit our changing business model” says Chris Booth, PSP’s marketing director.

“The business had recognised that the market was changing, and we needed to focus on our trade clients. However, that meant that the number of technical specification documents we needed to deliver would have to increase dramatically.”

For many years, PSP (which turns over more than $20 million per year) had supplied both retail and trade channels roughly 50 percent each.

With the introduction of more technical products, for which specialist knowledge was key, PSP now needed to focus its attention on the specifiers and designers who would influence their market direction.

With such a broad range of products, sending out a single catalogue was not the answer. “With so many products to choose from, how would clients know where to file our catalogue?” asks Booth.

“And anyway, by the time they’re ready to specify the product the catalogue would be out of date and we would need to send them a new one. The costs of that were enormous.”

Solution
PSP chose a new web content management system, Contegro, from Labyrinth Solutions, a technology and design company with experience of substantial website implementations. Contegro powers many of the country’s larger sites.

As Booth points out, many businesses have to make the types of changes of business focus PSP implemented, but for his company, the introduction of Contegro was a key part of their strategy.

“Last month alone we delivered approximately 15,000 technical documents through our web content management system.” says Booth.

And if you are wondering what 15,000 specification documents looks like, it’s a stack of A4 paper approximately two metres tall!

Increasing web traffic
“A key part of our strategy has been driving traffic to our website,” says Booth.

“So many businesses are almost ashamed of their website and only have a site because it’s generally expected. For PSP, our site is integral to our business model. We drive traffic to it by making sure our web address is on every piece of customer correspondence.”

That increased focus has reaped rewards; with the improved exposure of the site through Google, the number of unique visitors increased by around 40 percent between June and July alone. Over the last year, the number of visitors has doubled.

“Our experience with Labyrinth has been a positive one” says Booth.

“We knew that we’d be entering a long term relationship as this was such a big project, so it was important that [Labyrinth director] Vaughan Reed and his colleagues seemed to understand our needs,” he says.

“Total control of the content was a key factor for us; Contegro has delivered this, along with being fairly easy to use. Lots of web firms can deliver a good-looking web site, but to us it was even more important to get the technology and performance right.”

Easy navigation
As is the case with any forward-looking businesses, PSP’s website is an important window into the company, allowing it to reinforce its up-to-date image and wide product range. Intelligent use of graphical navigation means that users can find what they need quickly, despite the huge library of product information.

PSP’s technical document library is split into two sections:

• The public area allows any user to download both technical and marketing documents on the wide variety of products that they import.
• For more advanced users, including project managers, architects and engineers, a simple one-step registration process gives them access to an even greater depth of information. CAD files, technical manuals and installation guides are available in a wide variety of formats.

Content can be updated in real-time through a web browser by users who may not have specialist web knowledge.

Contegro’s powerful features allow additional features such as voting polls and category lists to be added to web pages without the involvement of skilled web designers and programmers.

Comprehensive reporting options inside Contegro means that the marketing team at PSP can see which documents are the most popular, and who is downloading them.

Feedback is essential
“We used to have a fairly static website, and updating the content took ages,” says Booth. Now, with the introduction of Contegro, updates now happen in real time.

“We recently got a comment from a user about a small spelling mistake on the site,” he says.

“We immediately updated the site and thanked them for their feedback. That’s hugely beneficial to a business; letting their customers know they are listened to.”

Booth also explains how PSP recently ran a survey to ask clients what they thought of the new website.

“We offered an iPod as a prize for the best feedback. We were pleasantly surprised how many of clients wanted to be actively engaged in the process. They were even more impressed when we told them what changes we had made as a result of the survey,” he says. (See the attached survey results summary box for details.)

Benefits
Other benefits that PSP attribute to their switch to a high-end content management solution include:

• The most important result of all. “Increasing the number of downloaded documents has been important to the business, but that’s not the end of it. More importantly we can definitely point to increased sales as a result of our switch to Contegro,” says Booth.
• Better results in Google searches. The inclusion of so much technical information, coupled with easy navigation has resulted in their number of new site users increasing month after month.
• A shorter development cycle. A new product was launched onto the market recently. The specification document was only written in June, the product was being quoted on in July, and the company has projected sales for as early as September. “That would have taken many months using a traditional print-based process,” points out Booth.

For more information

Labyrinth Solutions
www.website.co.nz
Vaughan Reed
Ph (09) 415 9301
vaughan@labyrinth.co.nz

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