Partner Profile

Sanctuary Synthetics

Sanctuary Synthetics are Ireland’s premier supplier of artificial grass lawns for homes, schools, crèches, retail, exhibition and corporate use, established over a decade ago in 2006 by Mark O Loughlin.

But even Sanctuary Synthetics had to start somewhere …

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“James in Webbuddy is the go to guy for cutting edge sales orientated webstuff, end of story”
Mark O’Loughlin
Owner and Founder

Background

Back in 2003 while Mark was landscaping he had a dream, he wanted to introduce artificial lawns to the Irish market. Predictably he was laughed out of the Ideal Homes exhibition, the very idea that Irish people would be interested in artificial grass was seen as a fool’s errand at best. But much like Ballygowan being laughed off the Late Late Show, Mark believed in what he was doing, and his idea was ready to break. He had a clear vision and the will to make it happen.

As the late Steve Jobs so adroitly said it,

“Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, ‘if I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’’ People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

We identified four key market segments for artificial grass;

  • Residential
  • Corporate
  • Schools and childcare
  • Trade/landscapers

The Brief

Take a 500+ page website and optimise it for Search Engines and filter users towards clearly defined call to actions – REQUEST A SAMPLE, INSTANT QUOTE, REQUEST A SURVEY. We also needed to ensure users were engaged quickly and brought to their relevant section for further information. There are almost 2000 images dispensed throughout the site to showcase their product and service.

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Content Optimisation

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Website Redesign

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Functionality Changes

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Amazing Result!

Pixel icon 512px Responsive Layout Re-Designed

We looked at how users were engaging with the site on various formats (desktop, tablet, mobile) and we re-designed the responsive layout with the users in mind. Out went the traditional sliders and a much simpler user-focused hierarchy was introduced.

Pixel icon 512px Rebuilt From the Inside Out

Starting with the WordPress engine itself and all associated plugins, we re-optimized the website for page speed. Essentially we built a new car around our engine, made it less web resistant. We reduced the website’s number of plugins by 20%. Plugins are great, too many are not.

Pixel icon 512px Optimized Landing Pages

We redesigned and reoptimized the key landing pages associated with each identified market segment – domestic page reoptimized for the domestic market and so forth for each relevant page. This boosted user engagement, but also, and equally as importantly, it made the Google AdWords campaigns more cost effective, increasing their Google keyword score, and decreasing the price per click of the relevant key words.

Pixel icon 512px Revamped Google Campaigns

Webbuddy streamlined Sanctuary’s Google Adwords campaign to coincide with the new redesigned landing pages, and taking advantage of the new expanded headlines and descriptions in AdWords (Feb 2017). We also overhauled the digital remarketing campaigns using HTML5 animated banners across the web. The result? A 15% cost reduction per click on Sanctuary Synthetics Google adwords campaigns. Good result!

Pixel icon 512px Internet Marketing

Webbuddy produced new video and image ads for Sanctuary Social networks, Facebook and Twitter. Facebook video campaigns in particular, were very successful garnering 500k video views throughout 2016.

Pixel icon 512px Define Clear Call To Actions

WebBuddy redesigned the ‘above the fold’ on the home page. No matter what the user wanted to achieve on Sanctuary Synthetic.ie they could get there easily from above the fold, without scrolling.

The Result?

A reduction in the site bounce rate to under 5%. That means that 95% of the over 8,500 unique visitors to the site every month are actively engaging with the site. It also means that the online marketing strategy we have in place is bringing the correct type of visitor to the site.

Google Mobile User Experience Score
100%
Increase in Website Traffic
18%
User Engagement Rate
94%
Increase in Email Subscribers
36%

So far so great. The key lessons we learned from working with Mark were, keep evolving, challenging your model and improving all aspects of your offerings, your reach, and your marketing.

Sanctuary continues to grow today because of Mark and his team, Webbuddy is delighted to be a part of their success story.

Sanctuary Synthetics Grassland Logo
“I’m very glad to be able, as owner of Sanctuary synthetics, to confirm that we are in fact very happy with our new site and would certainly commend Webbuddy to anyone interested in building or updating a business website. The beauty of the content management system is that we can easily update and add to the site as jobs are completed and interesting projects come up.” “So thank you James and best of luck.”

Mark O Loughlin

Owner – Sanctuary Synthetics Visit www.sanctuarysynthetics.ie