TI Beverage Group

TI Beverage Group and ST8 have been working together for the past
4 years. ST8 is resposible for the company’s Online Marketing Strategy, Creative Direction, Design and Advertising.

Objective

T.I. Beverage Group has commissioned ST8 to develop and market a large Web 2.0 community website. As owners of the domain Vampire.com, which was being used to promote the company’s Vampire Wine brand, T.I. Beverage wanted to leverage the potential of the URL and create a community website for vampire aficionados. Based on the recent popularity of vampires in pop-culture, the goal was to create a hub of vampire related content that would attract massive amounts of traffic. A portal featuring a social network platform, a video library, 24/ 7 syndication of the top related blogs, a music library and much more would enable the T.I. Bev’s marketing team to up-sell vampire.com fans the Vampire Vineyard’s products.

Process

Given the size and scope of the project, ST8’s team of creative directors, developers and cutting edge designers worked in collaboration with the client’s marketing strategy team to develop a user friendly and intuitive interface. The focus was to deliver and organize a large amount of content in a way that would foster interaction, minimize bounce rate, increase traffic and extend the average time spent on the site from 1:30 to 5:00 minutes. In addition, to leverage the existing fan base of the Vampire Wine brand, St8 created a private on-line community that is fully integrated with Facebook and Twitter that currently holds more than 10 thousand fans. To minimize costs associated with content creation and management, Vampire.com was built with word-press technology that enables the client to manage the entire portal’s content without any necessary technical expertise, and allows content funneling from other diferent RSS feeds that are relevant to the audience. Over the course of 6 months, ST8 worked closely with T.I. Beverage’s CEO and Online Marketing team through the discovery, design, implementation and debugging phases in order to deliver the project on time and on budget.

Results

The result is an exceptionally well designed and groundbreaking website. The various ad spaces strategically located throughout the website promote Vampire Vineyards’ merchandise linking the Web 2.0 experience to T.I. Beverage’s on-line store, while still offering a community website for all things vampire. The cutting-edge design elements of the website instantly connect the visitor with the brand and set the appropriate mood for a community hungry for vampire products. As a result, Vampire.com traffic grew from 20K unique visitors a month to more than 50K unique visitors a month in less than 1 year, and consequently sales increased 380% YTD. The numbers prove that content is king and that an engaging website will dramatically increase your rate of conversion. Thus, the website is a huge success and everyone was thrilled and proud with the results.

Click here to launch the Vampire.com website