Hasbean Coffee is a wholesale coffee supplier that operates across the UK. Using ingredients sourced from all over the world, they wanted to provide their customers with the best coffee experience possible – and take on their competitors, too.
The trouble was, they weren’t sure what direction to go in. After a recent acquisition, they had multiple stakeholders pulling in different directions. This can be a make or break moment for a business, and it needs to be handled carefully – otherwise, it’s money down the drain.
More importantly, it means that somebody’s passion project is in danger. Hasbean wanted more creative ideas to help them perform better, offering their audience a clear path of engagement.
And they needed to know how to structure their team to achieve all of those goals.
It’s sometimes easy to get tunnel vision, and getting that outside perspective from me was vital.
Fortunately for Hasbean, I’m a coffee drinker – I know what I like! Let’s see what I could do for them.
From the very beginning, the key thing I wanted to provide Hasbean with was direction, and that meant providing them with a marketing strategy.
So I had to look at every aspect of their business – as well as competitor and website analysis in order to align everything towards one core message.
The first thing I spotted was that their website needed a hell of a lot of SEO improvements. Most pages didn’t have any meta titles or descriptions, and there were plenty of duplicated H1 titles across the site.
This was an easy win: while there were over 1,000 meta titles and descriptions that needed updating, making all of those tags unique would go a long way in helping Hasbean rank more highly. This was something that could be continuously tackled under the hood while we were working on more substantive changes.
It was also clear to me that Hasbean should bring all of their websites under one roof. They had several different domains all doing slightly different things. The problem was, those websites were all competing with each other.
It was a bit of a microcosm of the whole approach I was taking – bring those sites together, face them in the same direction, and get them singing from the same hymn sheet.
Another major problem Hasbean faced was a lack of pathways for their customers to actually engage with their content. Email sign-ups were an afterthought tucked away at the bottom of the page, and their social media content – while quite strong – was failing to get people involved.
On top of that, their YouTube content was pretty uninspired compared to their competitors, and a lot of their branding on the website (for example, coffee names) was overly technical.
I spotted a great opportunity to bring these disparate threads together, and do something a bit creative in the process. So I made sure that they focused on their email marketing, delivering content that was tailored to their audiences, while increasing opportunities for engagement (eg. encouraging users to leave reviews for their favourite products).
We wanted to associate Hasbean’s product with a lifestyle, and align everything, from YouTube to Twitter to their website and email, around that. Again – getting everything singing from the same hymn sheet was absolutely key in consolidating the brand.
Hasbean also needed a bit of guidance in their team structure. With everything aligned already, it was simple enough to get the new members of the team up to speed with what we were doing.
Then, it was just a case of implementing it! Fortunately, with the clear sense of direction we had offered, it was that much easier for new hires to hit the ground running.
From the beginning, Hasbean had all the right ingredients to make an amazing brew – we just needed to get them blended in the right way.
And it’s safe to say that we achieved it.
Our core goal was to build a more cohesive and creative brand, because we knew that if everything pulled together, good things would come. As a result of the changes we made, we saw a 7x jump in traffic coming to the site, and Hasbean’s conversion rate increased by 40%.
Best of all, Hasbean is now a living wage employer. We loved working with the Hasbean team, and it’s great to know that we helped them reach that point. It’s a reminder of the real impact our jobs can have on the lives and livelihoods of others.
