Marcrist is a premium tool company manufacturing and supplying premium diamond-cutting blades, core drilling and grinding tools
I was taken on for two years as head of digital when the company realised it couldn't rely on face-to-face sales reps travelling the country during lockdown and needed a digital presence which they just didn't have.
I was responsible for building the company's digital presence, including websites and creating a digital marketing and e-commerce team. I reported directly to the commercial director.
In the two years that I led the digital team at Marcrist, I achieved the following:
- Built and led a UK and Germany hybrid digital team from scratch consisting of a graphic designer, Ecommerce executive, digital marketing executive and digital content and analytics executive.
- Managed the implementation of a centralised product database (PIM) Historically Marcrist had data stored in multiple different systems, inaccessible spreadsheets and relied very much on the memory of crucial staff members.
- Responsible for specifying the database structure and data requirements.
- Liaised with the IT manager and Commercial Director to set up the technical infrastructure based on Microsoft technologies (SQL Server & Windows Server)
- Built the database and automated import system using .net core C# and SQL
- Managed the creation of three fully content-managed main company websites for the UK, Germany, and Switzerland. Including e-commerce for the UK and a triage landing page for marcrist.com.
- Took an agile approach to manage the development of the sites with the graphic designer, freelance front-end developers, content editors (in-house for English language, external for German Language) and sign-off from the Commercial Director and Managing Director. Utilising Microsoft Teams for development team collaboration with face to face meetings and written progress documents and Gantt chart reporting for the stakeholders.
- Managed external team setting up hosting on Microsoft Azure
- Daily development team stand-ups with stakeholder sprint reviews and retrospectives.
- Managed testing using Unit Tests during development, end-of-sprint testing, UAT and ecommerce end-to-end testing.
- The three websites were completed within 2 months of starting (UK Ecommerce was launched 6 weeks later).
- Designed and developed a complex QR code system to assist in digital marketing. By creating a bespoke internal system, it saved the company thousands of pounds.
SEO Triumph
The budgets were focused mainly on the build of the team and websites so it was imperative that SEO was the main driver for the traffic.
I used my experience within the Web Agency environment to make sure that Google would be able to index and rank the pages highly by using a tried and tested three-pronged approach.
This started with Technical SEO which was making sure the site was built from the ground up with SEO in mind, Google ranking tools showed that the SEO quality of the code was 100% so it could understand the whole structure of the site.
Secondly, the content was created with SEO in mind, this wasn't about keyword stuffing, Google makes a point that you should build your site and write your content for the USER and not the search engines. I guided the marketing executive on the content style and how I wanted keywords to work.
Lastly, we started link-building by creating reciprocal links with distributors and small businesses on social media.
It was relatively easy to rank the brand and product names highly, but we wanted to make sure that we could beat the main competition when it came to generic terms such as "Diamond Saw Blades" and "Cutting Discs". One of the major competitors was Bosch who has a multi-million-pound overall marketing budget, we had the tiniest fraction of that but we were able to beat them on most of these terms by the time my job had been done and I moved on.
