I received an enquiry from an individual wanting to start up their own HiFi business. We agreed to meet up and so I travelled to their home and they took me to a location nearby showing what was a empty barn. The idea? Turn HiFi shopping into an experience.

The challenge? How to attract customers when you have no background in running a business and your showroom was to be located in the middle of the fields in the countryside of Bedfordshire.

The beginning

After having a tour of the barn and have a deep discussion with both Paul and Wendy, I just knew they had what it takes to provide that experience, as one can only offer an experience if the founders themselves are passionate. The metric I used for measuring their passion was down to two key factors in that Paul had a very strong online presence as a community forum poster, and secondly his own home showed equipment and pieces of HiFi demonstrating both Paul and Wendy's passion for good music delivered through specialist and fine equipment.

Myself, Paul and Wendy hit it off very well and so we began our journey on the development and launch of what is the highly successful and prestigious HiFi Lounge

My strategy

I began to focus on the web design of Hi-Fi Lounge. Bespoke design focusing on a niche set of brands and analysing competitor websites. Since the showroom was to be in a converted barn in the country side, the cookie-cutter approach of an e-commerce cart website was certainly a path I was not going to take.

We needed to be distinctive and memorable. Customers landing on the website would need to attain an immediate sense of service and experience.

Start the marketing and get brands on-board

Once the design ofthe website was complete, I had a follow up meeting with Paul and Wendy on content strategy. Since Paul was already use to spending hours on forums writing about HiFi, I leveraged his natural enthusiasm for communicating his passion into original content for the website. I had built a simple interface within the ecommerce site for Paul to segment his copy into categories and brands and provided Paul access to begin his knowledge sharing on his new website.

This lead to consistent dominance on Google, the combination of the bespoke design and semantic nature of website, along with Paul's knowledge and original content lead to keyword dominance on Google. Customers were search for these big brands and were finding HiFi Lounge as one of the high ranking websites to click through to.

This SERP [search engine result pages] dominance subsequently lead to more enquiries, more sales and inevitably the expansion from a handful of brands to several dozen within a few years.

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Expansion of New Showrooms

And so the growth and prestige of HiFi Lounge grew over time

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HiFi Lounge continued to grow

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This of course couldn't have been achieved without carefully implementing a digital strategy that was unique to the business and to what Google had seen;

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The success

I solely lead on the digital strategy and development of this project, and working with Paul and Wendy resulted in a strong combination of digital and industry knowledge, coupled with passion to deliver a highly successful project and case study.

• High Ranking website
• Expansion of 4 brands to 25+ 
• 2 employees to business owners and several staff members
• Consistent and steady dominance on search engines
• Average 5 star reviews on Google
• Original experiences in monthly events
• Expansion into headphones and cars in prestigious and complementary sectors

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