Unicorn Darts
strategy, digital
Prologue
Summer 2009
Unicorn Darts are the worlds leading darts manufacturer and arguably the biggest name in the industry.
Unicorn Group approached Profission late in 2008 and asked The Company to pitch for management of the group's brands online. After winning, the first task was to audit the current Unicorn Darts site.
Act 1
A new platform
Concerned that external e-commerce sites were gaining considerably better SEO positioning with its products than the brand could manage through its own site, Unicorn wanted to look at creating a simpler, more direct product range on the site that required less clicks to navigate and resulted in a much less linear experience. After comissioning a two-phase plan for projecting Unicorn Darts as the site of choice for the darts community, Profission embarked on the first phase; establishing a new platform with which to take the brand further.
Using its Medici platform, Profission created a fully-searchable product range with related product suggestions and matched products at difference price points. Using filters rather than categorising sub-products, the result gives the visitor capability to see multiple products within a specific sub-range in the page rather than forcing them to navigate through up to three levels of linear navigation. Range highlights are now promoted more strategically across the site and give the brand a more progressive persona.
As Unicorn's range of products has become more dependent on endorsement by its team of world-champion and national players, recognition of the players within the site, and the linking of players to their products, has dramatically increased for this rollout. More efficient blog and news tools have been introduced with video content regularly uploaded to the site, and with Unicorn's media personality links, calendar events are broadcast as they happen.
Epilogue
The first year
After launching the new platform in September 2009, Unicorn have seen traffic increases of 25% and with much better SEO positioning have now reclaimed keyword ownership of much of their product range. Both the average time spent per visitor, and the pages viewed per visit is continuing to grow month-on-month.
With better reporting on tournaments and the games, the players are given the platform they deserve and as Unicorn's World Champions collect trophy after trophy, so their site is collecting an audience increasingly interested in their progress and increasingly loyal to the brand.
Profission will soon embark on the second phase, focused on creating a community home for darts players everywhere.
