KeHE

Here’s how Mightybytes helps a fellow Certified B Corp meet key business goals and better serve their customers’ needs.

With more than 6,000 employee-owners and a 16-distribution center network, KeHE is one of the largest distributors of natural & organic, specialty, and fresh products in North America. It is also one of North America’s largest Certified B Corps, committed to using its business as a force for good in the world.

KeHE’s primary website users are retailers and suppliers. The company’s existing website had a few key challenges:

• Disorganized content: While the site provided helpful information about working with the company, disorganized content confused users.
• Conversion rates: Pages had no clear conversion goals to help users take action.
• Tech stack: The website’s underlying technology hadn’t been updated in several years, presenting complications that required urgent attention.

Most importantly, these issues undermined the website’s potential to better serve their customers and support company revenue goals.

We kicked off this project with a product roadmapping engagement that defined our shared vision for success.

During this engagement, we identified KeHE’s primary website goals and connected those to specific customer needs. This enabled us to define a hypothesis about which content might be most helpful to website visitors.

To ensure our hypothesis was on track, we conducted the following exercises.

• First, we surveyed suppliers and retailers regarding types of content that would be most useful to them.
• Based on the data and legacy information provided by KeHE’s team, we also created several customer profiles.
• Analyzing this data also helped us formulate a more effective content strategy to improve the new website.
• Next, we redesigned the site’s navigation and overall information architecture based on what customers told us they needed.
• Finally, we prioritized a list of site features to support both KeHE’s business goals and its customers’ needs.

This process helped us craft a product roadmap to drive decision-making throughout the project.

Our goal with every project is to empower our clients to build capacity and more quickly and effectively meet business and marketing goals.

To this end, we helped KeHE’s team retool their approach to content through clearer strategies and several custom, time-saving tools.

First, a set of custom Gutenberg blocks and page templates enable the quick creation of blog posts and event-related content. This saves time, improves quality, and makes a big difference in promoting events and better engaging users.

Working regularly with KeHE post-launch allows us to review content together and add custom blocks when appropriate.

KeHE also wanted to improve the website’s performance in search engines. To accomplish this, we overhauled their SEO and content marketing strategy, which included:

• A plan to publish, promote, and track content through email, social, and with their partners
• A comprehensive analysis of search terms in KeHE’s industry with recommended keywords for their content team to target
• Tools to track keyword performance across multiple pages over time
• Team training on how to recognize SEO opportunities, create impactful content clusters, and add effective metadata to their pages

These deliverables set KeHE’s team up for quick success while also enabling them to improve performance over time on long-term goals.

The new KeHE website was developed to AA-level accessibility standards so KeHE can better serve customers with disabilities who use assistive technologies like screen readers and other devices.

We also work with KeHE’s team to help them identify potential accessibility compliance issues as the site grows and evolves.

Education is built into our process, so we make sure to include training in all engagements to help our clients improve governance and build capacity.

In addition to the SEO training mentioned above, Mightybytes also trained the KeHE team to use their new content management tools and maintain good content governance and accessibility practices over time. 

While the website redesign provided an immediate improvement on several key goals, we continue to work with KeHE on how to improve upon their digital marketing performance over time.

Some examples include:

• Monthly analysis of keyword ranking, including which keywords/phrases dropped most in rank, help us collectively decide what to focus on next.
• A summary of top competitor performance helps KeHE understand where others in their industry might outperform them on keyword ranking and other marketing metrics.
• We also regularly review content clusters to identify opportunities for performance improvement.
• Finally, regular site reviews with KeHE enables Mightybytes to fix issues when necessary and outlines items for their team to address.

Because of these efforts:

• The website regularly ranks on page one of search results for about 32% of targeted search terms.
• Similarly, conversion rates for suppliers (10.5%) and retailers (35%) continued to increase the second year after launch as well.

Our partnership with KeHE allows us to help continuously improve these numbers.

Our work with KeHE helps them stay focused on continuous improvement, an important cornerstone of the B Corp movement.

To this end, retailer and supplier engagement has seen a steady climb in the years since launching the redesigned website as well.

• The site sees a monthly average bump of 6.8% for retailers and 4.7% for suppliers, respectively.
• The most recent 12 months saw an increase of 5.5% for retailer engagement and 24.9% for supplier engagement.

Because of these efforts, the company fosters trust and builds better relationships with its retailer and supplier customers.