KeHE

KeHE is a natural & organic, speciality, and fresh products distributor based in suburban Chicago. Here’s how Mightybytes helps this fellow Certified B Corp meet key business goals and better serve their customers’ needs.

With more than 5,500 employee-owners and a 16-distribution center network across North America, KeHE is one of the largest and most respected pure-play grocery and natural distributors in the nation. It is also North America’s second largest Certified B Corp, providing transportation and logistics to thousands of stores through their large distribution network. Their work is key in helping their retail partners discover innovation while also enabling established and emerging brands—including many Certified B Corps—to reach a wider audience.

KeHE’s primary website users are retailers and suppliers. While their website provided helpful information about working with the company, site content was disorganized, which confused users. Pages had no clear conversion goals to help users take action. Plus, technology under the hood hadn’t been updated in several years, presenting complications that required urgent attention. These issues undermined the website’s potential to support company revenue goals and better serve their customers.

Prioritizing User Needs

We kicked off this project like we do all new client relationships: with a product roadmapping engagement that defined our shared vision for success. During this workshop, we facilitated several exercises to identify KeHE’s primary website goals and connect them 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 surveyed suppliers and retailers regarding what content would be most useful to them. Analyzing this data helped us formulate a more effective content strategy to improve the new website. Along with redesigned information architecture, several user personas, and a prioritized feature list, this process helped us craft a product roadmap to drive decision-making throughout the project.

A New Approach to Content

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.

Custom Gutenberg Blocks

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.

Improving Search Performance

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.

Built for Accessibility

The site was also developed to AA-level accessibility standards so KeHE could better serve customers with disabilities who use assistive technology. 

Team Training

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. 

Reducing Website Emissions

Finally, while Mightybytes hosting is already pretty green, as part of our Net Zero commitment to address Scope 3 emissions—those which are mostly out of our control—we also offset 3,331.07 kg of KeHE’s estimated CO2e generated in 2020 via website data transmission. These offsets support forest conservation efforts in northern Minnesota and in turn support KeHE’s multi-year sustainability action plan to reduce emissions and waste throughout the company’s value chain.

Getting Results

KeHE wanted a website to help them tell their story and better engage target users. They also wanted to improve their website’s performance in search engines. With a clean, clear content structure and improved landing pages, the new site generated quick results shortly after launch. In a six-week post-launch snapshot we saw:

• A 325% increase in targeted keywords ranking on the first page of search results
• Organic conversion rates for suppliers nearly doubled while retailer conversions more than doubled

With these encouraging results, we look forward to helping KeHE further improve website performance over time and build better relationships with their retailers and suppliers.