Kaivac takes their website to the cleaners

Let’s be real. Who likes to clean? Getting down on your hands and knees to scrub germs and filth is not appealing for anyone.

Fortunately for people cleaning businesses, bathrooms, kitchens, campuses, restaurants, offices, and more, Kaivac has transformed the custodial experience and changed the sanitation game.

The Company: Kaivac 

• Headquarters: Hamilton, Ohio
• Employees: 150+
• Marketers: Jim Pickrel, Matt Morison, Kelly Lawson, Kelly Robinson, Megan Dulaney-Bollin, and more

Since 1997, Kaivac has been creating sophisticated cleaning machines for the people performing America’s dirtiest jobs. What started as a small company building all-in-one restroom cleaning machines turned into an award-winning brand providing fleets of smart cleaning technology to companies in many different industries nationwide. Their products don't just improve the lives of janitorial staff; they also help companies improve customer environments and streamline building maintenance and operations.

Throughout almost three decades in business, Kaivac has turned selling cleaning solutions into a science, but it wasn’t always so seamless. When we first met Jim Pickrel, their Director of Marketing, his team was working to create a “Sales and Marketing Machine” that streamlined sales with prospective customers and dynamically executed marketing campaigns.

The Challenge: Creating a website that keeps up with Kaivac’s marketing machine

While Kaivac’s marketing campaigns were enviable, their website needed work. What had once been a powerful WordPress website suffered from significant plugin bloat. It was frequently unavailable for periods of time, it operated very slowly, and it attracted high volumes of unwanted traffic. Any digital marketing progress was hindered by the shortcomings of the website, and Kaivac was missing out on new business opportunities. Jim and the marketing team needed a solution.

The Strategy: Address the most important issues first

When we first talked to Kaivac, they wanted to redesign their website as soon as possible. It quickly became apparent, however, that immediate and comprehensive reconstruction on a website that size would likely only magnify the frustrations of the Kaivac team. Instead, we decided to quickly solve the challenges with the biggest impact on their revenue first. After triaging the important repairs to the existing Kaivac website, we were able to take what we learned about their business and its goals to deliver on the full website redesign.

The Tactics: Deliberate development

1. Pump the breaks: Before diving into development work, we took time to interview the Kaivac team and explore their websites issues to uncover the heart of their problems.
2. Fix the infrastructure: Kaivac’s sluggish website was due in part to an insufficient hosting configuration. We transitioned their website to our AWS environment and added improved caching to increase the website speed.
3. Audit the plugins: Kaivac suffered from a common WordPress problem: an over-abundance of plugins that throttled their website speed. Our team reviewed every plugin, replacing the bad and deleting the unnecessary.
4. Split the traffic: Kaivac’s website served both their marketing and ecommerce audiences. We separated these functions into two sites to improve website speed and give ourselves more room to work.
5. Develop a lead magnet: To fuel Kaivac’s “marketing machine”, we built multiple ways for prospective customers to engage on the website, including “The Big Clean Quiz” to help users self-identify their cleaning needs.
6. Execute the redesign: After a few months of continuous improvement and results, we moved forward on the website redesign with a solid foundation. We built the new website using the Sanity CMS for its ability to manage content across multiple platforms.
7. Refresh the eCommerce website: While the marketing-focused website redesign was underway, we also refreshed the eCommerce website to remove Divi Builder and improve its performance.
8. Custom solutions: The Sanity CMS gave us the opportunity to implement custom functionality on the Kaivac website and integrate existing features from the eCommerce website, including ROI calculators, distributor locators, online warranty registration, and processing for tax-expempt customers.

As our partnership has progressed, we have continued working with Kaivac to increase their marketing through advertising, continued website enhancements, and an additional website for Expert Rotomolding, one of Kaivac’s other brands.

The Results: Fuel for the marketing machine

While working with Kaivac, we didn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach. Kaivac had unique needs that required a tailored marketing strategy and a calculated order of operations. Through months of close collaboration and technical problem solving, the Kaivac website was redesigned and received a polished interface, all while business operated as usual.

Today Kaivac is well positioned to keep their marketing machine rolling and grow their brand online.

We are honored to partner with Kaivac to revolutionize the cleaning industry and improve facilities everywhere.