Case Study: HIA bolsters customer acquisition with marketing platform upgrade

Streamlining digital tools and a more mature approach to the Housing Industry Association's digital focus will allow the organisation to scale more quickly, freeing it from the constraints of its over-reliance on a face to face mode of operations.

The Housing Industry Association (HIA) has seen digitalisation dramatically increase its operations.

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According to Ben Brooker, general manager of digital at HIA, the organisation and industry generally was typically a technological and digital laggard, however that has changed in recent times for the association as its digital velocity has increased.

“We've got lots of disparate tools and things in the market, it's about bringing it all under one umbrella and making sure that digitally we have a strong brand presence.”

A strong focus of HIA’s digital transformation was the need to bolster customer acquisition, according to Brooker, and that led it to upgrade its old Sitecore system to a newer version, a decision it took only after evaluating other alternatives such as Adobe.

He says that the old platform was not unable to handle the conversions, prompts or onboarding functions that were necessary, with the upgrade allowing for unification of tools across operations.

HIA worked with Sitecore implementation partner, Switch.

Like all such programs, there were the usual implementation bumps with internal stakeholders.

“Obviously, there's always conflict. And, you know, conflict is great in projects like this, and we managed it confidently. We saw things differently. But we're able to come together, discuss and ultimately come up with the best solution, which meant, we may change something in the front end that we wouldn't have thought we needed to initially,” says Brooker.

While content with how the implementation process has gone, Brooker says that if he was to do it over again he would involve more people in the process.

“It would have taken longer, absolutely, to bring more people on the journey. But I think identifying your stakeholders accurately and promptly is the absolute key to getting this right,” he says.

“Making sure you're bringing the right people in at the right times and keeping everyone updated is critical for any change like this.”