How The Horton Group Achieved a 26% Increase in Qualified Leads with Orbit Media

Case study: The Horton Group

The Challenge

A rebrand necessitates a website refreshed

The Horton Group started as a small family business in 1971 in Orland Park, Illinois, and they’ve retained their people-first approach to insurance as they’ve become an industry leader. The firm has branches across the Midwest, offering a range of tailored solutions for business, employee benefits, and personal insurance.

Horton initially enlisted Orbit Media to update their website in 2015. Their continued growth eventually led to a significant brand refresh, after which the Horton team needed to update their site again.

The firm needed a website that:

• Reflected new branding and style guidelines
• Provided an elevated user experience
• Clearly communicated solutions for three different lines of business
• Remained easy for the marketing team to maintain and update

“Our previous website was several years old and we needed something that was highly functional, user-friendly, and easy for us to fix,” says Margaret Taylor, Vice President of Marketing and Shareholder at The Horton Group.

Sticking with Orbit Media was the obvious choice. “We’ve always enjoyed a very good relationship with Orbit Media. We wanted to stay with them because they always provided great advice and we found their help desk to be really responsive.”

The Solution

Trusted service with exceptional collaboration
Orbit Media first developed content and user experience strategies for the site as well as a comprehensive project plan that encompassed design and copywriting, web development, maintenance, and more.

“We had a fantastic project manager, everything was very organized,” says Margaret.

The Orbit Media team also supported Horton’s marketing team when they needed buy-in from decision-makers.

“The team does a great job whenever we pull executives into the conversation,” Margaret says. “They’re very good at breaking things down and communicating the value of the website and its performance in a way that’s understandable.”

The team set a launch date for the new website, but a strategy shift moved the launch date forward several weeks. The team stayed flexible, quickly adapting to meet the firm’s needs.

“Orbit Media fully accommodated the new deadline and helped us move the project along so we could launch on time,” Margaret explains.

Distinctive design and copy sets the brand apart

Orbit Media worked closely with the Horton team to capture the firm’s legacy and company culture alongside its new brand style through the site’s visuals—which play a critical role in attracting ideal customers.

It was easy for the Horton team to communicate their vision to the Orbit Media designers. “The design team immediately understood the direction we were going,” Margaret says. “Every time we looked at a mockup, the designer was already ahead of us and showed us exactly what we wanted to see.”

The designers prioritized embedded video, bold blocks of text, and imagery with friendly faces, all of which made the site feel fresh, dynamic, and welcoming. “They gave us a clean, aesthetic look and, in our industry, those kinds of visuals really stand out,” Margaret says.

Horton originally asked Orbit Media to provide 10 pages of web copy for the project. Orbit Media did such a good job capturing the firm’s people-inspired culture and industry expertise that Horton expanded the copywriting scope to 30 pages.

Streamlined experience for all users

Exceptional customer experience is one of Horton’s core values, so the team wanted to increase the website’s navigability to better tell the story of their offerings. At the same time, they wanted to showcase the firm’s expertise across all three lines of business, helping qualify high-quality leads.

Orbit Media tackled these considerations by designing new navigation options that featured mega menus to lay out the full range of products and services available. They also revamped Horton’s resource library, making it easier for customers to find relevant articles and for the firm’s team to upload and organize their content.

“We update our website multiple times per day and Orbit Media has done an amazing job of making it very user-friendly to manage our own content,” says Margaret.

Orbit Media migrated the previous Drupal site to a custom WordPress site for additional user-friendly features, and their developer made the site’s content blocks and post types easy for Horton’s team to administer going forward.

Orbit Media also consolidated the previous site’s various Pardot, Formstack, and Drupal forms into a handful of Ninja Forms, organized by line of business. This reorganization makes it far easier for the firm’s team to see where leads convert while supporting a more intuitive user journey.

The Results

26% increase in leads from the website

Since unveiling the new site, the firm achieved 26% growth in qualified leads coming in from the website. “With the website redesign we’ve increased awareness and we’re ranking very high in our key categories,” says Margaret. “Orbit Media’s strategies help us make sure we show up when our customer is ready to buy.”

Horton has received direct feedback from customers that the new website influenced their decision to select Horton as their insurance provider. “The site really conveys the firm’s culture and the value of our offerings to people who come across our company,” Margaret says. “Thanks to Orbit Media, ​we’ve seen more activity on our website and we get more leads.”

Orbit Media continues to be Horton’s go-to partner for supporting their website needs. “Building a website is more of an ongoing partnership than a project that you finish,” Margaret says. “The next time we need an update, there’s no reason we wouldn’t go with Orbit Media again. I don’t have any plans to leave them.” 

Download the case study (PDF)