Mesirow (previously Mesirow Financial) is an independent, employee-owned financial services firm headquartered in Chicago. With capabilities spanning Global Investment Management, Capital Markets & Investment Banking, and Advisory Services, the firm serves clients through a personal, custom approach to reaching financial goals and acting as a force for social good. To best serve clients in the digital age, Mesirow realized they needed a digital solution that drives operational efficiencies, improves how their digital experiences are managed, and enables deeper connection with customers and prospects.

Mesirow partnered with Bounteous to undertake a replatform of their website as well as a complete redesign of their digital properties. This would empower their marketing team to more effectively manage and support lead generation efforts, while providing a top-notch experience to customers.

Mesirow Website displayed on laptop screen
Why Drupal was chosen: 

Mesirow wanted a best-of-breed, open-source solution which gave them the ability to update and enhance their DXP as their business needs evolve over time. Drupal was a great fit for the desire to have a flexible, expandable, and low cost of ownership CMS which will serve as the hub of Mesirow’s digital platform for years to come. Additionally, Drupal allowed the content management set up in a way that gave marketers the ability to create compelling content, while giving developers ease of updating the codebase. 

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

Challenge
Mesirow was looking to enhance their digital properties and infrastructure in order to provide customers with a more seamless digital experience. This would require a complete transformation of the company's website and digital experience, including redirect work to ensure the new site would be easily found. Additionally, a redesign was needed in order to promote and protect the brand and reputation as well as drive engagement and appeal with a highly diverse audience.

To better facilitate content marketing and lead generation, Mesirow looked to empower their marketing team with the right strategies, tools, technologies, and governance model. This would enable the marketing team more flexibility in content management and the ability to drive more qualified leads into their organization. Key considerations included delivering an authentic, efficient, and personalized experience for their customers. 

Mesirow mobile app displayed on a phone showing their Insights page icons are coming out from the screen to represent the CMS, user, experience, and analytics & insightSolution
After selecting a content management system (CMS) and platform, Mesirow chose Bounteous to better tell the Mesirow story to prospective customers. With extensive platform experience and a rich collection of client success, Bounteous partnered with Mesirow to lay the foundation for a seamless, integrated digital experience.

To match Mesirow's desire for flexibility and long-term maintenance, Bounteous leveraged a site builder that offers a low-code solution for building and maintaining websites. The Bounteous team designed the new site with efficiency in mind, focusing on optimized customer journeys and experiences as well as content strategies that support the delivery of relevant content at key moments in time. This approach allowed for a scalable foundation that would enable Mesirow to incrementally move towards personalized conversations over time. The team also executed a full SEO migration to ensure quality site traffic. The flexible system incorporates a beautiful design and has eased the authoring process for the Mesirow marketing team.

With the new platform and strategy in place, Bounteous laid the foundation for Mesirow to build more tailored and personalized experiences for their customers and prospects—both on the website, and across other digital channels. 

Results
In the weeks after launching the site, there was an immediate increase in engagement across the board. Positive increases across multiple SEO metrics included: visitors, page views, time spent, and pages per session, which were up 23%.

Technical specifications

Drupal version: 
Drupal 9.x
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

Bounteous and Mesirow leveraged several key Drupal community-contributed modules to help create the solution, including: Webform, Pathauto, EU Cookie Compliance, and Acquia Search (Apache Solr). Where possible, we contributed bug fixes back to Drupal core and contrib modules to help support the Drupal community.

Organizations involved: 
Sectors: 
Banking and Financial