Cynosure, a leading developer and manufacturer of aesthetic medical treatment systems engaged GeekHive as their web development team to build AMPS (Amplified Marketing Practice Support) 2.0, the next generation of their marketing portal to support their B2B customers. Cynosure’s major focus was to provide practitioners the tools and education needed to build their growing practices. In a truly collaborative effort, our creative agency partner Cramer designed the portal’s new look and feel, with the goal of increased usability in mind, while we focused on tech strategy and implementation of their design.
About the project
Cynosure’s site is very different than your standard corporate website, they truly want to provide support and educate their practitioners, not sell them anything directly. Because of their goals, this was not your run of the mill CMS implementation but more of an application built on top of the Drupal platform. There was a lot of application logic involved to account for customers contributing content with listings and then applying workflow on top of that.
A True Education and Marketing Portal
AMPS 2.0 solved the challenges posed by the previous version and positioned Cynosure to become a true thought leader and educator in their field. We delivered on their vision by:
- Creating a customized dashboard and workflow process that allows for the approval and transfer of relevant marketing materials including manuals, product support information, display ads, and videos related to the specific customer account.
- Building in and out-patient dashboards via mobile websites for iPads. Practices could have them on site with information on their products and services for clients to look at while waiting for their treatment.
- Incorporating responsive web design and a new Practitioner Locator that allows for a new use case - patients and those interested in Cynosure treatments can use AMPS 2.0 to quickly locate a Cynosure practitioner in their area that offers the treatment they are looking for, across any device and screen size.
- Leveraging Salesforce Suite to establish a framework that will allow us to integrate Salesforce into AMPS 2.0. Now customer data that was previously siloed off can be synchronized across both AMPS 2.0 and Salesforce - a win for Cynosure’s sales and marketing teams.
- Positioning the application for future success - we built everything to be intertwined, but also remain its own separate piece - paving the way for future integrations (e.g. video, ERP, Social, etc.)
What’s next?
A major driver for the reimagined AMPS platform is the launch of a revolutionary new product, SculpSure. Upcoming features on AMPS will allow practitioners to report on SculpSure device usage and enroll in rewards programs. With these features, AMPS will help Cynosure pivot from manufacturer to thought leaders and educators industry wide.
In addition, the redesigned AMPS portal significantly changed the audiences that would be connecting with the platform. Previously, the site would only be accessed by customers, but new features like the Patient Dashboard and New Practitioner Locator added new sources of web traffic to the mix.
Why Drupal was chosen
How We Landed on Drupal 7:
Given the significantly improved feature set for this next generation marketing platform we determined that Drupal 7 was the best platform choice for this project for several reasons - the advantages of open source, the solid community behind Drupal, and strong content and user management capabilities. Finally, Cynosure was looking for a solid, cost-effective, low maintenance approach to hosting infrastructure and the emergence of services like Pantheon added additional incentive for sticking with Drupal. In addition, Salesforce integration was a key component of the build and the Salesforce Suite modules gave us a solid foundation for our approach.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Salesforce Sync
An important target for the AMPS 2.0 project was to synchronize customer data in AMPS with Salesforce, an important platform for the sales and marketing teams at Cynosure. The approach to integration would be graduated over time as Cynosure reconciles customer data that was previously siloed in AMPS or Salesforce. In general, we needed to take a loosely coupled approach to linking data in Drupal to Salesforce records. Salesforce Suite provided a great framework on which to construct this approach, allowing us to map a subset of key Salesforce objects in Cynosure’s Salesforce organization into Drupal entities which we related to the core content types in the application.
Migrate
We had to migrate a large amount of data from AMPS 1.0, a Drupal 6 application, to the upgraded site, and this allowed for accelerated content migration.
Views and Search API
We used a combination of views and Search API to implement a full-featured search experience for users to be able to find product support and marketing materials.
