It’s not unusual for businesses to evolve faster than their branding. ICM started as a grain dryer manufacturer in 1995, ten years later the company was designing and building corn-based ethanol plants around the world. The ICM evolution is still happening. Before we commenced renovating the website, we had to ask the question: Who is ICM today?
How Can Renewable Energy Marketing Match The Industry’s Spirit of Innovation?
ICM is an innovator of biorefinery process technology. For years its website had been circulating the same words and images through an outdated network of aging conduits. Like biorefineries, websites can lose their efficiency and need updated UX design. It was time to rebuild the infrastructure and pipe in brand-new content.
The Key Message Says It All
The answer emerged during talks with ICM’s internal marketing team, salespeople, scientists and leaders. Our first order of business was to create a key message that defined the latest incarnation of the brand.
Today ICM offers a variety of process technologies that give ethanol producers the ability to diversify. They can make oil, corn syrup, animal feed and other products that keep them in the black when the demand for ethanol wanes. That’s empowering for people whose success may depend on selling more than clean fuel.
Website Design for an International Brand
ICM’s main marketing goal was to promote diversification technologies to ethanol producers. The site map was revised to improve the visibility of these opportunities. The website had accreted a lot of content over the years; some of it was no longer relevant. We consolidated pages, simplified choices and organized the site in a way that would help users clearly understand what the brand was all about.
We concluded that WordPress was the best content management system for displaying ICM’s large catalog of products and services. The highly customized front end uses a combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP to modularize full-page templates, which provides every page the flexibility to deliver a unique experience.
ICM’s popularity in South America is growing, but foreign audiences differ from their U.S. counterparts. International versions of the site were created with messaging and services tailored to their needs. The site was programmed with the intelligence to recognize users from other countries and display the right content in the right language.
Organic Web Design
Each page received fresh copy that reinforced the key message with words such as capability, diversification, opportunity and efficiency. On the back end, title tags and meta descriptions were revised to improve SEO rankings and performance.
Our visual design strategy was to tell the company’s story and showcase its capabilities in vivid, photographic detail. Custom icons helped illustrate process technologies and signal important benefits. The user’s scrolls and clicks activated motion throughout the site. Images and words shifted into place like moving parts of plant machinery.
Responsive website design is required in this day and age, but the task is never easy with so many dynamic components at work. People access digital content in more ways than ever before. We succeeded in creating a seamless experience across all major browsers, devices, screen sizes and resolutions.
Generating Powerful Design Is a Process
One of ICM’s greatest attributes is efficiency. Its technologies make excellent use of resources to deliver top market value. At Jajo, the design process operates the same way. It starts with a key message that encapsulates the whole brand. From there, content is neatly unpacked, clarified, and funneled into multiple streams. With well-structured web design, every path leads to value. Nothing goes to waste.
UI UX Design For Branded Customer Experience
ICM’s business goals and digital marketing are finally back in sync. The website is powered on. The brand is fully operational.