History Lessons
ION is a technology company at its core. They develop several software applications, design and build hardware solutions for geophysical challenges, and provide data solutions to empower high-risk decision making in the energy industry. Once upon a time, ION started its journey as a hardware manufacturer for oil and gas services, and as time went on, they flowed down the path into the territory of oil and gas. Times are changing, the world is shifting to green alternatives and ION isn’t one to be left behind. They have retooled their offerings to be a part of this shift while not leaving behind their long-established relationships with energy companies. Somewhere along the way, they forgot to update their image to reflect this “New You” they had become. The market only knew them as “ION, that one manufacturer for oil and gas equipment,” not as they should have been referred to, “ION, that fresh new tech company with software applications to keep our green energy teams safe and efficient!”
Enter Kul Creative
ION needed a makeover. They wanted to refresh their image, without fully rebranding. They wanted to keep their established reputation with old friends, while setting themselves forward on the right foot in new relationships. We would need to keep their logo, font, and brand colors, but alter their tagline to reflect new goals, change up the order in which they prioritized brand colors, and brighten up their public facing channels to showcase their new offerings.
Websites
First things first, home page! Where is that first impression taking place? On The World Wide Web. People enter their search on Google and click the first link they see and what should they fall onto, but a homepage that screamed, “We’re stuck in 2005!” Simply not the ethos one would get when visiting their team in person. It was not optimized for today’s browsers. It was not mobile friendly, containing several Flash elements and offering no mobile format. It was a clunky nightmare to navigate, and consequently their web traffic was atrocious!
Refreshing a website this size was no small task. There were over 400 pages of content, many of which were out of date or completely irrelevant to their business now. We organized all content by taxonomy of page, what needed to be kept, thrown out, and re-written, and what the new goals for traffic would be. Through several discussions we established the look and feel for the new website, discussed custom features and tools to be built, and trained for continued maintenance (after all, this would be built on the WordPress engine). A long project, taking months of collaboration, finally comes to a close, but it’s only the beginning for their new site. ION makes the leap and takes their new website live.
Social Media
Growing a social media presence is important for every business. B2B and B2C alike, this is how you’re going to get feedback, gain new clients, and control your public image. As an energy company, public reputation is massive. ION needed to get away from only posting about advances made in oil and gas, and step up their interactions with green energy industry leaders. We worked out plans for pay per click campaigns to spin through adjacent markets and grow a following there. We designed simple, easy to use templates to create a consistent look and feel for posts of different types as well as a common “scent” for users to follow when clicking through to landing pages (on the new site). And we established how each social media channel should best be used to meet ION’s changing persona.
Email Marketing
Ok, so you have a social media following, what if they don’t check social media? Email marketing has been a prime channel for reaching known and new prospects alike. Using CRM tools such as Salesforce and Pardot, we built a series of landing pages within ION’s new website to encourage visitors to reach out for more information. These captured emails were also “politely asked” to sign up for continued information in the form of email newsletters. Like a popular band in the 70s and 80s, you’ve got to K.I.S.S! “Keep. It. Super. Simple.” ION had a history of overflowing their email newsletters and losing readers and subscribers at first glance. We redesigned their templates for marketing, creating short 3-4 sentence structures that enticed readers to click to read more should they be interested. Thus, not overloading and overwhelming uninterested readers (keeping them from feeling the need to click the unsubscribe button), and also capturing prospects onto further landing pages and leading the further along the buyer’s journey.
Trade Show Presence
Trade shows are where the handshakes happen, and while historically, ION does very well with this, times change, budgets get compacted, and the need to “do more with less” becomes increasingly important. Minimizing trade show footprint, means loosing wall space and advertising real estate. Collaborating with a small team of incredibly talented programmers, we designed an entirely digital touch-screen-wall that allowed ION to showcase EVERY offering in their expanding playbook, all in the space of 12 feet wide. This was another brand image leap for ION. Setting the stage with ION as the technology leader and trendsetter surrounded by competitors stuck in an era of printed graphic walls. When you want to sell yourself as the leader in technology, why not come up with something that nobody else is trying yet?
Onwards and Upwards
All said and done, this brand refresh was a long process, and a long time coming. Over a year of close collaboration with a talented team, months of A/B testing, internal and external usability testing, mood boards, mock ups, and more, lead to the roll out of a shiny new ION. Exceeding growth for sales expectations and reaching into new adjacent markets aided ION in weathering the storm that the oil and gas downturn brought in 2020, coupled with the first year of the pandemic. ION soldiered on, thriving with the growth into the technology industry.