UX, Digital Marketing, and Design for IgnitEd
Drupal website restructure, UX review and marketing support for a major higher ed institution
Introducing the Story of IgnitEd
IgnitEd is an online community and collaborative platform for business faculty developed by Le Moyne College. Its purpose is to encourage the sharing of business school curriculum, course materials, case studies, teaching notes, articles and studies with like-minded peers. Participants can submit their own research and scholarly articles for peer review. The IgnitEd website features hundreds of course resources, available at no cost for downloading and review by business faculty.
IgnitEd’s emphasis on ethical and sustainable business practices is a direct outgrowth of Le Moyne’s roots as a Jesuit institution. As a result, IgnitEd’s mission is to be the preeminent source of case studies and teaching resources, serving faculty, administrators, students, and alumni at Jesuit institutions around the world. In addition, IgnitEd’s resources are available to any business faculty looking to emphasize the contribution of ethical business practices as a way to bring about global transformation.
Website: https://www.ignited.global/
The Challenge
O8 was initially engaged by Le Moyne to support IgnitEd with website design, development, and digital marketing.
Our Solutions
We developed paid media campaigns, consulted on digital marketing strategy, and achieved measurable results.
We also redesigned the homepage, course resources, and other major areas of the website.
Paid Media Campaigns
O8 worked with Ignited’s marketing team to develop, launch and manage social ad campaigns on Facebook and LinkedIn. This enabled the new site to gain targeted exposure among business faculty active in fields such as marketing, operations, accounting, and international, as well as those who had interests in topics like social justice, business ethics. and sustainability.
Following the initial launch, the ad strategy shifted from social to paid search, which provided a lower-cost acquisition model. Beyond registrations, another key conversion goal was to encourage the review of case studies and resource downloads by interested faculty.
The initial ad campaigns greatly raised the profile of Ignited, resulting in hundreds of thousands of impressions, thousands of site visits and contributed to hundreds of registrations.
Site Redesign
O8 was also tasked with re-architecting and redesigning the Drupal 7-based Ignited site from the ground up, updating the underlying site structure to make it more scalable and sustainable. Page URLs were updated to make them more meaningful to search engines as was the taxonomy of course materials. This internal redesign was followed by an external visual/UX redesign to make the site more welcoming and user-friendly.
Home Page
The home page redesign balanced the need to maintain key brand elements, navigation, and existing color palette while still providing a more engaging, interactive experience. The new design offers three different calls to action, which update if the user is already logged in. Featured Course Materials are showcased immediately below the hero space, using colorful imagery, similar to stories on news sites.
Before
After
Course Resources Page
The new design removed the detailed sidebar filters from the main page and brought the main curriculum topics into focus.
Before
After
The Results
During the marketing campaign, the registration form conversion rate rose over 113% (i.e., more than doubled) as compared to the previous period:
Following the launch of the redesigned site, the number of pages successfully indexed for search increased nearly 4x, as reported by Google Search Console:
Overall, for the one-year period of O8’s involvement, encompassing July 1, 2018 - June 30, 2019, organic users increased nearly 51% over the July-June of the previous year.
O8 continues to work with LeMoyne on new functionality and performance improvements.
"For us, as a small department, O8 has been critical to our continued evolution. I truly feel as though I have more people working on the success of my business than what is listed on the payroll. I trust their guidance and their willingness to accept feedback and pivot."
