Indy Chamber

A Marketing Story by Design On Tap about Indy Chamber

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Indy Chamber

Increase Sales

Challenge

The Indy Chamber team is known for uniting business and community in the nine-county Indianapolis region. But by the end of 2017, the organization’s digital presence wasn’t matching up with its impact in the field. With an average of four online leads coming in per month, the potential to better engage more people was great. To tackle the challenge, the Indy Chamber turned to Design On Tap. Before working with Design On Tap, the Indy Chamber tried things to make progress on their journey to measure membership engagement. They put digital database systems in place, but the programs couldn’t talk to one another. Website edits meant to gather useful data never seemed to work as expected, and the user-friendliness factor was nil. In 2017, Pellman knew the old website wasn’t doing the Indy Chamber any favors. In fact, it was likely hindering his team’s ability to be successful. Pellman says the site felt like it was doing its 2,000+ members a disservice by not holding up the Indy Chamber’s end of the bargain — ouch. It was time for real change, and an RFP

Solution

Pellman first met the Design On Tap team as they were coming on as a new member. He had heard about their technical capabilities from a peer, but that isn’t what tipped the scales in the vendor selection process. For the kick-off, Design On Tap met the Indy Chamber folks in their 19th floor headquarters overlooking Monument Circle. Together, they set measurable goals and benchmarks for the entire project and started down the journey of understanding their target audience from a timeline and progress perspective. While exactly how it would all shake out wasn’t a priority, the end goal was crystal clear: a website optimized for the Indy Chamber’s buyers’ journey, or “join journey.” Having a third party ask the tough questions allowed interviewees to more honest and gave Pellman’s team incredible insight into the digital experience that would become the new indychamber.com. The new site is organized so members can find what they need more seamlessly, while prospects are encouraged to find and move through an intentional join journey. Before, the Indy Chamber team thought about their members in three very defined buckets, but those segments didn’t prove as useful as expected and, therefore, didn’t drive site content. Only about a third of the previous site’s pages were retained for the new one.

Website Creation

Results

Seven months after launch, the new IndyChamber.com averaged 10,000 monthly users with 26,000 page views, much better than the site has ever delivered. Pellman expects those numbers to grow as new, more relevant content is added. The Indy Chamber and Design On Tap continue to measure progress, gain new insights, improve the user experience and create new experiments in which they can increase numbers related to lead generation and engagement. The January 2018 launch stepped up the Indy Chamber’s marketing team’s game in terms of relevance of the organization, and that’s just the start.