The Australian School of Management (ASM) website is a subsidiary company of the Careers Australia Group (CAG) of brands. Focussed on delivering quality training in the higher education industry based in Melbourne and Perth.
The opportunity
ASM was purchased by CAG in 2015 and the website at the time needed a lot of improving not just in terms the user interface and responsiveness with various devices, but the backend processes and system applications to push data to the right areas of the business. The digital marketing team at the time was myself and our developer in a company of 1500+ people and it was our responsibility (with the help of internal and external content and copywriters) to develop the new ASM website from the ground up.
Original sketch mock ups
Here are some initial sketch wireframes in the early stages of design for how the UI will look.
Wireframes
The next step was building the wireframes from the sketches in Adobe Illustrator. If you are looking for wireframing tools, I recommend Pencil Project (for mac) as a free tool. If you are looking for something that is more robust, I believe Sketch is an excellent choice.
When the wireframes are built, this is the best time to bring in key stakeholders to sign off for approval. With a company this large, you need to get little pieces squared away so you have a leg to stand on instead of doing all the work and then the designs being rejected. The wireframes being signed off holds the layout of the UI at a minimum and will be held accountable if it gets changed down the track which makes things messy.
Final Designs
You can see how the site currently looks here. However below are the original design mockups created in Adobe Photoshop CC for when it was launched.
Website Development
The website was built on OctoberCMS, a content management system that runs on the backbone of Laravel, a PHP framework. The development from start to launch was over a 10 week period. This included the initial design planning, full design mock ups, development, content loading, analytics setup, Salesforce integrations and web server configuration. Significant improvements were made to the content and structure in consultation with a third party to improve the SEO and rank of the site upon the relaunch.
Website Integrations
The website is integrated with Salesforce, connecting the website the the CRM when an enquiry is completed. This creates new contacts in Salesforce with additional information on referral sources and channels.
The Results
Due to the SEO improvements and content improvement we were able to improve organic traffic to the website by over 200% compared to the previous period. We were able to maximise the retention of that organic traffic by also decreasing the bounce rate by nearly 10% compared to the previous period. The website generated substantially more conversions across a broad range of channels including Organic Search, PPC, Email, Referral and Social.
ASM First contact email
In conjunction with the launch of the new website, various emails were developed to match the new branding of the website. Email marketing was something ASM hand’t previously done, so marketing professional looking emails to potential students made the brand look much more legitimate and professional. Various journey automation campaigns were created and here is an example of an email a lead would receive for more information about ASM.
