Trimble, Inc. is an industrial technology company that is transforming the way the world works by delivering products, solutions and services that connect the physical and digital worlds. Their solutions are used across a range of industries including architecture, building construction, civil engineering, survey and mapping, agriculture, natural resources, utilities, transportation, and government. Company offices, fulfillment centers, manufacturing, services, research and development centers, and related facilities total more than 152 locations in 34 countries.
Creating brand consistency across a growing company
Trimble
About
The challenge
Trimble has been growing rapidly and acquiring multiple companies in recent years. With this extensive expansion comes the large task of unifying content to create a consistent brand experience. For Trimble’s small, centralized marketing and digital website team, coordinating efforts across marketing teams out in the business to create consistency posed a significant challenge. They needed to equip the team with its limited bandwidth to 1) efficiently maintain brand consistency as new websites were inherited through acquisitions or developed within the business units, 2) manage content through numerous content management systems, and 3) translate content in multiple languages without duplicating efforts.
The new design system intends to unify eight industries and multiple brand experiences into one cohesive look and feel.
Action for solution
Trimble tapped the Kin + Carta UX Research and Design team to craft a single, scalable marketing content solution that could manage various brands, products, and services in multiple languages to a global audience.
The focus of the project was to:
- Enable the small central marketing team to be able to manage more sites
- Provide consistency in design across all the company’s various sites
- Significantly decrease the time required for creation of new sites while maintaining a consistent look and feel
- Make the solution scalable and uniformly accessible
Leveraging the capabilities of Contentful, we built a Gatsby React front end that consumes data from a headless Contentful backend. We also created a Contentful Sitebuilder application for the Trimble marketing team that allows departments across the organization to personalize and use Trimble’s design system. Contentful backups, including assets and entries, were managed using Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda functions.
Regardless of language or content, the entire site now hosts a consistent brand experience.
With 40 customizable components, the new design system accommodates developer needs like never before, creating an uptick in usage across the business and, in turn, lightening the workload of the marketing team.
Outcome
Trimble now has a centralized marketing experience platform that allows departments across the organization to personalize content using Trimble’s design system. In terms of business value, digital channel maintenance costs are lower, and Trimble is now on a path to having a corporation-wide consistent brand presence. Further results include:
- New marketing websites can now be created more quickly.
- Data collection volume has increased by a factor of 10.
- Customer data collected on the company website increased from 14,000 to 1.7 million over a one-year period (a 121-fold increase).
While the previous CMS created silos within Trimble’s internal web and content management teams, the new design system facilitates cohesive collaboration between all necessary elements of the business: design, strategy, UX, tech and development.
