Informed Solutions Reaches Out to a Global Marketplace
Overview
Informed Solutions is a leading provider of technology innovation, digital transformation and systems integration services, working with large organisations across the private and public sectors including energy, government, emergency services, transportation and logistics.
The business is engineered to deliver innovation at scale using agile, adaptive methods and a collaborative partnering approach, and its success has been recognised with many prestigious awards. Last year alone, Informed Solutions won a Queen’s Award for Innovation, an ICT Excellence Award for Emerging Platforms at the World IT Congress in India, and the Australian itNews Benchmark Award for Innovation Excellence. The company is headquartered in Altrincham, with other UK offices in London and Edinburgh, as well as Australian offices in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.
The Challenge
Over the last five years, Informed has made a huge impact on the digital transformation market, winning high-profile, competitive tenders on a global level. However, Group CEO Elizabeth Vega realised that to reflect the business’s development and to strengthen the company’s brand, Informed Solutions needed to reflect this progress in its marketing strategy. This included launching a new website that authentically reflected Informed’s core values and culture, whilst adapting to the differences and needs of the UK and Australian local markets.
Says Neil McCluskey, Digital Creative and Tech Sectors Advisor at GC Business Growth Hub: “Informed Solutions deliver highly complex business transformation solutions to high-profile clients all over the world. However, it’s often the case that companies like Informed find it very difficult to identify the key areas of their services which outsiders find so compelling.”
The Solution
GC Business Growth Hub began supporting and providing feedback on Informed Solutions’ core marketing functions in early 2017, identifying key areas where the company needed to prioritise clear, resonant communications.
The business also sent two of its leadership team on the Hub’s Greater Connected programme, an intensive business accelerator initiative geared towards supporting the start-up and scale-up ambitions of the region’s digital, creative and technology SMEs.
This programme helped Informed Solutions’ leadership team to think in more clear and concrete terms about the scale-up plans for the business, resulting in the company deciding to take a more strategic and far-sighted approach to communications.
The Results
With the benefit of the Hub’s support and feedback, a pilot website was reviewed and refined over various iterations and the new global website launched in October 2017, to coincide with Informed Solutions’ 25th anniversary.
The impact we can directly attribute to this new website and a more strategic approach to communications and marketing includes several high-profile contracts. In the UK this includes projects with new clients National Health Service Improvement, Royal Mail and Ofsted. In Australia, new business included three projects with National Archives Australia, as well as a major opportunity with Australia Post.
Since July 2017, these new contracts have created new staff, contractor and industry placement jobs, including 15 new full-time staff positions, four one-year student work placements and 11 contractor roles of greater than three months’ duration. Nine of the full-time roles were directly attributed to the Hub's support.
Elizabeth Vega, Group CEO, says: “Following the new website launch we immediately saw an increase in visitors, including a 130 per cent increase in traffic towards our ‘platforms and solutions’ page and a 110 per cent increase in traffic towards our ‘industry capabilities’ page.”
The company now has a more systematic approach to creating and refreshing new marketing content, including news articles, thought leadership posts, webinars and videos.
“Our upward trend in traffic has also continued across our social media channels,” adds Elizabeth. “This is reflected in a 100 per cent increase in page views in the space of a month on our company LinkedIn site, and a 190 per cent increase in tweet impressions on Twitter and 34% increase in profile visits.”
Informed has consequently developed a more strategic partnership with The Growth Company. It looks forward to working together on improving other aspects of the business as the company further scales up; accessing the wealth of external expertise available in and around the North West, inviting supportive challenge and working collaboratively on any priority areas and key challenges that we face.
Neil, digital creative and tech advisor at the Hub, concludes: “Informed Solutions are now one of the UK’s leading digital transformation company’s, and the Queen’s Award is further recognition of that fact. It’s a tremendous achievement, well done!”
The company had previously received support from the International Trade team on developing its international strategy and market entry into Australia.