Developing a New Content Strategy for Cat.com’s Industry Section

In 2017, Cat.com had over 30,000 pages of evergreen content for customers, but industry groups added content without guidance, leading to weak information architecture, missing content and conversion opportunities, inconsistency, and poor brand alignment. I developed an UX strategy for the site that could be leveraged by all groups, segments, and regions.

 

Situation


In 2017, more than 30,000 pages on Cat.com were comprised of evergreen content. This content was segmented by different industry groups and customer segments, aiming to provide thought leadership, case studies, and helpful information to customers in the early-to-middle stages of their journey.

Over time, industry groups added content to the site without any standards or guidance on how to create cohesive industry sub-site experiences within Cat.com. This resulted in several challenges, including the following:

  • Weak information architecture: Industry groups had hundreds of pages within their sub-sections, but the pages were not meaningfully connected. This was due to the platform’s lack of secondary navigation and content tagging capabilities. Additionally, some groups lacked a strong information architecture or content strategy.
  • Missing Content: The goal of each sub-experience was to provide customers with content that served all stages of their journey. However, in many industry experiences, critical pieces of content were missing. At times, the content that was present performed poorly.
  • Missing Conversion Opportunities: The pages within industry experiences do not always work together as a system to encourage users to take the next steps in their journey. Many pages lack a primary call-to-action, have too many CTAs, or weak CTAs.
  • Lack of Consistency: Pages targeting the same customer segment did not always share the same look and feel. These consistency challenges are magnified across regions, where the experience, type of content, and messaging varied drastically.
  • Poor brand alignment: In certain industries, elements of the corporate brand was not well-integrated. Additionally, some industry experiences fail to clearly communicate the value story of the industry or related product line.

 

Actions


  1. I developed an industry solutions strategy that could be leveraged by all industry and product groups, customer segments, and regions. This included experience principles, sitemaps, and best practices.
  2. I designed new page templates and components, which would support the new strategy. With these new elements, the goal was to create consistency across all industry experiences, while also making content creation easier.
  3. I developed content strategy training to help marketers and content authors understand the new framework. With the new templates and components in place, content marketers could focus on developing a strong content strategy and rich content, while letting the technology manage the rest.

 

Results


Before I left Caterpillar, I transitioned this project to strategy and development team members. Work to transform the Industry Solutions section of Cat.com is still underway.

Throughout the process, I also shared the approach with key business partners. They have incorporated much of the ideology into their current content marketing processes, in preparation for the completion of development work.

SITUATION

ACTION

RESULTS

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