What the brand needed
As a business, Exxaro has been undergoing a process of evolution, fully embracing the move towards digitalisation, while also being cognisant of community needs and the environmental impact of their operations. Exxaro has a rich story to tell, and wanted their unique narrative to come to life on their website. The company approached us to redevelop their website to reflect the business’ future vision, aspirations and culture, while using best-in-class digital practices.
Exxaro’s previous site was built on an outdated platform, which was not capable of keeping up with the Exxaro vision, and they experienced challenges in encouraging return visits. Visitors were spending less time on the site and the mobile experience was lacking, even though SEO was driving the best traffic from mobile.
The biggest content drivers to the site were job seekers and suppliers, but Exxaro had a key request to engage with and obtain more stakeholders. Therefore, the story and user journey needed to adapt. This was no easy task as the company boasts vast content across all their operations, initiatives, and audiences.
Traditionally, organisations in this industry have not been associated with sustainability leadership. Our challenge with this project was to highlight Exxaro’s future-forward business approach and ethos, while creating positive sentiment for a legacy brand. The company had a critical new focus to share with their audience, but needed our help getting that message across. With a refreshed website, Exxaro could outline their future vision, describe the company’s current and future business objectives, provide access to essential services and information repositories, and showcase post-launch content that tells the Exxaro story. We stepped in to help them digitally represent their journey of transformation and innovation.
Client Ask
Exxaro’s purpose is to power better lives in Africa and beyond. The key area of opportunity is around conveying the human story of the impact that Exxaro is making with stakeholders, as well as imparting key information to each stakeholder, aligned to their specific needs.
Through rich storytelling focused on both impact and outcomes, we worked to bring Exxaro’s purpose to life on the website. We integrated existing communication and digital strategies, leveraged off our channel audit and aligned to Exxaro’s communication values. We needed to move away from gritty, industry communication to embrace relatability and humanness. To make Exxaro’s story as accessible as possible, the site also had to be mobile friendly.
Key audiences, community members, investors, staff, customers, and suppliers – as well as their needs – were identified and developed. We expanded by using the following principles:
- Storytelling at the core
- Experience orientated and immersive
- Accessible
- Cross-pollination of content
- Content curation rather than feeds
Insights and execution
To build the site from the ground up, we completed extensive keyword research. This keyword research and SEO knowledge ensured we built the information architecture that audiences were searching for. Overlaying audience search knowledge with Exxaro’s business goals and objectives allowed us to serve both sides – client and customer.
Exxaro is respected by its peers for innovation, ethics, and integrity; we endeavoured to drive this digitally. Imagery and videos used across the site are only of Exxaro operations, people and achievements. Imagery that depicts company employees and their various functions helps champion the idea of company-wide collaboration.
The website is a cloud-based solution with user interface development completed in Angular JavaScript. On every page of the site, we provided journeys to additional details and doors to more information, interactive and live market results, as well as reports.
These journey touchpoints form a relationship with the content of the page they are on, and change on every single page. A search functionality extends across every touchpoint and data element. We also provided virtual tours of the company’s one-of-a-kind green building – a key feature for Exxaro.
The website is formatted to encourage a user to read and learn about the brand’s business strategy and vision. Though heavy with information, the site has a minimal visual impact and is easy to navigate.
The launch of Exxaro’s new website has helped establish the brand’s online presence and highlight it as a contemporary brand that is cognisant of global trends. The launch is extremely timely as the focus on renewable energy has intensified with resource businesses on the continent under pressure to re-evaluate their priorities. The website demonstrates Exxaro’s initiative and commitment to inciting real social change.
The results
The launch of Exxaro’s new website has helped establish the brand’s online presence and highlight it as a contemporary brand that is cognisant of global trends. The launch is extremely timely as the focus on renewable energy has intensified with resource businesses on the continent under pressure to re-evaluate their priorities. The website demonstrates Exxaro’s initiative and commitment to inciting real social change.
A summary of the website’s traffic performance for Q1 2022 is listed below:
- The website experienced an increase in overall volume; users increased by 43%, while new users increased by 47%.
- Sessions and pageviews increased by 41% and 34%, respectively.
- There were 124.4K users, 43K new users, and 364K pageviews during this period.
- Organic search accounted for the majority of site traffic (38.7%, which represents a quarter-on-quarter increase of 28%), followed by direct traffic (31%), paid search (24%), social (3.7%), and other sources (2.3%).
- The website’s average search position improved to 13.84 (up from 15.79 in Q4 2021).
- Website PDF downloads totalled 16,792 (an increase of 30%).
- Mobile devices accounted for 66% of traffic share, followed by desktop (33%) and tablet (1%) devices. There is a steady increase in mobile user traffic.
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