The Society for Information Display (SID) is one of the oldest associations in the Silicon Valley, designed to encourage awareness and familiarity with innovation and research in the display technology space. Leading Silicon Valley brands like Apple, Applied Materials and others are its corporate members, and the association is well-funded.
As display innovation accelerates with new-age materials, components, and design, it became important for the SID to be more inclusive, bring on more of the millennials and younger workforce to develop interest in the display technologies, and build a stronger leadership presence, both in the U.S. and abroad.
SID’s website and digital presence had not been updated, and the executive leadership was seeking to initiate a comprehensive digital transformation process. SID also owns DisplayWeek—an events site that manages its flagship annual conference, and InformationDisplay—the digital presence for its bi-monthly magazine.
Purplepatch worked with SID to understand the goals for a complete digital refresh. Since SID had already invested in a legacy CMS, we had to ensure all our design and workflows fit the existing CMS.
All the three digital properties—SID, DisplayWeek, and InformationDisplay—had to exist on the same URL and then redirect to their properties without the user realizing that there is a different content service providing the experience.
Also, each URL had to be updated with different content assets frequently and they had to be easily indexed for search, content update, and graceful retirement.
Purplepatch conducted user interviews with the leadership, the website management and IT teams, the corporate partners, and prospect audiences to understand their specific needs and vision for the three properties.
We designed SID as the flagship portal to deliver insights and intelligence, latest research and innovation news, and partners content. We aligned the SID monthly newsletter to match the site content updates, snapshots of industry events, and the leadership messaging as well. These helped increase the traffic to the website, as the mobile-friendly, content-rich site now began to appeal to a wider audience. Over the last few quarters, the client has seen over 300% increase in net new traffic every month, and the average time spent on the site has increased from 20 seconds to 4.35 minutes per session.
The site was also created to appeal to the millennials so that they could consume content in a progressive manner—from snippets to videos to long-form as they developed an interest in display technologies. In fact, the SID local events are today experiencing a surge in younger and diverse audience profiles.
The DisplayWeek site has a unique experience—the site sees a surge just a few weeks prior to the annual conference and then traffic drops off a week after the event is completed. To keep the audience engaged, we devised a continuous content plan that would help drive traffic and engagement.
Working with the SID team, we collected all the past events video content, session presentations, and speaker profiles, interviews, and podcasts. This allowed the site to deliver rich content and engagement for new advertisers, sponsors, and partners. We also created a calendar of events that helped drive more ticket sales for every event.
