Case study: How Omron used Bynder to improve leads by nearly 40%

In this case study, we speak with senior marketers at Omron about how they used Bynder as part of a website redesign to improve overall traffic and UX on their site.

Omron is a global industrial automation manufacturer headquartered in Japan. The company has 36,000 employees and works with clients in over 100 countries.

Omron Automation Americas uses SDL Tridion, a large CMS platform, to host its websites. In 2016, Omron wanted to migrate its European Instance of SDL Tridion to an American Instance.

This required a complete website redesign, which prompted Omron’s website developers to look for a Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool to help them create a repository for all digital assets associated with the website. Omron reviewed nearly a dozen DAMs, but ultimately selected Bynder, a cloud-based platform that integrates seamlessly with SDL Tridion.

ClickZ spoke with Dan Lauer, Omron’s Web Content Specialist to learn more about their American rebranding effort and to better understand how Bynder’s DAM helped Omron achieve their goal of simplifying customer and partner experiences on the website. Brian Kavanaugh, Head of US Demand Generation at Bynder, was also on the call.

Omron migrates content from Europe to the Americas

Omron’s website redesign was a key part of their rebranding initiative. Dan Lauer has been with Omron since 2015. At that time, the Omron website was connected to the European instance of SDL Tridion and Dan’s team was not able to control how they wanted to present Omron’s story within the Americas. 

“In 2015, our VP of marketing along with the head of digital marketing began working with a consulting agency,” explains Lauer. “If you asked someone within Omron to give you a 30 second elevator speech or share a presentation, it became apparent that nothing was cohesive.”

Omron’s content lifecycle

The first step Omron took to gain control of their story was to migrate the content they had in the European instance onto an instance of SDL Tridion that was just for the Americas. “This allowed us to control our destiny a little more,” says Lauer. “We worked with Dept, a third-party consultant that specializes in Tridion and they helped us set up a completely new instance of SDL technology infrastructure using the latest version of SDL.”

Digital asset fragmentation spurs the need for consolidation

When Omron migrated from the European instance of SDL Tridion to the American instance, their assets were stored in a variety of places including within the CMS system itself, in Box (another file management system), in Lotus Notes databases, locally as stored files, and on shared network drives. Omron’s developers recognized that there was a need to consolidate assets and flagged the issue. That an explicit technology to manage assets existed (e.g., the DAM), wasn’t yet on their radar. 

Bynder’s Head of US Demand Generation, Brian Kavanagh, noted that many organizations don’t realize there’s specific technology (e.g., the DAM) which can eliminate companywide inconsistencies across the entire brand.

“It’s part of our job at Bynder to educate organizations about DAM technology which can help organizations manage a large amount of assets,” says Kavanagh. “The pain points are pretty universal and include scattered content, slow time to market, and risk of brand inconsistency.”

Though it was the web developers who ultimately motivated Omron to seek out a DAM solution, Omron’s partnership with Dept also factored into this initiative. Lauer explained that when a third-party consultant audited their digital ecosystem, it became apparent that they had a problem. Updating a simple datasheet, for example, required finding the file which could be in multiple places, and updating it across those multiple places. 

“The pain points outside of the website redesign were already known,” says Lauer, “We needed a centralized place for people to obtain the latest version of a document, image, video, or software file.” 

Bynder implementation and rollout

Bynder has not been rolled out globally to all 35,000 employees at Omron,  but is currently focused on the industrial automation business in the Americas. Implementation of the DAM began in October 2018 and was tied specifically to the build phase of the website redesign. 

“From October 2018 until about February of 2019 we went through workshops to set up the taxonomy and gave people a brief overview of Bynder,” explains Lauer. “Throughout December and January, we took thousands of assets involving many gigs from our old websites, imported them into Bynder and tagged files with specific metadata.” 

Lauer stressed that the adoption and ease-of-use for Bynder even for people that might not have a technological background was very high. Omron involved all key stakeholders in the primary business driver for Bynder, which was the new website launch.

“The industrial automation unit in the Americas is  the test case not only for the website, but also for the DAM,” says Lauer. “The system is scalable, so we can quickly add other business units across the Americas and globally.”

Preliminary results: A faster, more efficient website

Omron’s key driver for selecting Bynder was the ease of use and its native integration with SDL Tridion which helped resolve two of their biggest pain points—storing large files and the need to quickly upload discontinuation notices.

“On our old system, I would have to upload discontinuation notices individually. Bynder makes it easy to upload one, two, or fifteen different documents at once and tag everything, so that it’s quickly available within the CMS and can be added to the website,” explains Lauer. “In terms of the amount of time that saves me in updating the website, the benefit is really immeasurable.”

Omron didn’t have any specific metrics or a digital measurement framework that they used to measure success of the DAM, but Lauer emphasized that they wanted the website to generate more leads, load faster, have better overall usability, and keep visitors on the site longer. Here is a list of some top-line results, to date:

• 800 leads received on the website, a 38% increase
• Average number of page views per session almost doubled
• Bounce rate improved by over 20%
• Average session duration improved by over 20 seconds
• Organic search traffic increased over 15%
• Traffic from Google increased by nearly 20%
• Mobile visitors increased from 14% to 23%
• The new website is over 4 seconds faster

On the success of the new website and the DAM platform, Lauer says, “I wouldn’t say it was necessarily surprising. We had all of those metrics in mind when we were going through the website redesign process. We wanted a better user experience, a better search experience on the website, and a faster loading website. Bynder was key in helping us achieve these goals.”