Isadora Agency Crafts Cohesive Digital Presence for Hilco Global

Hilco Global, a financial services company with 20+ subsidiary operating companies, excels at asset valuation and in maximizing financial returns. Isadora Agency partnered with Hilco to organize and merge these completely different websites into a new cohesive and dynamic brand presence.

Project Overview

Hilco Global is a diversified financial services company with over 35 years of experience working with the world’s leading banks, professional advisors, law firms, and other institutions. Isadora Agency’s work with Hilco was in-depth and extensive.

The company initially sought a corporate website redesign. However, after a deep brand audit, it became clear that Hilco needed a more comprehensive digital brand transformation. Isadora Agency’s work redefined the brand’s services, values, positioning and customer interactions across 20+ of their operating companies.

This aligned Hilco more closely with the evolving needs and expectations of its target audience in the digital age, and turned a fragmented digital experience into a cohesive, powerhouse brand. Addressing these goals meant improving user trust, updating the brand image, and transforming the perception of Hilco’s website to that of a “house of solutions” for the company’s diverse audiences.

This transformation involved consolidating 20+ disparate websites and thousands of pages into one unified hub, in order to eliminate silos, create a streamlined user experience, and accentuate the company’s breadth of services. Isadora Agency’s work gave Hilco a more authoritative presence by organizing vast amounts of content, by updating an outdated look and feel to a more sophisticated, formal, and modular design. As a result, the website speaks to Hilco’s credibility, and users now access a variety of solutions and services from a single source, eliminating the need to visit multiple sites. The new structure helps users find synergies between services they might have otherwise considered, creating even greater potential for new business from Hilco’s already substantial pool of accessible partners.

Amplifying Hilco’s accessibility and findability extended to SEO—a vital step, as users typically find Hilco via organic search. Isadora Agency’s SEO and analytics team performed a competitive SEO audit and analytics review before creating a detailed redirection strategy and applying SEO best practices to the Hilco website. The redirection in particular was a massive undertaking that involved all 5,000+ pages, and was crucial to preserving Hilco’s existing search engine rankings while creating a smooth user experience.

Homepage

Hilco’s homepage receives the website’s highest traffic, so recreating it was an important focus. Placing the most crucial information front-and-center helped accomplish this, so Hilco’s four solution areas, clients, case studies, and key statistics were visible and prominent. It’s a bold reflection of Hilco’s credibility, and a clear means of drawing users directly toward information they need while keeping them on-page. Featuring a hero video that highlights Hilco’s Chicago headquarters served to give the homepage a sense of place and personality.

Operating Company Pages

Hilco’s portfolio includes over 20 different trading companies. A majority of these subsidiaries’ business arrives via user searches, and users have specific goals in terms of specialty financial services when they perform those searches, so each of these companies needed to retain their own homepages. We assessed the structure and information architecture of the Hilco Global website on a page by page basis, which allowed the creation of unique landing pages that fully featured these companies’ services. Users now have a much clearer picture of their options, and of where they can fulfill their financial needs. And while these pages serve as standalone profiles, they can also serve as entry points that drive traffic to Hilco’s main hub as well.

Personas

Creating four distinct customer personas for Hilco helped their team understand their audiences’ differing needs. By mapping out the goals, motivators, pain points, and needs of each of these four personas, we made Hilco confident that their site would be able to meet any scenario. This differentiation illustrated how, for example, a higher-level executive seeking to contact someone quickly has different needs than a broker researching liquidation services for a client. Detailed user journeys for each persona strengthened Hilco’s understanding of the flow of these scenarios. Addressing this need meant Isadora Agency could build these journeys through the web pages, and ultimately guide prospects and customers further down the sales funnel.

Strategy

Isadora team tackled this challenging project by:

• Defining customer personas to better understand the audience’s needs and user flow.
• Completing an exhaustive content audit of all subsites.
• Creating a comprehensive sitemap that allowed for growth.
• Building wireframes that provided a logical structure for easily navigating the website.

Company Directory

Since the website is a main source of contact information for users, Hilco needed a way to easily contact the correct representative. The solution was to create a company directory. This sleek tool gives users just the details they need—without overwhelming them—and offers a well-organized platform to more fully engage with Hilco’s services.

Navigation

Simplifying Hilco’s website navigation was a major part of addressing the company’s vast array of services and ultimately redefining their online presence. It meant auditing the kinds of strategic insights Hilco offers, and breaking them into four unique categories of solutions: capital, advisory, monetization, and valuation. It was important to make sure each of these could be featured without inundating users with information—instead, keeping them engaged and pointing them in the right direction. We organized the complex display of operating companies, solutions, and services into a mega menu, making it easier for visitors to find the information they need.

Mobile Layout

This digital transformation included a responsive mobile version of the site that caters to users on the go. It presents all the information found on the desktop site in small, digestible chunks for easily distracted viewers. The new website is fully responsive, and automatically adjusts the layout, font, and image sizes to all resolutions, which ensures a consistent and visually appealing experience across all devices.

Services Provided

• Customer Journey
• UX/UI
• Web Design
• Interactive Prototypes
• Web Product
• Web Development
• User Experience Design

The Results

• All Traffic Up by 171%
• SEO Traffic Up by 19.7%
• Interactions Up by 77%

About Isadora Agency

Isadora Agency is a web design company and leader in enterprise digital transformations via branding, UX Design, Product Design, eCommerce, and ongoing web development & management.