IndyCar

IndyCar first engaged myself and the team when they were in the market for an updated and more user-centric digital presence. Up until this point they were experiencing a downturn in race attendance due to competition from other series, relying on conventional marketing and not attracting millennials. Their leadership team knew they were missing the mark with a large portion of motorsport fans, but they needed help in developing a new strategy.

To start we had to define their current fan base, who they were, what attracted them and what they would improve – from the live experience to digital. Surveys were used on the IndyCar site for initial research. The findings were as expected, most avid and casual fans were middle class males in the 35-55 age range who weren’t technically savvy and came to the site mainly for news or race day information. We also found that younger IndyCar fans visited for the technology behind the cars, live timing/scoring and rich media; all which were lacking in varying degrees on the present site.

IndyCar also had a limited social reach aside from one sided conversations with polls, contests, etc. We worked with their internal social media team to integrate social media throughout the site, share IndyCar’s rich content and create two way conversations with younger sports fans who weren’t familiar with the series.

Because there was an abundance of information being presented we were careful of not confusing/overwhelming visitors when they first landed on the site. We established five main areas users could access immediately in the primary navigation: Latest News, Scheduling, Drivers/Teams, Statistics, Tech Info. Focusing on these key areas, along with strong visual cues, satisfied persona types we identified during the research phase.

The homepage was created as an exploratory portal, giving the visitors opportunities to explore aspects of IndyCar they may not have been familiar with. Their “Road to Indy” program consisted of three series concentrating on future IndyCar drivers. Partnering with YouTube gave us the ability to showcase a variety of rich content from behind the scenes team interviews to HD in-car perspective content previously unavailable. Fans could also view trending content on social media and add to the conversations.

Architecture was modular so editors could easily swap and move content around based on changing needs during the season. We utilized bootstrap framework, giving users a seamless experience across all platforms.