Brand-Polishing

Innovative Merchant Solutions consolidates and upgrades its portfolio of Web sites into a focused corporate brand.

Client: Innovative Merchant Solutions Corporate Site

Web site: www.innovativemerchant.com

The Opportunity

Upgrade 2.0

Within the space of a few years, Innovative Merchant Solutions grew itself into an industry—leading credit card processor. The number of the company's Web properties had grown with it—to about a dozen—each with its own objective, and each with its own branding, tone, architecture and navigational structure.

IMS caught the eye of Intuit, Inc., the makers of TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Quicken, which was looking to expand its portfolio of services to its customer base. After it was acquired by Intuit, IMS sought to refine and align its brand image with that of its new owner, while retaining its own distinct identity.

Balancing Act

Died-in-the-wool direct marketers, IMS sells everywhere it can, its corporate site notwithstanding. The site needed to double as a lead generation mechanism for its entire suite of services, including ISO and affiliate partner-programs.

Finally, a robust support section also needed to be added, with extensive training, tutorials, and help for developers.

Servo's Solution

Catalog and Conquer

Since the site needed to accomplish many objectives, effective organization was paramount. Servo began by helping IMS identify its full portfolio of services and products, partner programs, and technical support sites.

From there, Servo helped IMS create service briefs, getting on paper the benefits of each, its sales objectives, target customers, brand positioning, and market messaging. These briefs provide a clear direction for existing and new product and marketing managers, as well as any creative agencies with which IMS works.

Servo simultaneously catalogued each of IMS's sales, service and partner Web sites. Content was culled and rewritten to align it with the new service briefs.

Servo also worked with IMS's Operations teams to build out a robust support section, providing both technical help and educational training to customers, partners, and developers.

The Results

A Flagship that Runs Like a Speed Boat

The result is an Web site that presents not only a sophisticated corporate image, but also leans aggressively toward lead generation.

Perhaps most importantly, the new site's architecture was built to streamline and simplify the lead generation process. Sales content is brought to the upper levels of the site, with a "Featured Products" area on the homepage. Clear calls-to-action are pervasive; the contact form is never more than one click away.