The Client
Genius NY
Genius NY is a tech accelerator competition that awards $3 million every year among five startups from across the world that plan to bring business to CNY. It’s the largest competition of its kind for uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), robotics, IoT (Internet of Things), and big data startups.
How We Helped
Web Design & Development
Digital Marketing
Awareness
Like most organizations that connect communities and the tech industry, GENIUS NY has many different audiences. Their new website needed to clearly communicate what the organization does and how to get involved.
We used the kickoff meeting to identify the kinds of businesses GENIUS NY interfaces with, placing an emphasis on UAS, IoT, big data, and robotics startups. From there, our team researched how these audiences search for and apply to accelerator competitions such as our client’s.
The plan was to use this research and smart information architecture (IA) to route stakeholders to specific initiatives and tech startup owners to GENIUS NY’s portfolio, FAQs, instructions, timelines, and links to registration.
We created a new sitemap based on audience research and crafted content that emphasized GENIUS NY’s differentiating factors. Ultimately, the new website supported brand awareness through ease of navigation, logical hierarchies, and optimized content informed by user behavior.
By reorganizing and redesigning their website in a functional CMS, Idea Kraft made Genius NY more visible and legible to their target audiences: tech startups, community leaders, and stakeholders.
Adaptability
For GENIUS NY, every year brings a new competition cycle – and with it more exciting milestones and an ever-expanding portfolio.
But their last website didn’t have the capacity or user friendliness to display this breadth of experience. GENIUS NY needed a CMS that would not only allow them to update their portfolio but also support as much content as needed to tell the story of their competition.
In order to fulfill GENIUS NY’s wishlist, we made sure they had space to upload unlimited photos, advertising, video, and news items. The interface we build for all of our clients is intuitive, making it easy to add, edit, or remove any pages.
Design
In this case especially, it was imperative that website design supported both awareness and adaptability.
The new website design had to highlight GENIUS NY’s impressive status as the largest accelerator competition of its kind in the world, while also giving them the flexibility to evolve in the future by adding new content and initiatives.
Improving visual impact was at the top of GENIUS NY’s to-do list. A lack of photos and a muted color scheme didn’t help the accelerator stand out, either. After presenting some initial design direction to GENIUS NY, we decided that adding some color, dynamic graphics, and more images would bring new life to their online presence. We also continued to collaborate with them throughout the development process to craft an agile design.
The result is a modern and engaging website that directs different audiences to appropriate initiatives while prominently promoting their big event with engaging, straightforward calls to action. An overall seamless flow, engaging visuals, and well-placed links catch and hold the attention of any visitor.
Client Collaboration
GENIUS NY’s new website is still driven by technological accuracy but also offers a simple, stylized representation of their contribution to the industry.
Digital Marketing Campaign & Results
Idea Kraft was able to help GENIUS NY successfully retarget warm leads and expand awareness to entirely new audiences with a digital advertising campaign in 2023.
We started by targeting leads in the drone field who were already searching for an accelerator like GENIUS NY. By monitoring and adjusting to user behavior, we identified the best keywords for high click through rates, resulting in more than 27,000 visitors to GENIUS NY’s landing page.
The next phase was a broader awareness campaign to reach audiences who weren’t yet aware of GENIUS NY. Audience research determined Reddit and LinkedIn were the best platforms to reach the target audience of tech entrepreneurs.
After running an awareness campaign on those platforms to familiarize users with GENIUS NY, we built on that campaign by retargeting warm leads for clicks and conversions. This dynamic approach proved effective, ultimately bringing over 7,000 people to the website and achieving over 1.6 million impressions.
“Idea Kraft was a fantastic partner to collaborate with on this much needed redesign. You are a highly skilled, creative, and responsive team. You really listened to our input and gracefully accommodated some last-minute curve balls we tossed out there. In addition to looking awesome, the website is also well constructed on the back end, and easy to work with. The finished product is perfect, and exactly what we were hoping for!”
