How TPM Created a Truly Unique Site for Turnium’s New SASE Brand

When Turnium TTGI decided to consolidate their two brands, they turned to their trusted partners at Total Product Marketing, who had provided web and marketing content for both arms of their organization for years.

As they brought Turnium — a managed SD-WAN-as-a-service provider — and Multapplied, which offered the same technology from the same team, but as a white-labeled OEM solution, together, they wanted to stand out from the crowd.

Not Just Another SASE Site

The executives at TTGI came to TPM with a request for a full rebrand. The new site had to incorporate content from Turnium and Multapplied in a way that would appeal to both brands’ target audiences while differentiating the combined services from the competition.

Chief Marketing Officer Geoff Hultin suggested incorporating the idea of a cityscape like those in the beloved Richard Scarry books — a concept that both challenged and excited the TPM design team.

“Our goal was to build a website that is unique in the industry. I wanted to show the inner workings of SD-WAN technology — the use-cases, the situations, and the people. SD-WAN is a complex idea and to describe it in pictures is really hard without resorting to the usual images of highway interchanges, cities and maps with sparkly blue lines connecting them across the globe. All this has been done. And done. And done.”
Challenges

Both of the existing sites, while well-designed, relied heavily on stock photography and unoriginal depictions of computers with wavy lines depicting connectivity that were common on the sites of Turnium’s competition.

To build something truly unique, the TPM design team — led by Design and Development Director Lisa — would be starting entirely from scratch. The team began brainstorming how the city theme could be used to highlight the multiple scenarios in which SD-WAN could be deployed.

The Sky was (Not Quite) the Limit

With the Turnium team placing their trust in TPM’s design decisions, the team was free to begin playing with ideas. But their artistic visions had to be balanced against functional concerns. However creative the site design was visually, it had to work practically.

Whatever they came up with had to be buildable, it had to collapse and scale for viewing on different devices without disrupting the user experience, and the art and animation couldn’t compromise the performance of the site. An isometric art style and coded animation were selected to give the site an impression of depth without compromising speed.

“Animation has to hit at both the simplest and most complex levels. Well-executed site animation offers something for everyone, from those with the perspective and experience to grasp its deeper means to those simply enjoying the experience — and everyone in between.”

— Lisa Eyo, TPM Director of Design and Development

As the site began to take shape, TPM’s writing team created copy to match, and the design evolved continually with the copy to ensure the site offered a holistic experience for visitors — not just standard text boxes and stock imagery.

Making the Ordinary Extraordinary

The final result was a site unlike any other SD-WAN site on the web, incorporating both symbolic representations of Turnium’s services as well as more literal depictions of SD-WAN use cases.

Server City

At the top of the page, a city perches on a server stack in a playful callback to traditional imagery that highlights how SD-WAN can connect various organizational hubs, remote workers and teams spread out across a geographic area.

The Slushy Machine

The result of intense collaboration between TPM’s design team and the client, the slushy machine offers the most accurate visual representation of Turnium’s offering, which lets customers customize or create their own solution. (Fun fact, the slushy machine idea arose from Lisa’s dissatisfaction with drink offerings as she sketched ideas for the site while on a plane.)

The Globe and Warehouse

This section incorporates some more literal depictions of how SD-WAN can connect people and things at manufacturing facilities, transportation hubs, warehouses, and all points across the supply chain.

City of Logos

A standard isometric city graphic was customized to include logos of various Turnium partners while maintaining their branding standards. And the spilled slushy, which has flowed throughout the page, forms the river flowing around the city.

“To some, the story is subtle. But to others, the story is the best part of the website. Regardless, the beautiful design, the story that it tells, makes a fantastic backdrop for the messages we want to communicate.”
Geoff Hultin
CMO, Turnium

The TPM Difference

Total Product Marketing’s secret weapon is the integration of our expert team. While Lisa, who led the redesign project, is a developer, designer, and coder, she also knows how to write web copy and understands conversion pathways — so she knew how each part of the site had to work together to engage visitors of varying knowledge or skill levels.

Most marketing or web development agencies have skilled designers. But when designers are focused solely on a single aspect of the project, they simply can’t produce a site as comprehensive or cohesive as the new Turnium site.

“Boring, run-of-the-mill websites are hard to read. Visitors end up skimming and making decisions solely on price because they haven’t been engaged enough to take in all the information that’s available to them on the site. Good design goes unnoticed but has a huge impact on marketing.”

— Lisa Eyo, TPM Director of Design and Development

Turnium was thrilled with the final result — a unique site that offered an ideal blend of design, performance, SEO, and marketing for conversion, with each piece playing its part.

How Can We Help?

No matter how grand your vision may seem, the integrated team at Total Product Marketing can help make it a reality. Contact us today to learn more.
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