From fragmented marketing to focused growth 

ADM is one of the world’s premier global human and animal nutrition companies.

ADM procures, transports, stores, processes and merchandises agricultural commodities, products and ingredients. The company’s global network is immense, connecting crops to markets on six continents.

Headquartered in Chicago, ADM employs more than 42,000 people.

In 2022, the company exceeded $100 billion in annual revenue.

In the past 10 years, ADM has grown their core business to include new categories. Much of that growth came through the acquisition of more than 20 brands, which created fragmentation both internally and externally.

ADM reached out to Valtech to:

• Transform ADM.com from a static website to the centerpiece of a digital ecosystem.

• Unite disparate marketing campaigns into a comprehensive, connected narrative.

• Facilitate collaboration across marketing, technology and analytics to turn untouched data into a source of insights, growth opportunities and future states.

A deep discovery phase with numerous stakeholders helped us define what ADM’s optimal tech stack should look like:

It must support current and future strategic digital business ambitions.

It must deliver against required business capabilities.

It must acknowledge the current martech landscape and leave room for changes in the near term and the long term.

It must enable and enhance digital operational models.

The platform

After a three-month exploration of four different solutions, ADM selected Optimizely as the platform for its ecosystem. We then began migrating several legacy sites, building the new site and connecting the entire tech stack around a centralized structure. The new ADM.com launched in early 2022, a year after the project began.

The design system and customer journeys

ADM has more than 15 business units around the world. Regulations, product availability and stakeholder needs can vary greatly from one business unit to the next. This context defined how we approached designing user experiences:

• We developed design concepts and wireframes.

• We mapped customer experiences across the ecosystem.

• We developed Pardot email templates and HTML landing page templates to support demand generation efforts.

• We launched a governance model with UI toolkit so stakeholders at the unit level could leverage templates and make their own changes as needed.

• Altogether, we developed more than 30 components to support the site’s launch.

The SEO foundation

From Day 1, we established an SEO foundation because organic search is an important traffic source for ADM’s marketing funnel. That foundation consists of:

• A holistic keyword strategy.

• Technical and on-page enhancements.

• Ongoing A/B experimentation.

The keyword strategy identifies qualified queries with search volumes that align with ADM’s business goals. These keywords can then be used to inform each business unit’s own content strategy.

As we built and integrated the new ecosystem, we overhauled ADM’s integrated marketing by creating 100-plus campaigns for more than 1,000 places. These campaigns supported all the different business units.

Before, ADM’s marketing relied heavily on paid media placements. Unit-level marketing teams gauged performance with impression metrics.

We replaced this approach with full-funnel demand generation programs that showcased ADM’s teams as go-to-experts in their fields.

The campaigns targeted audiences with precision. We used ads and partner email blasts to capture attention, qualify prospects, and drive leads toward gated assets such as white papers, infographics and case studies.

The dashboards

We developed master analytics dashboards for integrated marketing campaigns as well as ADM.com to track marketing performance everywhere. These dashboards served as a single source of truth for all marketing stakeholders.

The alignment

In the past, ADM’s global integrated marketing campaign planning was disconnected. Each business unit conducted its own planning. We took over the leadership of IMC planning and coordinated across all business units. With a unified plan and real-time dashboards, we were able to align integrated marketing activities with ADM’s business goals.

With a new digital presence to elevate its brand story, ADM was able to reach target audiences with more precise, relevant messages. The ecosystem itself became a go-to destination for customers while supporting better demand generation efforts with gated content.

By integrating the marketing campaigns and the ecosystem, we helped ADM level up its own marketing ambitions:

• We launched personalized user journeys in key markets and developed components so it would be easy to translate and deliver English content to non-English-speaking audiences.

• With Optimizely’s dynamic personalization engine, we can identify user trends, which can be used to serve personalized content more accurately.

• We have run A/B tests with AI-generated content and gated content.

• We conducted the first automated nurture tests in 2023.

• We revamped ADM.com’s homepage based on user testing analyses and best practices.

By shifting marketing’s focus from publisher-led paid media to an optimized channel mix, we saw impressions nearly quadruple over three years.

By focusing on thought leadership content, we drove engagement and a massive increase in clicks, from around 87,000 in 2021 to more than 402,000 in 2023.

By targeting audiences more effectively, we saw the average cost per click drop from $226 in 2021 to $36 in 2023.

By continuously optimizing creative, targeting and placements, we saw clickthrough rates rise from 0.56% in 2021 to 1.41% in 2023.

By optimizing lead capture with A/B testing and targeting, we created more opportunities to convert prospects into customers. Leads grew from 5,733 in 2021 to 9,595 in 2023.