The National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) represents over 16,000 new-car and truck-franchises. Founded in 1917, this trade association focuses on supporting auto and truck franchise dealers, their employees, and their customers through advocacy, training and education, research, networking, the annual NADA Show that attracts nearly 25,000 attendees each year, and more.
NADA.org serves as the primary place for members and other audiences to access the organization’s resources and services. As NADA looked to the future, its leaders recognized that it needed to modernize its website to increase its impact in the industry as well as retain members and attract new ones.
Fueled by long-term strategic objectives, driven by the need to streamline the NADA experience into one website ecosystem, and accelerated by an outdated content management system, NADA partnered with Tombras – one of the nation’s leading full-service independent advertising agencies – to reimagine its online presence.
After over a year of comprehensive work, Tombras built a modern website ecosystem that elevates NADA’s core services, activities, and subsidiary organizations to increase industry authority and drive member engagement.
Through a comprehensive discovery process, which included over 12 groups of stakeholder interviews across NADA’s internal departments, we gained an understanding of the mission, objectives, key audiences, and unique needs of the departments and organization as a whole.
Together, we set to work creating a comprehensive strategy that aligned with our key business objectives. Content strategy and user experience experts from Tombras redesigned the site’s architecture, beginning with a sitemap and navigation structure that would seamlessly allow users to switch between associations and other key sections of the NADA website. We then restructured the extensive site taxonomy, with a focus on organizing and connecting content by topic to increase content visibility and boost internal linking throughout the site.
Once the information architecture of the site was established, Tombras digital designers worked with the content and UX teams to bring the site to life in a modern way. This intense work took over five months of fast-paced design mockups, sprints, and client reviews. Once completed, Tombras delivered a robust design system with over 30 unique components that unified all departments while being flexible enough to reflect their individual branding.
Since the launch of the new NADA.org, pageview traffic increased 46 percent, and unique users increased 26 percent compared to the same time period the previous year. The majority of increased traffic resulted from activity on the newly redesigned NADA Headlines, SEO improvements, and improved digital marketing for the NADA Show. Education Resources and Policy Issue pages also generated significant improvement based on audience growth and time on site.
