Transforming the website for one of the worlds’ largest copper mines.

Challenge

KAZ Minerals is one of the largest copper producers in Kazakhstan. Following a major restructuring in 2014, it was transformed into a high-growth company focused on large-scale, low-cost, open-pit mining. It is now one of Kazakhstan’s highest profile and fastest growing companies.

We were commissioned to deliver a new corporate site as the mines were becoming fully operational. There were four languages (English, Kazakh, Russian and Chinese) to communicate this growth story and to support a range of stakeholder interests, from investors to potential employees and CSR professionals.

KAZ Minerals needed a long-term partner to help manage, maintain and develop their new site, www.kazminerals.com.

Action

The website is one of the main communication tools for the business and therefore structure, content and messaging was key.  We developed a new look and feel and integrated detailed mine features including timelines, statistics, production reports, site plans and a real-time copper price feed. We also produced a fly through video to show the mine in action.

The site uses the Umbraco Content Management System. This allows all content, news and video to be updated easily across each of the four languages. We also implemented advanced analytics to give in-depth measurement of engagement.

For instance, the analytics revealed a steady increase of traffic to the sustainability pages which resulted in the development of a new case study section in order to explain their ESG story. We also launched interactive data charts, which turned Excel spreadsheets into engaging visual aids, showcasing the impact of their ESG management.

Since launch, we have worked with KAZ Minerals to keep the site updated with the latest production reports, announcements and annual report content as well as fresh modules and features.

Every quarter we deliver the website analytics report and brainstorm new ideas to help support their growing business. We also send out quarterly emails via Mail Chimp to alert subscribers to the latest KAZ Minerals news.

As part of the annual report updates, we always identify ways to better tell the story of how the business is changing, often via new modules such as the water cycle animation. We make sure these new modules can be re-used for other features across the site.

Impact

A straightforward and intuitive structure, key landing pages, modular teasers and clear calls to action help to guide users to information quickly and easily. The advanced analytics mean we can track engagement statistics – for example, the annual report has been downloaded 2,753 times in English, 1,038 in Russian – and in Q1 there were 538 downloads of the annual report.

ESG traffic has been steadily increasing over the past 2 years, seeing a peak of 320% YOY, reaching >72,000 visits in Q3 2019. We are finding that the most popular page is environment, with visitors reviewing the waste, water cycle, health and safety and employee diversity pages after.

Careers visits to the Russian site are still high, showing a +68% YOY increase to latest vacancies in Q1. Over the past couple of months KAZ Minerals has been trialling LinkedIn posts to promote the latest vacancies, which has resulted in 565 referrals from LinkedIn in Q1 2020.

The investor section continues to receive high levels of traffic, seeing a +70% YOY increase in Q1 with almost 50,000 page views, and 62% of that traffic being new visitors. The mine videos also continue to be of interest, receiving around 500 views in the latest quarter.