Magnolia CMS
How Magnolia CMS Helped Simply Business Increase Sales Leads by 135%
Simply Business is the UK’s leading insurance broker for small businesses. It has over 160,000 businesses that it insures, more than any other online UK broker. It has been a Sunday Times Tech Track 100 company for the past three years and was recently named in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA.
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- Simply Business
Launched in 2005, the insurance specialist identified a need to improve insurance offerings for the UK’s small businesses, whose needs were neglected by existing insurers and brokers.
The traditional financial model was slow-moving and inflexible, therefore Simply Business developed an agile and online brokerage service, which was able to deliver bespoke policies, tailored to their individual and very specific requirements. Simply Business offers public liability insurance among its product portfotio.
Statistics
| Client | Simply Business |
| URL | www.simplybusiness.co.uk |
| Product | Magnolia CMS Enterprise Edition |
| Number of Sites | 1 |
| Number of Authors | 7 |
| Page views | 1,200,000 per month |
| Site visits | 160,000 per month |
| Unique visitors | 150,000 per month |
The Environment. What was the situation before Magnolia arrived?
Effective customer interaction is mission critical for Simply Business, who’s sales rely very heavily on the website. Accuracy and quantity of customer data is key to intelligent targeting and communication.
Previously, any content changes on the site had to be formally scheduled. Front-end programmers would have to modify or create the html, then ‘check it in’ for publishing. Processes were only there for checking code, however basic spelling mistakes could be missed and then even more changes would need to be rescheduled, meaning an extremely long time to deliver final content.
There was always that fear in the past that you couldn’t develop new content, because if you’re going to have some people from Tech, Quality and Systems sitting down for a few hours - the expectation was that it better be something that makes a lot of money, otherwise you’re wasting everyone's time! This meant there was always a stasis where nobody ever tried anything.
Alastair Douglas, Head of Marketing & Analysis
The Challenge. Uniting Marketing Requirements with IT Capabilities
Simply Business realised that the problem stemmed from Marketing content management being tied into the application building requirements. Therefore an intelligent intermediary was required to meet both the technology and Marketing requirements.
The overall goal was to make SimplyBusiness.co.uk a site regarded as highly for its content and community, as for its insurance and finance website. If this was to be achieved then a system would have to be put in place to allow IT and Marketing to work more efficiently together.
It was also business-critical to continue developing the website as the primary sales channel and ensure effective customer interaction and data collection. For this to happen there would need to be better integration between the back end business logic and the front end website. The primary objectives were:
- To save time spent on creating and modifying content projects and allow the Marketing team to react quicker to the fast pace and change of market requirements. Time saved would also mean reduced costs.
- To empower people at Simply Business to work together efficiently and effectively, with streamlined content management processes. This would allow the Marketing team to be more creative with content and develop campaigns such as search engine optimization (SEO) through the creation of landing pages.
- To enable interaction with customers and website visitors to allow for better data collection and sales generation. Social media, webinars and other interactive features driven by the Marketing team would be introduced to support this.
Finding the Right Solution
It became clear that introducing a Content Management System which would integrate well with the business logic backend could solve the current issues. After Simply Business realised they also needed a CMS that integrated well and was easy to use, the search was on for the best fit.
The final challenge for the Simply Business CMS was to achieve all of this with a limited budget. Good value was essential, but the idea of going for a free CMS was excluded due to the importance of reaching the key success factors without compromise.
Finally the choice was made. As simplicity and ease-of-use were key to delivering on the objectives, Magnolia CMS was chosen for the job. Magnolia were able to help deliver the following results for Simply Business.
The Results
The following benefits were achieved after introducing Magnolia CMS.
Time Saved
The simplicity of the user interface meant that creating and modifying content could be done by anyone with little or no training.
The thing which I think is great about Magnolia is the ease-of-use. Whenever anyone starts, it takes about ten seconds to explain how to create content!
And now that it takes much less time, we’ve started generating a lot more content. We have hundreds of pages about products compared to the twenty or thirty we had before.Alastair Douglas, Head of Marketing & Analysis
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- SimplyBusiness.co.uk
And with the Magnolia Standard Templating Kit, Simply Business are also now able to make changes to the site which allow Marketing to work on the content and Development to update the back end at the same time. The templating kit provides templating best practice and an extensive set of ready-made functionality that can easily be extended for custom designs and content output.
Previously this would have taken weeks due to the non-separation of tasks. Marketing are also now able to create many more pages based on existing templates, instead of requiring technical resources to set this up each time.
Simply Business can now also save time thanks to the Marketing team being able to publish content immediately and without having to involve IT resources, as was the case previously. This flexibility also allows Marketing to test content on the fly and develop new and original content much quicker. Again saving valuable resources.
Errors can also be quickly fixed once seen, which reduces the pressure on Marketing to only push content live once it has been through the long process of creation and publishing.
People Empowered
We now have a level of trust between IT and Marketing. Instead of fearing confusion, we can now be more bold because we’ve got all the basics right.
Alastair Douglas, Head of Marketing & Analysis
This all means that there are now no broken links on the site, no disruption to the process and no sudden unplanned change of the site display.
We wanted people to be able to try things out on the site, but with reasonable restriction through the use of templates. It’s the perfect combination of simplicity and control.
Alastair Douglas, Head of Marketing & Analysis
This new-found bravery and level of experimentation was apparent in the creation of a recent Simply Business webcast, broadcast online to help customers complete their tax returns. In the past this would not have been done, as the amount of manual work required would have been too great to justify experimenting with a new idea that had no guarantees as to results.
Now, content is in the hands of the Marketing team.
Interaction Enabled
Due to different internal people’s understanding of setting up data collection forms on the site, there were often errors in the past. Now, data collection templates have been created to include all of the correct elements. So if there is any information missing from the page then a user is prompted by the CMS to update this, meaning the complete elimination of human error.
Magnolia CMS is also supporting Simply Business’ Search Engine Optimization
We developed a multi-disciplined campaign to not only extend our reach over SEO platforms, but also make better use of existing website content. We were able to create over 150 landing pages tailored specifically to our target audiences.
Alastair Douglas, Head of Marketing & Analysis
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- Simply Business' new content
The campaign successfully delivered alternative strategies for attracting new visitors to the home page by making better use of existing content and company resources. The new content delivered significant increases in search-engine-generated traffic:
- 185% increase in results from long tail search terms
- 135% increase in online ‘Request for Quotes’ (RFQs)
The Future
Simply Business have even more plans to develop the flagship site www.simplybusiness.co.uk and are confident in working and expanding with the help of Magnolia CMS.