New Website Boosts Leads by 135% for UK Largest Specialist Small Business Insurer

Simply Business, the UK’s leading insurance broker for small businesses, has boosted online leads by 135% in the first year since implementing a new website based on Magnolia CMS, the open source content management system that delivers simplicity on an enterprise scale.

We wanted to make Simply Business as regarded for the quality of our content and community as for our insurance and finance services. To do this, we needed to rebuild Simply Business.co.uk on a platform that both IT and marketing could easily use and that would let us make full use of social media, webinars and interactive features.

Alastair Douglas, Head of Marketing and Analysis, Simply Business

Simply Business switched to Magnolia to make it easier for marketing teams to author and publish content faster. The company insures over 165,000 UK SMEs – more than any other broker.

Using Magnolia CMS, Simply Business’s marketing team could quickly and easily create tailor-made landing pages that cater specifically to the diverse needs of this large group of businesses. By adding 150 new pages in the first year, the site now integrates seamlessly to Simply Business’ SEO and ‘pay per click’ advertising campaigns, with the content provided to site visitors better matching the search terms they had used when seeking specific products.

This new content strategy has lead to an increase of 135% increase in leads from ‘long-tail’ SEO that helps users find content on the site through more specific searches.

Offering more focused and relevant content is proving key to the company’s strategy of building the brand’s reputation and customer loyalty through targeted advice and articles for its small business customers.

Magnolia offered the perfect combination of power – including the ability to integrate seamlessly with back end business logic – with a simple user interface that let’s our marketing team work faster.

Alastair Douglas, Head of Marketing and Analysis, Simply Business

The ability to add new content quickly in response to marketing campaigns is now facilitated by the use of Magnolia’s Standard Templating Kit, which allows Marketing to work on the content and Development to update the back end at the same time. The kit provides templating best practice and an extensive set of ready-made functionality that can easily be extended for custom designs and content output.

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. A great example of that new pioneering spirit is the creation of our new Simply Business webcast.

It was so much simpler to achieve with Magnolia and meant we could experiment more and react more quickly to news and events that are concerning small businesses. For example, we were able to provide our end users with multimedia content on completing their tax returns in good time for the deadlines!

Alastair Douglas, Head of Marketing and Analysis, Simply Business

About Magnolia

Magnolia’s open source content management system delivers simplicity on an enterprise scale. Its outstanding combination of ease-of-use with a flexible, standards-based Java architecture has led to its adoption by enterprises and governments throughout the world, including ING, the U.S. Navy, JBoss.org, Johnson & Johnson, Lloyds TSB, Sony, Unilever, and the US Department of Defense. Magnolia is used by governments and leading Fortune 500 enterprises, and in more than 100 countries on all continents of the world.

Magnolia International Ltd. is the creator of both the open source Community Edition and its Enterprise Licensed Editions of the Magnolia CMS. Full global service, support, implementation, consulting and training for enterprise clients are delivered by Magnolia together with its international network of qualified partners. Find out more about Magnolia at: www.magnolia-cms.com

About Simply Business

The UK's leading insurance broker for small businesses, Simply Business insures over 165,000 small business customers, more than any other UK broker. The company has been a Sunday Times Tech Track 100 company for the past three years, and employs over 140 people at its offices in London and Northampton, Simply Business revenues have grown 44% a year from £4.2 million in 2006, to £12.5 million in 2009.

Launched in 2005, the full service insurance specialist identified a need to improve insurance offerings for the UK’s millions of small businesses whose needs were neglected by established insurance and broking companies. Where the traditional broking model was slow-moving and inflexible, Simply Business developed an agile and online brokerage service which was able to deliver bespoke policies tailored to their individual and often very specific requirements. Its online offering is supported by a dedicated, UK based team of insurance specialists who provide a tailored and personal service more commonly associated with broker relationships.

Press Contacts

Adrian Brophy
+44 (0) 1962 883203
adrianbrophy@xtrashot.com

To arrange interviews please consult the media kit page for contact information.