Case Study

Brief

The Barclays Corporate and Group Centre Communications team engaged LBi in December 2007 to develop a digital strategy to enhance the current Barclays.com site so that it better reflected the scale, capabilities and ambition of the business. 

LBi’s strategic review brought about 8 imperatives for the new site:

1. Ensure content and functionality focuses on the breadth and scale of Barclays

2. Create a distinct position and reinforce it with an excellent user experience - both should differentiate it from the Business Unit sites

3. Anchor the site in a design style that is unique to Barclays as a whole

4. Use clear signposting to facilitate visitor goals

5. Tell the corporate story through attractive exploratory journeys

6. Ensure that the site demonstrates best practice, legal compliance and is both accessible and usable

7. Establish dedicated and effective centralised governance, including workflow and ongoing management processes

8. Identify a new technology platform that can accommodate existing systems.

Strategy

In collaboration with the Barclays Corporate and Group Centre Communications team, LBi developed a digital strategy to enhance the Barclays.com corporate website. We implemented new site architecture to allow visitors to navigate quickly to the right content, with a new look and feel to reinforce the brand positioning. LBi proposed a number of other recommendations and strategic initiatives and made the site:

Broader: To communicate and demonstrate the breadth of international capability that the Barclays Group offers.
Richer: For a more dynamic, interactive and engaging user experience that brings to life the Barclays Group Story.
Better: Ensuring that global best practice and competitor analysis learning’s are implemented to ensure a best-in-class experience.

Execution

The new site architecture allowed visitors to easily meet their objectives by navigating quickly to the content that interests them. A new look and feel reinforces the corporate brand positioning, based on the existing colour palette, emphasising that Barclays is a universal bank with a diverse portfolio in Retail and Commercial banking as well as Investment Banking and Investment Management. Visitors can identify the corporate site as part of Barclays, but importantly, there is a clear visual and branding distinction between Barclays.com and Barclays.co.uk. The result was built using FatWire, the selected CMS for all Barclay’s sites, which is hosted by LBi.

Results

• 10% increase in engagement
• 23% increase in traffic being sent from homepage to Internet banking
• 27% decrease in people exiting the site from the homepage.

The last two results show that the pages are performing better and getting users to the content they are after, quicker, thereby making the site more effective.