VisitBritain Consumer

The ask

VisitBritain’s digital marketing team wanted to evolve beyond the constraints of a traditional CMS. They needed a publishing platform that was more flexible, faster to update, and capable of tailoring journeys for diverse markets worldwide.

The VB team wanted establish a publishing platform to:

• Gain more flexibility/reduce time to live when creating and publishing content
• Improve user journeys throughout the site - tailored for each individual target market
• Employ a new design that took inspiration from the GREAT brand guidelines

• Improve the performance of the website for international visitors

   

The approach

Technically, the use of Drupal’s ‘Paragraphs’ module provided the foundations to build a website that was both pleasing to the eye, as well as incredibly flexible when it came to content editing.

Paragraphs enabled us to build and design the site at a section or ‘component’ level, rather than the traditional page level approach. This method means that it is now possible for a content editor to combine any number of these components in a variety of combinations across the site. In theory, it would be possible for no two pages to look the same.

Components such as the hero parallax have a particular stand out effect, no less because they enable the site to showcase some of the stunning imagery of Great Britain that VisitBritain has access to in a slick and modern way.

Since launch in early 2016 we have continued to grow this bank of components with the direction of the VB digital team. One phase of this has been the creation of components specifically for campaign pages, as these have slightly different requirements than the main site. We have most recently launched the 'I Travel For...' campaign, which ties in with the updated VisitBritain strategy.

The results

The new VisitBritain platform has enabled the organisation to confidently deliver global campaigns, streamline publishing, and tailor content to international markets.

Technical Drupal Development features of note include:

• GeoIP targeting accurately to country level.
• Locale specific homepages to cater for over 15 languages and 20 markets. This allows for a high degree of content tailoring per market, for example, it is possible to have an English language homepage that has different content depending on whether you are visitor from the UK, USA, Australia, Middle East etc. This allows for sharply targeted campaigns to the various international markets.
• Highly optimised caching to be able to handle dramatic and sudden spikes in traffic caused by international marketing campaign activity.
• Granular workflow permissioning to allow for wide content management participation across the VisitBritain organisation.
• Out of hours Drupal support to be on hand for global marketing campaigns.
• Broad usage of the AWS product suite, that yields a highly-available, auto-scaling, secure platform.

The result is a modern, flexible platform that allows VisitBritain to act quickly, deliver targeted campaigns, and present Great Britain to the world with confidence.
 

Visit website

www.visitbritain.com