The Oxford Group; Rapid development of a next generation optimised site with Drupal 8

By Coherence on 15 September 2018

The Oxford Group, part of the City and Guilds network, have a distinguished history providing training and mentoring to executive and professional personnel in medium to large enterprises. The training provides personnel with the tools to manage the change and exploit the opportunities presented to their businesses.

With very strong repeat business and new business through recommendation, and a strong profile from individual practitioners within the business, the Group had thrived through referral. However, with a new strategy and a wider ambition to bring the Group’s capabilities to new markets, the web strategy came into focus.

With little data on user behaviour, anecdotal understanding of personas and a diverse set of propositions providing a potentially fragmented content requirement, the challenge was to provide a platform that could both present a refined proposition plus the ability to rapidly iterate messaging in the light of emerging user understanding.

In addition, they needed a polished enterprise grade website that could grow with them as the understanding of their web user journeys evolved. They needed the ability to support their message in different markets and multiple languages. Most importantly they had a six week window to bring their new proposition to market.

Visit oxford-group.com →

Why Drupal was chosen:

The Oxford Group needed a platform that delivered a fresh content strategy and the ability to rapidly evolve that message. Excellent device support was required for varying patterns of usage across markets. The rich content and use of animation to create a restrained but delightful user experience required a fast and robust rendering of HTML with strong caching capabilities.

With integrations into marketing automation platforms such as Hubspot and Pardot to manage their customer conversations, they needed a powerful platform with strong API integration capabilities.

As a brand with strong UK recognition, the Oxford Group’s strategy to explore new markets required the ability to create new language versions at short notice as opportunities presented themselves and the sales strategy evolved. Not least, as a growing global brand operating in multiple markets and part of the City and Guilds Group, they needed a robust and secure platform comfortable supporting mid to large enterprises with multiple content editors and lots of content.

Coherence used Drupal 8 to provide a robust and scalable solution with strong integrations into third party systems, extensive functionality through contributed modules and a community of developers committed to its ongoing evolution and security. It’s multi-language capabilities provides powerful support for its market-level content.

In addition, Coherence used the DX8 Drupal Productivity Suite to provide the Oxford Group with an extensive set of re-usable design patterns, built into drag and droppable component libraries, which allowed Oxford Group’s content editors to develop their messaging through building new pages, optimising existing pages with new content components and reprioritised content hierarchies.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):

Coherence onboarded the Oxford Group onto the project through a series of engagements designed to understand their business, ambition, market position and differentiation from competitors. With a wealth of legacy content, a diverse set of service offerings and multiple strategic sales opportunities, the challenge was to define an impactful web engagement strategy that would clearly explain, differentiate and promote the Oxford Group’s proposition.

Coherence conducted workshops with senior marketing, sales and operational leaders to understand the messaging priorities required for the site and build an engagement strategy which would help to define the key user journeys required for the key persona groups. Senior stakeholder interviews were conducted in parallel on a one-to-one basis to gain full insight into the needs of the business and the web’s role with their customer acquisition journeys.

Their legacy site was content rich the need for a focused proposition with a common commercial offering and tone of voice meant little of this could be re-used for the next generation website. Coherence worked with Oxford Group to strip down the marketing stategy and develop a new engagement and user journey strategy which drawing on their new marketing and sales strategy the aim of reducing the overall click requirement to a point of conversion by 2 thirds.

A suite of visual and functional components were designed to allow the rapid development ofna set of rich and diverse case study, service page and insight ccontent layouts, enabling their editors to tell a story that was tailored to each client engagement.

From designs of a set of key pages and user journeys, Coherence were able to identify a set of components, which could be used to drive a wide set of messaging needs across the site. Through DX8, Coherence built these into working prototype components, which could be tested in-browser with representative content to gauge their performance across 6 break points.

With a challenging deadline driving the relaunch of their marketing and sales strategy, Coherence built and tested the master application, populating it with English language content in a four week design and build sprint. On launch, Coherence moved to the definition and development of an extensive set of product offering content elements, sitting underneath the top level service offerings, an addition to the parallel development of the French language version of the site.

The result delivered a powerful and flexible content delivery platform, allowing Oxford Group editors to manage market level content through workflows. The site delivers a clear and defined service offering, supported through rich content demonstrating the experience and insight within the Group using a diverse set of layouts, component combinations and content types. Integration into Hubspot allows seamless progress from the web to sales journeys. A strong start for an ambitions business wishing to spread its wings globally.