Barclays

Barclays plc is a British multinational investment bank and financial services company, headquartered in London, England.

In 1967, Barclays deployed the world’s first cash dispenser.

According to a 2011 paper by Vitali et al., Barclays was the most powerful transnational corporation in terms of ownership and thus corporate control over global financial stability and market competition.

Challenges

Barclays had multiple areas of inefficiency and areas for improvement. Specifically,

• inconsistent content, content structures, visual styling
• difficulty updating shared content, like call-to-action and “promos”
• on and off-site promotions led to landing pages that were not optimized or personalized for the target audience
• content was not aligned to customer journeys in terms of their structure or content
• creation of content in multiple formats was costly and inefficient, and
• content and data would regularly go out of sync across pages.

How we helped

Barclays selected Urbina Consulting to work on multiple omnichannel initiatives over a 3-year period. This project was truly omnichannel, including

• multi-property, multichannel digital delivery
• marketing content, both product descriptive and editorial content marketing
• colleague intranets supporting call centers and physical branch staff, and
• product terms and conditions and legal disclaimers.

For both product marketing and knowledge content:

Working with the global content strategy leadership group, we began by building semantically structured content models and processes to support adaptive content delivery for internal and external users.

This supported dynamic display of personalised and contextualised content based of various audience and platform parameters.

What we achieved 

The content model developed by Urbina Consulting has been converted to MS Word and corresponding Adobe AEM templates that allow more effective reuse and single-source updating of content across product marketing deliverables.

In parallel, the user and colleague help and documentation teams are using the new structures and specialised writing skills we introduced to write more effective, usable and reusable content that works for both customers and staff.

The project addressed the entire Barclays.co.uk website and had guidelines that affected all sub-proprieties such as Wealth and Premier across the UK business.

For editorial content marketing: We worked with the Global Head of Content Strategy to train them and key stakeholders on ourcustomer-centric, data-driven content ideation methodologies using customer journey maps and developing an omnichannel core content strategy that supported and roll-out plan for all editorial content during 2019.

For all teams that were trained in improved content creation and structuring techniques:

Urbina Consulting trained over 70 staff.

When surveyed, 100% of trainees agreed with the statement “I will be able to apply learnings to my work”.

Project champion and Head of Content, Robin Lynch, said,“The levels of professionalism, expertise, skill, and personal attention to detail were at a much higher level than any previous course I have attended”.