Driving engagement with Nomura Connects.
Background
Nomura wanted a website for its global thought leadership. Nomura Connects, built in the previous 12 months on WordPress, was created to meet this need. But the website had become expensive to upkeep and unyielding. It lacked the functionalities needed to achieve its goals. Nomura hired us to improve Nomura Connects functionalities, enhance security and refresh the designs.
The purpose was to drive audience engagement with Nomura Connects, home to its global thought leadership, and improve its functionalities.
Our role
- Content strategy
- Design
- Build
- Content migration
- Campaigns
Our Approach
Our process began with a series of questions that challenged our clients to separate basic functionality needs like simplifying content population from the long-term capabilities requirements of the website. It compelled the marketing team to consider the variety of content to display on Nomura Connects and incorporate the possibility of presenting more than just text and imagery. We recommended a block approach that can deal with the complexity of content formats like videos, podcasts, infographics – allowing downloads and a range of functionalities broken into components on different pages. We took time to understand how and why audiences engage with Nomura Connects. We used those insights to improve the editorial content designs and layouts. For example, we created landing pages for categories to provide context for various topics and improved user-driven content engagement by incorporating a search functionality that appears on overlay and introduces trending topics and other search options.
Our Strategy
We focussed on evolution to deliver a website that is flexible, robust and dynamic. The website anticipates growth in the volume and format of the content it presents and priority audience group engagement. We laid the foundation for that growth by re-asserting Nomura Connects' "focussed thinking" theme. We planned categories and landing pages that help users quickly understand content themes and content presentation flexibility by making it possible to reuse functionalities from other sections.
Catered for complexity
We utilise a block approach that accommodates the complexity of content formats like videos, podcasts, and infographics and allows downloads and a range of functionalities broken into components on different pages. Visitors can enlarge information, play videos and overlays, and much more.
Reassert the Nomura Connects brand
We redesigned the homepage to give an editorial feel and simplified the presentation of featured articles to drive engagement. We also redesigned the podcast landing page to reflect changes in the ways priority users consume content and introduced scans promotion like the week ahead that has been successful.
Built-in performance
We introduced the ability to gatekeep content like whitepapers to support data capture and user engagement analysis. We refined related content layouts to improve CTR and incorporated a search functionality that appears on overlays that introduces trending topics and other search options. We also introduced facet search to allow audiences to access content to a range of attributes.
Multisite setup
We created a localised website in Japanese with Japanese content to enable better targeting and efficiency in content sharing between the global and local Japanese teams. We made it efficient – easy to remove irrelevant global content from the local Japanese site.
