The journey from dated to relevant.
Butterfield Bank is a leader in offshore banking; they provide a range of custom products, tools and services in banking, trust and investments across international jurisdictions.
Project: Website Redesign
Create new content to align with brand voice and site architecture. Ensure the content strategy meets the requirements for SEO.
Tools
Illustrator, Acrobat, Photoshop, Figma, Word, Zeroheight, Jira, Drupal
Team
Butterfield Marketing Department, Programme Manager & Investis Digital team.
Role
Content Designer
Year
2020 - 2021
Discovery & Strategy by Investis Digital
There was a negative online perception of Butterfield Bank being unconnected, frustrating and needing a clear direction. The bank's old website held years of information posted and often not revised or taken off the website when irrelevant, making it hard for a user to navigate through the content. The future perception for Butterfield’s website is to shift how they communicate with their customers to ensure users have a positive and engaging experience.
The digital agency that led the website redesign for Butterfield Bank was Investis Digital. They provided extensive research before launching the project. I worked closely with their team, studied their research, and referenced their insights while writing content and creating page layouts for the website.
Investis Digital held an engagement process before the website redesign launch, which included meetings with key stakeholders to evaluate their needs and how to meet internal and external goals to serve their customers better. The agency deeply understood the bank's key audiences and their current perceptions - they suggested defining a content strategy by bringing the tone of voice, vision and narrative thread to demonstrate to users who Butterfield Bank is now and where they are going.
Discovery
The website contained too much content and duplicated copy across various regional website pages. The content included a variety of inconsistencies and outdated information. The new website needs to approach quality over quantity to help users move throughout the site and follow the next step.
Users need clear direction with a strong call-to-action, allowing them to flow and progress through the website with logical next steps.
Unifying the bank from a regional and products & services across all jurisdictions, ensuring all audiences experience a consistent level of quality.
Users need an experience that meets their needs and aligns with modern UX standards.
The content will need to meet the needs of all the different regions once the stand-alone regional websites consolidate to meet SEO requirements.
Information Architecture
The information architecture is complex as the respective jurisdictions offer curated solutions and products. The site architecture allows geotargeting tools to redirect users to the services provided within their specific region, which helped simplify the repeated content and SEO problems occurring on the old website.
I created a flow chart to help see the overall content structure of Butterfield’s website. Understanding shared content and pages with unique content, were critical in the content audit phase. Jurisdictions shared that had the same content, needed to share the same page to maximize SEO.
Content Strategy
My main goal was to reposition Butterfield's current perception as dated and frustrated to relevant and reliable. Investis Digital's advice was to unify the bank's mission 'To build relationships and wealth' throughout the content on the website.
The content audit discovered that 11 sites (approximately 100 pages) are conflicting and uncoordinated from the brand's mission and vision. The content has too many facts and details, which loses the voice of having a conversation with your customer.
Investis discovered from the engagement sessions that users want reassurance about Butterfield's expertise and trustworthiness. The content has too much detail, focusing on an overwhelming amount of information. The suggestion was to bring in "more narrative elements, and the content would be able to speak to relevant audiences more clearly, increasing engagement and conversion rates."
Butterfield's Global home page had minimal content, as it was internally considered a page their customers often didn't visit. The menu options are overwhelming and do not have any structure, which makes it difficult for a user to navigate through the site.
Users visiting Butterfieldgroup.com outside a jurisdiction where they do not provide services will see the global home page. The global home page has information to let the user know about the bank: who they are and what they do. Allowing users to select the service they are interested in will guide them to the appropriate jurisdiction. Strong call-to-actions are visible and invite the user to have a conversation with Butterfield Bank. This revised global home page provides clear direction and communication to all international users.
Searching for opportunities within Butterfield Bank was not a simple task. Their careers section was disconnected between jurisdictions; each location had its individual careers section. Users would click on the particular jurisdiction website and their career section to see the bank's opportunities. The CTA to 'apply now' gave the impression that you would need to hand-write your application and physically mail it in - not the most efficient way to receive applications.
Under the new site architecture, the careers section is a shared content page with all jurisdictions included. The content engages users to search and apply for opportunities in all jurisdictions. A visual image of the bank's locations helps users see where offices reside at a glance. This structure is efficient for internal employees who need to post opportunities.
Private Banking is located under Wealth Management & Trust - the double title is not effective for SEO. The list of menu items under the private banking section on the left is an example of too much information for a user to navigate.
The site architecture helps keep information structured and grouped logically for users to navigate the site easily - private banking is under banking; it's simple. The content and imagery express a trustworthy bank - representing the bank's vision and mission. Adding the team images with their contact details was an element that will encourage users to start a conversation about the bespoke services Butterfield Bank provides in their private banking jurisdictions.
Improved SEO and Visibility
Searching for “Banks in Bermuda” places Butterfield in the second spot in Google Search; before the launch of the new site, Butterfield Bank was at the bottom of the list and not visible as a top bank.
