Sector(s)
TTG was first established as Travel Trade Gazette in 1953, as the world's very first weekly travel trade newspaper. Today, TTG Media continues to deliver authoritative news and educational features in a monthly magazine in the UK & Ireland, and also offers a range of face-to-face training events, a news-led website, a community for luxury travel professionals, annual travel awards, bespoke marketing campaigns, jobs, and much more.
Full Fat Things partnered with TTG Media to create a flexible, integrated and scalable publication website. TTG Media had accelerated their digital business well beyond their competitors over the last decade but had reached the limits of their single platform solution and realised they needed more specialist stack to achieve their next level of growth. Through understanding their goals and objectives, Drupal CMS would be the best option that would be able to take them to the next level of growth.
TTG is also becoming digital as it sunsets its print titles in favour of serving travel agents digitally. This makes the website all the more important.
About the project
From travel magazine to B2B media business
TTG Media has moved from print to digital-only, which is powered by a new tech stack delivered by us, Full Fat Things. By shifting to digital-only, TTG Media unlocked the ability to understand their audience through granular data. This deeper audience insight enables them to deliver content that resonates with their readers and boosts registrations.
With this move to digital-only, it meant the tech stack was going to be the most important. We were excited for this opportunity to make a difference and be the partner that would help them accelerate to this next level of growth. For us to provide the tech, we;
- Held in-depth workshops with all departments to set a product roadmap with clear, aligned objectives
- Translated the outcomes into technical requirements
- Liaised and collaborated with other suppliers to ensure connected data and user experiences
- Mapped the project against Sprints and continued to work iteratively, through a collaborative feedback loop
- Our customers are welcomed into our normal day-to-day internal comms, and TTG were no exception
- Daily comms meant tight working practice and quality delivered at pace
Goals
- Tech stack to support rapid evolution from display advertising to high-value marketing services
- UX-led CMS maintaining brand, while improving usability for both visitors and content editors
- Seamless connectivity between CMS and CRM, enabling efficient data flow, automated marketing and a cohesive digital experience.
- Maximise registrations and first-party audience data with deep detail on the link between content engagement and audience member
- Smooth migration of content, media, users, and subscriptions
- Flexible CMS to support a wide range of content types and commercial campaigns
- Scalable architecture to handle growth and new features with ease
Working with the Full Fat Things team to relaunch our website has been a real pleasure. Right from our initial meeting, all throughout in-person design sessions with our various teams, development and beyond launch they have consistently displayed their value, acuity and quality as a digital business partner. Their friendly and attentive team liaised with us daily to capture the detail and nuance of our requirements to deliver a fantastic product, and to guide us with a confident hand every step to the summit. Worth every penny. Steve Hinds, Head of digital
Requirements
- Flexible CMS that could handle large amounts of complex content
- A platform that could help maximise subscriptions
- Lead capturing, Lead scoring and tracking. Detailed reporting on user activities directly mapped onto content hierarchy
- A UI-led design to boost conversions to registered users
- A platform that has little to no limitations for commercial growth and able to facilitate the evolving marketing services
- Optimise engagement and return for clients through dynamic marketing service solutions
Outcomes
- Granular and joined-up data to superpower their sales story and customer outcomes
- New product sales based upon intense knowledge of audience interactions
- Deep audience insights that can bolster conversions and new sales
- Faster editorial workflows
- A canvas for commercial creativity
- Improved marketing efficiency from the lake of data in Drupal
- Enhanced user engagement and personalisation
- A scalable, durable foundation to support long-term growth
Business problems solved
- Flexible CMS
- Transitioning from advertising revenue to more subscription-based revenue
- Granular audience insight, which means they can use the audience data to create campaigns that will convert and drive subscription growth
- Editorial & marketing teams have more autonomy to create campaigns
- In depth Sales data for new sales and delivering proof of existing campaigns
- Audience data that simply isn’t possible in regular CRM tools
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was selected because it is the tool that you use to build CMS in whilst building the rest of your application. This Drupal site would have several specific publisher features that focus on business to business (B2B) publishers. B2B publishers need to understand what their readers are doing on their site as they mostly sell marketing services to their customers who engage with their audience. Therefore, key features such as knowing exactly who their audience is, what they’ve read, how they’ve interacted, and all of their demographic and psychographic information. In a cookie consent world, the generic analytics solutions inside CRMs and things like Google Analytics are not guaranteed to be able to store all of the information needed to build the complete picture of the customer.
Drupal can do this. Drupal stores customers, their activities and profile information, all of the articles they’ve read. Drupal also powers and delivers the registration and paywall tools, lead tracking as well as delivering reporting on customer segments and activities that drive sales data for delivering customer campaigns, as well as new lead generation, supporting data to show what could be delivered to customers wanting to reach their audience. All of this, and additionally providing lead scoring based upon activities that can involve dwell time on articles as well as aggregated time reading taxonomic terms. WOW Drupal! Of course, the relevant information is synced to a CRM for newsletters, etc., but the powerhouse here is Drupal. Drupal is the primary lake!
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
