The Westpac business team have heaps of great business content across the company. They wanted to curate content into a new section of the Westpac website to support SME's and substantiate the overall brand promise, 'Together Greater'.
One-on-one interviews with Westpac Relationship managers and a review of the competitive landscape revealed that SME's have the ambition to grow their business, but they don’t know how.
Government sites have an array of helpful ‘business 101’ guides (and dominated Google traffic stats on common business terms) and accounting firms had helpful accounting and tax content. But SME's struggle to find practical information to improve their business and there's no single ‘go-to’ place to help them.
A bold, collective vision for a new content hub emerged – called Business Base. With the help of Westpac’s internal specialists, the goal was to create a ground-breaking online destination for Kiwi businesses to access financial expertise, industry insight and practical tools to help them start, run and grow their business. And it had to be delivered in record time.
Westpac already has extensive 30-page brand guidelines - our job was to interpret them for online content. We wanted to communicate to them in the way they wanted - by solving problems, being tech-savvy, being refreshing, real, expert and human. Tonally, we wanted to sound dependable, practical, approachable, making customers feel confident, informed and reassured. Trust in the Business Base will build trust in the Westpac Business brand.
Firstly, we needed to know - what exactly are small business customers after? To answer this, without a huge market-research budget, we used the tools at our fingertips - qualitative interviews, an SEO deep dive and some local academic research for good measure.
Interviews with Westpac Relationship Managers really helped to ascertain the post-covid landscape.We learned about what was keeping their customers up at night, issues facing specific industries, and uncovered some of the most common queries they were getting on a macro and micro level.
Then we actively searched high and low inside the Big Red W for related Westpac content and resources that could help business customers. No surprises, we uncovered a lot of helpful assets and met some very smart people. From the economic steam writing insightful market reports, innovative Payments experts, sustainability managers and experienced marketers – the list goes on.
Early on, we realised that there was content out there we should just be linking to, not competing with. ‘Playing in our lane’ therefore become an important design principle.
Westpac had a great relationship with Westpac partners Xero, who believed in our vision and had their own set of resources for their small business customers. Their content of course, was focused on accounting and important topics like tax. Instead of seeing each other as ‘competition’ for eyes online, both parties worked together with a customer-first approach. Xero would share their great content with our customers, Westpac would attribute it, and have back links to their site.
The strategic audit phase helped us to define the topics we would cover. These ‘pillars’ formed the primary user pathways (and how content was arranged), on the topics of starting a business, funding and finance, growth and international business, digital innovation and sustainability, emerged.
We linked out to essential external business websites, such as government funders, or experts in sustainability. We also included supporting links to existing Westpac tools, their REDnews blog business articles and inspirational case studies.
Along with the many visuals we were able to beg, borrow but not steal from our sources, we also really wanted to add value with … was video.
Big On Writing prefer to use real, genuine talent. We discovered Warren Ngan Woo by accident, when we met with him over Zoom to chat about his team’s Westpac Business Education programme, “Managing Your Money”. Straight away we were taken by his energetic screen presence and dad jokes. We had our front man.
Warren and his Financial Education team had a great face-to-face programme, so we drew from these topics for a Business Base video series. The budget wasn’t huge, which meant we were restricted for time and other luxuries such as make-up artists and complex lighting set ups. But the result was slick thanks to a tight script, natural performance and some extremely tight pre-production.
Initial Beta testing with customer focus groups revealed an overwhelmingly positive result. More results to come.
“Big On Writing’s superpower is the incredible content writers they have, who understand a business need and a consumer need. This ability allows them to deliver content that is fit for purpose for the business but also what a customer needs and importantly wants to read. Their project management still are superb, they understand the complexities in a large organisation and go over and above to solve any road bumps.”
Michelle Lumsden
Westpac Senior Marketing Manager - Brand
