Prologis is the global leader in logistics property. They own, manage, and deliver state of the art logistics buildings for the likes of Amazon, Sainsbury’s, ASOS, BMW, Royal Mail, and Jaguar Land Rover.
Behind the impressive property portfolio and expert service, Prologis has a rich collection of stories that elevates them beyond their service offering and taps directly into their audiences’ situation.
The Challenge
Ridgeway worked with Prologis UK to create a website that would act as a stage to showcase its authoritative position within the market, but also work as a platform for Prologis to integrate a meaningful narrative that enables its audiences to easily understand the company’s perspectives and personality.
Since the launch of the website Ridgeway have continued to work with Prologis on phase two which has included translating their brand refresh online and integrating their multiple microsites into the main website, for a more consistent and better user experience.
The Strategy
Ridgeway’s team undertook several discovery workshops with key departmental stakeholders from Prologis to get a full understanding of what differentiated the company from its competitors, key motivators, challenges faced, and commercial objectives.
We coordinated two surveys – one with internal stakeholders and a survey placed discretely on their previous site for visitors including key clients or competitors to complete. These surveys offered a quantitative insight into business objectives and personas.
External stakeholder interviews with senior executives at some key client and competitor organisations also held some very interesting insight into industry challenges, points of differentiation for Prologis, types of information required by clients and prospective clients on the website and competitor sites. This feedback formed the basis of many ongoing changes to the project.
A key component of the new Prologis platform is the property search functionality. It provides interactive maps which is integrated with Google Maps to enable visitors to scope out all available Prologis properties across the UK by showing each location via a marker. Users can then easily bring up the key information about a particular unit.
From our external stakeholder interviews, it was noted that despite previous assumption, clients and prospective clients didn’t always know the specifics of the property they were after and would instead scope out a larger area and narrow their decision based on other criteria.
Integrated components were built outside of the pattern library so that the client can edit content and use it wherever required. Building components, such as image sliders, like this gives clients greater flexibility, and means snippets of articles can be pulled through onto the site easily. The website was also built so that it supported the Prologis apps and served data to them.
It was imperative that the new look was visually appealing and would reflect a best in class website experience with a well-considered layout. The design of the website had to showcase the brand digitally and the overall feel of the site had to remain corporate to ensure a professional ethos was demonstrated to corporate clients.
Increased visibility of both land and property had to be achieved based on research feedback, this has been achieved by making the property search a key feature of the site. The Prologis team were delighted with their new website which showcases their story clearly and allows them to demonstrate their involvement in the community.
The Results
Six months after the launch of the new website, compared with the previous period, Prologis have seen:
- A 25 per cent increase in sessions
- A 12 per cent increase in users
- A 19 per cent increase in pageviews.
Phase Two
In phase two of the project, Prologis needed to bring the vast number of microsites that existed for their large collection of logistics and industrial parks into the main website. To do this Ridgeway configured 14 widgets which allow the team to build bespoke pages whilst using the same template.
This has two main benefits – it gives the property park teams flexibility to build customised pages for each of the parks to meet their individual needs. It also means these pages still adhere to the Prologis brand and are inline and integrated with the main Prologis site providing a better user experience.
The Prologis team can now manage these pages internally and do not need any external support which saves them budget and gives greater flexibility.