Progeny

Progeny offers independent financial planning, investment management, tax services, property, HR and legal counsel, all in one place.

Merging an established veteran brand business into an emerging challenger brand requires cultural alignment in a conservative market where opportunity to disrupt and differentiate are ripe.

With high net-worth individuals as their key target market, providing trusted, efficient and personalised service is key to their success.

With mega brands dominating the space Progeny are inspired by the leaders, but aspire to disrupt a largely conventional market.

Progeny’s acquisition of The Fry Group was a bold commercial move with the decade old disruptor taking on a veteran brand over a century its senior. It transitioned them from being a solely UK based company to having international operations in Europe (Belgium) and Asia (Hong Kong and Singapore). The acquisition posed them with the opportunity to promote their position as the first and only firm in the UK to bring together independent financial planning, investment management, tax services, property, HR and legal counsel. It also necessitated that they reflect the international scale of the business to maintain and grow an international client base. 

In order to achieve this, a new website was needed, within which valuable former The Fry Group digital assets could be migrated. The international SEO value of this content was significant, emanating from a 120 year old brand that had established 30 years of digital activity, domain and organic authority. The exercise had a further element of complexity due to The Fry Group retaining the brand, tax, estates and financial planning aspects of the business in UAE. The nature of the deal put into play a critical timeline for activity whereby the acquired The Fry Group assets needed to be transitioned to their new digital home by 1st July 2024.

Progeny put out a brief to this effect which StrategiQ were invited to respond to. In preparing our pitch with a design for what we felt the website should look like, our thinking went wider and deeper. We looked at their space and how and what they should communicate. We also identified a wider issue around the impact of the acquisition (which doubled the size of the business) on their brand development. The February pitch presented us with the opportunity to pose the question.

The result was StrategiQ winning not only the website redevelopment project, but encompassing their rebrand into the wider project. This made total sense, as to truly optimise the value of the website project we needed to understand their customers, personas and position in the market. 

The agreement to partner on the project necessitated close collaboration, challenging conversations and some tough decisions being made. To execute a rebrand and launch an international website whilst transitioning a wealth of content with associated international SEO value against an immovable deadline was a serious challenge. To do that whilst protecting site rankings and achieve a high quality outcome at pace required a carefully considered strategic plan.

Rapid growth requires a clear digital direction. In choosing StrategiQ, Progeny chose a team of problem solvers who would act as a critical friend. We broke down the challenges through SWOT analysis, presenting the areas of potential opportunity and loss with honesty and transparency. From this, we planned a phased approach to guide us through the necessary process to achieve optimal value in reaching the end goal.

Phase 1 focused on gaining a clear view of the brand. We consulted with Progeny leaders and team members along with senior management from a range of businesses they’d worked with to understand ‘what makes Progeny, Progeny?’. This enabled us to define the brand foundations, vision, mission and values that would help determine the tone of voice and design direction. 

In Phase 2 we undertook an exercise to plan out how we could transfer as much authority and SEO value as possible to mitigate the switch off of the former The Fry Group website. This was even more critical given that the The Fry Group website  was being terminated on 1st July, whilst the go-live of the new Progeny site was only due for delivery a couple of months later. 

Phase 2 revolved around planning how to merge two large websites into a single digital entity without cannibalisation of value or duplication of information. This involved gaining insight as to the services moving over from The Fry Group, evaluating which content needed creating and rewriting, what 302 (temporary)  redirects needed actioning to maintain and leverage rankings and appreciating how to uphold the legal obligations of The Fry Group retaining its brand presence in Dubai. The result was a detailed technical SEO sitemap of how all of the information would hang together which then informed design of the user experience, pages and templates.

Our research had given us insight that what could help Progeny to differentiate itself from the market was delivery of personalised online user experiences to give customers what they want, when they want. The research also revealed that website users visited the site 3-4 times prior to activating an enquiry. 

On this basis, we architected user journeys designed to nurture leads through the process, to strengthen the connection and provide them with a more personalised experience. This started with an invitation for users to submit basic data at the outset of their engagement to tailor their experience. The result being an experience that addressed them by name and recommended their local office, content and events specific to their geography and service area of interest. 

Repeat visits would see users welcomed by name and offered updated relevant information until such time as they chose to enquire. At this point all of the data collected on their engagement to date would be pushed through to the CRM to enable the appropriate consultant to respond armed with the insight to have a relevant conversation based on understanding the nature of their enquiry and level of knowledge.

At the outset of our relationship, Progeny were also deep into a data migration project to harmonise data from various systems into Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE CRM (Tyler double check with Dan). No stranger to integrations, StrategiQ needed to ensure that the prioritised customer experience we were creating on the website, could result in optimised sales results for Progeny through the ability to track activity and gain insights that would inform seamless online-offline engagement.

The work required to optimise the outcomes of the project was significant. It involved:

• Mapping out various personas digital customer journeys
• Creating a detailed technical site map
• Auditing and streamlining a vast library of content, tagging it across the four key service areas of financial planning, investment management, tax services, property, HR and legal counsel  [Tyler check]. 
• Rewriting all the service pages and brand-based pages to match new tone of voice guidelines.
• Planning and executing capitalisation of SEO opportunities identified during the discovery phase.
• Developing a really interactive and visually engaging website to disrupt a conservative market and differentiate the Progeny experience. This entailed using WebGL animations such as Progenys brand aurora and star constellation. 
• Delivering a suite of marketing assets that reflected the revised internal brand to align 1,000+ employees behind their values. This was aimed at supporting the team to personably and professionally serve Progeny’s ideal client base of high net worth individuals.

To accelerate the performance and outcomes of the website project we:

• Identified new keywords and SEO optimisation opportunities to not only maintain previous rankings, but build the foundations for accelerated growth. 
• Enabled the website to be multilingual and location specific to communicate to different individuals in different regions with different needs. 
• Recategorised a lot of thought leadership content to ensure better evergreen SEO content.

Our approach to personalising the user journey is innovative in the financial sector, as is feeding the data gathered through repeat visits into a CRM upon submission of an enquiry form. We will continue to monitor the performance of the platform to further optimise lead conversion metrics and identify further opportunities to employ innovative engagement and conversion techniques.