Goodbody Leverages Sitefinity Cloud to Boost Marketing Agility 

When you think of digital trendsetters, financial services companies may not spring to mind. Intrinsic challenges like security and regulation make it difficult to readily embrace innovation in the same way that enterprises in retail or travel can.

“It’s like trying to turn the Titanic,” joked Sean Croston, who is the chief operating officer at Goodbody, one of Ireland’s largest stockbroking firms.

The reality, however, is that the rate of digital adoption has been exponential across the board. Now businesses in all sectors—financial services included—need to adopt a digital-first approach to customer engagement. This realization sparked Goodbody to reevaluate its own digital strategy. 

“Our customers are our business,” Croston explained. “We need to look at digital as a competitive advantage and go at it with vigor and achieve the goals and outcomes that we're looking to do for our customers and business.”

Goodbody’s internal digital transformation project identified three core focus areas it needed to address: people, processes and technology. 

The company felt it had the right people in place to deliver the customer-first experiences that clients demanded. However, the processes and technology didn’t support these efforts.

“Our marketing agility was really, really sticky,” Croston explained. “We were looking at it end to end, and thinking, ‘Gosh, there's an awful lot of breaks.’ We saw an opportunity to enhance the process of launching campaigns and delivering online experiences to better serve our customers.” 

That’s when Goodbody began looking for a platform that could tie these disparate marketing and sales processes together in a highly effective and highly efficient manner. After assessing the technology landscape, Goodbody decided Progress® Sitefinity® Cloud was the best fit.



As a PaaS-based content management system, Sitefinity Cloud met all four requirements of the firm’s key digital transformation project, which were:

• Security and governance—as a company serving European customers, Sitefinity and Azure both offer GDPR tools and workflows to promote compliance and security
• Compatibility with Microsoft—Goodbody used Microsoft Dynamics and Office 365, so a .NET CMS hosted on Azure was the ideal fit
• User-friendliness—Goodbody wanted a solution that empowered operational agility across marketing and development teams, which Sitefinity did with its intuitive UI and Azure DevOps management portal
• Resource-efficient—Sitefinity Cloud freed Goodbody from having to dedicate time, money and resources to manage website infrastructure while also providing more flexibility to support future growth plans

Going live on Sitefinity Cloud in just 15 business days, Goodbody was able to immediately accelerate the execution of new marketing campaigns with Sitefinity.

Within weeks, the company pushed out some of its first marketing microsites, including a marketing hub that houses all of the company’s brochures. The combination of drag-and-drop content editing tools, custom workflows and compliance features helps Goodbody operate more efficiently, ensuring speedy end-to-end creation and publication of new content.

Goodbody’s newfound marketing agility has also resulted in better customer engagement. In fact, while many in the financial services space have dialed back customer acquisition efforts amid the coronavirus pandemic, Goodbody quadrupled the number of account openings year over year.

“Sitefinity has been a positive experience in terms of our digital transformation, increasing customer engagement substantially and its impact on our ability to respond to COVID,” Croston added. “It's been an enabler for our business.”