Spears500

Context

Spear's magazine is a respected media brand that comprehensively covers global wealth, business, and culture. It is a reliable source of information for the affluent financial services sector, including bankers, lawyers, and family offices who advise wealthy clients. It is held in high esteem by the ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) community.

Since its inception in 2006, Spear's has established itself as a leading authority on wealth management in the UK and Europe. The magazine is also known for its incisive commentary on the latest arts, business, and lifestyle trends.

Challenge

Spear's has long relied on its print magazine to attract new readers and generate advertising revenue for its digital platform. However, with limited potential for lead generation and ongoing investment, the magazine's traditional mechanics needed to be revised to sustain long-term growth.

In response to these challenges, Spear's team requested innovative strategies to expand its reach, attract new advisors, and increase brand awareness. It was time to get creative and develop a solution to increase website traffic and social media engagement.

Brainstorm Session

We gathered with the Growth team to brainstorm ideas for creating a new web product that would attract new readers to Spear's in a more organic way.

After a productive session, the Growth and Product departments evaluated the ideas using the ICE framework. This decision-making tool assesses the impact, confidence, and ease of implementation. The team with the highest score was selected for further development.

Goals and Metrics

We kick-off by defining some success metrics, user stories, and goals for this project. With these parameters in place, we delved into crafting potential user journeys tailored for both Spear's readers and also for financial advisors who were unfamiliar with our brand.

Proposal

Build a new find-an-adviser tool which is the website spears500.com which is a side project of pear's magazine. The project allows UHNW community to search and filter advisers according to a range of attributes such as the adviser’s expertise, location, the clients they serve and the types of advice they offer. The proposal also enables the advisers to put themselves in front of the people most likely to require their services. The proposal also include expand Spear's private client directory (leads).

Process

• Define metrics and proposal

• Prepare website sitemap, navigation and taxonomy

• Create wireframes, prototype and test

• Develop a simple design system + UI designs

Design System

We build Spear's 500 Design System using Atomic Design methodology, breaking user interfaces into smaller components that can be combined to create larger interfaces. The approach is based on the idea that the layout can be broken down into smaller and reusable building blocks, helping designers create consistent and scalable UIs while reducing development time.

UI screens

Results

Currently, the Spears 500 website attracts approximately 6.5K monthly visits, where visitors spend an average of 1 minute and 38 seconds per visit and view 1.5 pages on average.

The website is constantly updated, with the marketing team introducing new streams of income by implementing sponsored tags such as Top 10 Recommended, Featured, Top Ten, and Top Flight for profiles and companies.

In addition, we have made the decision to disable the internal blog on the Spears 500 website and instead utilise the Spear's Magazine blog. This allows for a more streamlined approach to content creation, providing readers with a centralised location for all news and articles related to the UHNW community.

Since the launch of the new website, the private client directory has increased by 36%. Furthermore, the Spears 500 print report is still published annually and includes 2,361 profiles spread across 612 pages.