Barclays newsroom

Humanising the banking group’s corporate narrative through ‘always-on’ storytelling

“The Speak team have been fundamental in driving forward our editorial strategy and approach. By working closely with teams internally, they quickly identified our core aims and worked to build a process around them, creating an always-on newsroom that we had never had before. The impact was instant and the Speak team have become a well-respected part of the Corporate Relations function with many comments made on the quality of writing and photography.”

Tom Barber, VP, digital content and channels manager

Objectives

Speak Media’s collaboration with Barclays has transformed the bank’s corporate comms team into an always-on publishing operation, delivering a compelling calendar of content week in, week out, all-year round.

At project launch five years ago, in late 2017, our brief was to:

  • Employ best-in-class editorial practices to articulate the corporate narrative in the most human, emotive way possible.

  • Deliver tangible visitor engagement and enhanced brand perception by making the main corporate website (home.barclays) and LinkedIn page as valuable and useful as possible.

  • Transform content coordination and distribution, tackling duplication and silo working to improve the efficiency and performance of content.

  • Ultimately, implement a long-term, ‘always-on’ publishing operation, delivering a steady stream of high quality, timely and relevant content to key channels on an ongoing basis.

Approach

Speak set up a dedicated newsroom team to coordinate and deliver best-in-class content in collaboration with Barclays teams. Our integrated operation includes: 

  • Weekly editorial meetings to ensure the involvement of multiple stakeholders to break down silos, reduce duplication and maximise ROI.

  • Fortnightly higher-level strategy meetings to ensure the project is delivering against stated objectives.

  • Embedding the bank’s weekly ‘news grid’ meeting (for media relations leads) into editorial planning, enabling us to source stories globally.

  • Implementing a fortnightly internal channels scan to monitor activity across Barclays’ internal channels.

  • Weekly review of key competitor content for content gap analysis and industry benchmarking.

  • Implementation of a rigorous editing, proofing, fact-checking and sign-off process for every story.

  • Monthly ‘blended’ dashboard measuring content performance across Group channels.

Results

Our long-term editorial strategy has transformed home.barclays into an always-on operation with a busy publishing calendar, delivering strategically aligned and channel-optimised content to a growing and highly engaged audience. 

Since its launch, we’ve seen target-busting organic increases in traffic and engagement: 

  • session time +254%

  • return visits +174%

  • interactions +208%

  • monthly page views +60%

  • 2.5m annual impressions on LinkedIn

  • 24,000+ interactions on LinkedIn annually

2.5m

annual LinkedIn impressions