Virgin Group overhauls digital strategy to tell ‘amazing stories’

Virgin Group – owner of the Trains, Holidays, Money, Mobile and Media franchises – plans to “re-imagine” its digital content strategy to raise awareness about all the activities of the parent brand.

Virgin Balloons

The group identified heritage music, entrepreneurship and travel as three of the key areas it will look to emphasise on its website and other digital platforms going forward.

Virgin appointed digital agency Beyond to conduct an extensive social conversation analysis to identify “white spaces” – conversations relevant to the business online that Virgin was not participating in but where it can authentically input itself.

The brand and agency are now working on developing a new Virgin.com website that will tailor content to the individuals visiting it, based on the social insights gleaned from the conversation analysis. The site, which will be powered by a bespoke “smart publishing platform”, will go live in the third quarter of this year.

Daniel Richards, Virgin Group digital director, told Marketing Week the aim of the activity is to extend the Virgin brand reach through content, particularly in the UK, US and emerging markets.

He adds: “There’s a massive wealth of content across our group of companies because of the broad nature of the group – we are in space travel and we’re also in trains – so there’s an awful lot of great stories we can tell better about the amazing things Virgin does.”

It is also hoped another outcome of the new content strategy will be the alignment of all the different disparate businesses – which all have separate content strategies of their own – in one single place.

In March Virgin Group confirmed it had appointed Nigel Gilbert as its first ever key projects director to spearhead the launch of cross-brand initiatives across all its divisions. 

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