Introduction
Founded in 1933, A-lehdet is a bold and innovative media house focusing on lifestyle and health that publishes high-quality magazines and develops media brands. As a pioneer in digital influencing and one of Finland’s largest media houses, there was an unspoken expectation that the brand’s digital presence be consistent and captivating. Unfortunately, A-lehdet was falling short in this area. Decentralized content, brand inconsistency and low visibility were threatening the brand’s chance at being passed down to the fifth generation of the Lyytikäinen family.
A dozen sites, a dozen tech solutions, a dozen headaches
Much of A-lehdet’s digital presence exists in the form of community websites dedicated to topics such as interior design, travel and health. Years ago, when the brand first arrived online, the answer to the question, “How do you serve content to customers with different interests in the best way possible?” was “By adding more websites.” After building its digital strategy around this widely accepted notion and launching its sites, A-lehdet could tell it was hitting a wall without even running the numbers.
With more than twelve different sites to manage, the brand didn’t have the luxury to turn out enough content to keep visitors returning to its sites with consistency. In struggling to support or build out a fan base, A-lehdet’s SEO rankings began to slip. The brand quickly found itself in a scenario where it was spending more on lead generation than it was making from converting those leads.
To make matters worse, each of A-lehdet’s sites utilized different technologies and repositories, fragmenting its 50k articles and 6k blogs and squashing the potential for universal content to be reused across communities. The brand’s current digital strategy was stagnant and not scalable.
A-lehdet needed to reinvent its tech stack and consolidate its digital properties in a way that would encourage diverse fan bases to routinely spend time on their sites. A-lehdet needed a solution that would unify content, support reuse and offer features to encourage efficient content creation and management.
A content platform brings order to the chaos
A-lehdet quickly realized that it needed to invest in content infrastructure. In securing a platform capable of storing all brand assets in one place and scaling seamlessly, the brand would be able to build and curate a more cohesive, navigable content ecosystem. All of this had the potential to create a better user experience and increase reader loyalty.
Contentful was selected for the job, as the content platform had successfully helped other companies deliver on all of the above. In decoupling code from content, Contentful gave A-lehdet content creators and editors content governance and greater creative freedom. They can now create and publish content at a speed that better holds readers’ attention and encourages them to check back for new content.
With Contentful being an API-first platform, integrating new tools takes little time and hardly any development. A-lehdet quickly got its tech stack up and running, introducing Frosmo and React to customize community content and user experiences without the hassle of spinning up entirely new sites or content.
This powerful, centralized management capability enables teams to scale rapidly with existing resources, maintain greater brand consistency and deliver relevant content to their customers.
A noticeable (and continuing) return on investment
Today, A-lehdet uses Contentful to house all of its content. From within the interface, team members can edit the content and share it to any platform or device — important for on-the-fly initiatives and updates best communicated at pace. This powerful centralized management system enables A-lehdet to scale faster than they thought possible. Since implementation, the brand’s readership has increased by 15%. Readers are also staying on the site longer and returning to pages 17% more than before Contentful’s introduction. As A-lehdet continues to add new content and tools to its flexible, scalable composable content platform, the brand is sure to see growth in these important KPIs and others.
