If you’ve ever attended an auction, you know timing is everything — minutes, even seconds, can make the difference between placing the winning bid and completely missing out. Australia’s leading online auction platform, Grays, offers an intuitive, well-organized website that helps both B2B and B2C customers quickly find and bid on everything from jet planes to fine jewelry.
After decades of in-person auctions, Grays saw a growing appetite for online shopping and went fully digital in the early 2000s, setting a new industry standard. But the organization’s technology stack put Grays marketers in a tricky position. They struggled to create and maintain content for a diverse customer base and various product categories (internally called ‘divisions’) with its rigid, custom-built content management system (CMS) and disconnected ad-management tool.
“It was becoming more and more difficult to deliver relevant content as our target audience changes significantly depending on what division of Grays they are interested in, like construction materials, cars, boats, wine, home goods, electronics, or jewelry,” shared Ellie Clubb, a website producer at Grays. These discrepancies impacted brand recognition and forced customers into a longer buyer's journey, where they spent a lot of time sifting through Gray’s website to find the right product pages.
Bidding farewell to siloed, outdated CMSes
To provide a rich customer experience and uphold its reputation as a trusted and innovative company, Grays decided it was time to invest in a more modern solution — one that would enable their marketers to efficiently deliver audience-specific content across all of their digital properties.
After exploring the market, Grays selected Contentful. They knew it would connect well with its existing React components and liked the idea of having an editor-friendly interface that would bring new website banners to market faster than ever by eliminating inefficiencies and workflow gaps.
After replatforming, Grays saw immediate results.
“We have new bandwidth and capabilities to build division-specific homepages with more tailored content for various markets. This has made our site far more relevant and engaging for our diverse audiences,” shared Clubb.
“It's an incredibly dynamic site, now,” added Amy Richards, Head of Marketing. “It looks clean and modern, plus we can adjust content based on what’s happening at the time by leveraging data insights — something we couldn’t do before."
Today, Grays has five division-specific homepages, which allow the group to create browsing experiences that are relevant to customers based on their interests.
Buying into automated and reliable solutions
Adopting Contentful has revolutionized not only the platform’s user experience but also how the marketing team operates. Before Contentful, Grays had to manually update web content nearly every day. Today, they use scheduled publishing to automate this process, which is helping the company scale offerings and outcomes without increasing headcount.
The way content is organized on the backend of Contentful is also making an impact.
"Previously, simple actions like changing a banner caused problems. Now, our marketing team can make changes quickly and independently of developers, without worrying about breaking the website,” said Clubb. Contentful’s rich text editor and content versioning give the team even more confidence when hitting publish.
Paving the way for an innovative mobile app
Grays’ transition to Contentful has not only modernized its operations but firmly positioned them at the forefront of digital innovation in the auction space. By empowering its marketing team and embracing technology that meets the evolving needs of its customers, they continue to set a new standard for relevance, reliability, and innovation in online auctions.
Looking ahead, Clubb and Richards plan to roll out personalization and bring its mobile experience onto Contentful.
