Planet

The Client

Planet provides integrated software, payment, and technology solutions for its customers in the hospitality and retail sectors and worldwide via a network of global financial services partners. With headquarters in London and nearly 3,000 expert employees across six continents, the company serves customers in over 120 markets.

The Situation

Planet provides retail and hospitality businesses with tax-free services, payment solutions and integrated software. The company had a sales-led go-to-market strategy with corporate and PR-centric marketing. 

“Planet has grown a lot through acquisition — for example, we acquired four companies at the end of 2021 — which meant we had numerous digital experiences we needed to merge,” said Alvaro Alberdi, VP of Digital Marketing at Planet. “In addition, the company was very sales-led; our marketing was focused on outbound with very little focus on inbound activities.” 

The Challenge

Planet’s previous corporate website — built on an Umbraco CMS — was outdated, making content management and marketing efforts arduous and inefficient. Alberdi said, “It was just super clunky and inflexible, and it was difficult for the average marketing person to change content.” Combined with the fact that Planet didn’t have a dedicated web development team, the company increasingly relied on external partners to make site changes.

“We knew we needed to modernize things, moving from our legacy CMS to something much more flexible,” Alberdi shared. “And we knew we needed to similarly transform our marketing, taking a more modern approach to lead generation.”

The Solution

Planet considered numerous solutions, ultimately choosing to transition to Drupal based on the company’s research and guidance from its technology partner CI&T. “After talking to different vendors, it became clear that working with Acquia was the safe, smart choice given that we didn’t have a web developer then and weren’t sure when we would. We knew the website would be at the core of what we were building, and we didn’t want to risk going with another company. And CI&T — an Acquia partner — helped convince us that Drupal with Site Studio and Acquia offered us the greatest flexibility and efficiency,” said Alberdi.

Transitioning to Drupal with Acquia Cloud Platform has allowed Planet to boost its B2B business, improving its digital marketing strategies, lead generation, and organic traffic. “The goal of the weareplanet.com website is to build our B2B business — we want it to rank well in the search results and serve as a place where we can drive typical inbound and outbound campaigns, really using it as a business generation tool — and we’ve been pleased with how it’s been performing,” he shared.

Planet’s digital team also appreciates Site Studio’s flexibility and usability. “It’s so easy to use — any kind of marketer or even members from other departments can easily build landing pages, even if they aren’t technical — so that’s a huge benefit for us,” Alberdi said. 

Additionally, Planet’s digital team now has greater visibility into the user experience and can share behavioral insights with stakeholders from across the company. “We can look at the full funnel, analyzing data and examining behavior flow to see how our users are experiencing our website — and then we can share that data across the organization, educating other teams and business units,” he said.

Since replatforming onto Drupal and implementing Site Studio, Planet has improved the user experience for employees and customers. “We have a customer resources area that we use for onboarding. In the past, we sent new customers an email with tons of PDFs attached to it, which clearly wasn’t the best experience for the employee or customer receiving it. Now, we’ve replaced that with a single QR code that sends customers to their own onboarding section of the website, which is managed by our customer success team. Our customer success team can independently upload, change, add, and remove items — and translate things — without needing any help from the digital team. They’re super happy to use it, as it makes it much easier for them to keep things up to date,” Alberdi noted.

Currently, Planet is upgrading from Drupal 9.5 to Drupal 10, and the digital team is looking forward to taking advantage of the platform’s advanced capabilities. “One of the things we’re excited about with the move to Drupal is the translations and the ability to work with ChatGPT installed within Drupal. We’re a multilingual website, and managing translations is a pain. We’re currently in testing mode with it, but things are looking very promising,” he shared.

Asset reference

The Results

Since transitioning from its old CMS to Drupal and Acquia, Planet’s website has achieved significant organic growth. “We know our website is performing well from a content and technical perspective; Ahrefs shows that our traffic increases between 20-30% each month. And we performed an SEO audit this past spring that reiterated that our renewed digital strategy is working well,” said Alberdi.

“We’re also very active in Google and social media ads, where we’ve seen early success with our multichannel approach. All of these efforts have boosted our conversion rates and ROI,” Alberdi noted.

The company plans to continue its partnership with Acquia and its investment in channel acquisition to help reach its goal of generating 30% in new business via its digital channels by 2026. “Our investments have worked well enough to provide the business case, so our goal for next year is to keep investing in channel acquisition, improving our efficiency,” Alberdi concluded.