Business Wire, a Berkshire Hathaway company, is a global press release news distributor — one of the “big three” in the world of newswires, and the digital destination for millions of journalists, PR and IR professionals, and news readers every month. 

Business Wire first reached out to us interested in improving the user experience for two primary audiences: potential new customers researching press release distribution services, and members of the media looking for new stories in their areas of interest. But what started as a website redesign quickly evolved in a full-scale digital transformation that leveraged the full spectrum of our core capabilities.

Bilberrry embedded with the Business Wire team on a complete digital transformation. Over the course of 14 months, we collaborated to overhaul the performance and experience of nearly every part of the business — from marketing, sales and editorial, to product, engineering, and security.

Unifying a disjointed user experience

Business Wire had been operating for years on a legacy CMS built primarily for publishing and archiving press releases. Over time, that system stopped meeting the team’s ambitious marketing and sales needs — it simply lacked the necessary flexibility for nuanced user journeys, robust analytics, content marketing, and localization. As a workaround, teams relied on a variety of subdomains built on platforms like Hubspot to test and publish new marketing initiatives, leading to a fractured experience with disparate branding and inconsistent navigation. Our first goal was to bring consistency and clarity across Business Wire’s entire digital ecosystem. 

In lock-step with Business Wire’s marketing team, we established a content framework that would help their full roster of audiences find relevant entry points and streamline their conversion journey, all on a single domain. Our focus on a clear-eyed navigation, scalable resources hub, and cohesive sign up flow helped transform the sprawling Business Wire user experience into a unified, conversion-generating sales funnel. 

From there we built out a brand new design system that underscores Business Wire’s legacy of cutting edge newswire technology and industry-leading editorial services, while remaining approachable and human. This design balances imagery from Business Wire’s top-performing new releases with dramatic blocks of color, subtle animations, and friendly ilcons in a robust component and template library that web admins can use to craft uniquely compelling, high-performing pages. 

Making a case for headless 

Most marketing-driven websites don’t need the complexity of a headless architecture —  in those cases, we nearly always recommend working with us on a WordPress implementation for its agility and ease of use. But Business Wire is not a typical marketing website. Its unique business demands made it the perfect use case for a headless approach. 

First, and most importantly: the press releases. Business Wire press releases are built and distributed to media outlets around the world in a completely separate platform from the website, but are archived for discovery on businesswire.com. A headless approach allows us to bridge the press release content source into the web experience, making the site feel unified despite multiple origins. 

Second is PressPass, Business Wire’s authenticated user experience. PressPass lets readers save custom newsfeeds and completely tailor their news reading experience, and is another standalone application, completely separate from both the CMS and the press release platform. But because of our headless implementation, it feels completely cohesive with the rest of the businesswire.com experience.

And finally, the requirements of our partners on the marketing team. They required a centralized content hub to manage their editorial content — one that was flexible enough to match their marketing goals, but didn’t demand constant developer support, We built the Business Wire CMS on Strapi, configuring the new brand design system, page templates, and components directly into the CMS to give the team total control over their content, whild integrating seamless into our headless architecture.