A Digital Marketing Hub to Support Transformation at the National Physical Laboratory

The Potential

NPL’s work underpins progress across science, industry and national infrastructure, from enabling breakthrough R&D to ensuring standards, safety and regulation, but as the organisation developed its commercial capabilities and broadened how it engages industry, its digital experience needed to keep pace.

The previous website reflected the breadth of NPL’s activity, but not the way users needed to find and understand it. Content had grown over time into a fragmented structure, creating friction for audiences trying to answer basic questions:

• What does NPL do for industry, and how do we engage?
• Which capability, programme or expert area is relevant to our challenge?
• Where is the evidence of impact, leadership and innovation?
• How do we move from discovery to action, enquiry, collaboration, service engagement?

The opportunity was bigger than a redesign. NPL needed its website to become a platform for transformation, a clearer front door to the organisation, and a digital foundation that could support marketing, lead generation, and scalable future growth.

The Insight

For complex organisations, especially those balancing research excellence with commercial ambition, digital success depends on clarity, structure and momentum.

NPL serves a wide set of audiences across commercial organisations exploring services and partnerships, researchers and academic bodies, government stakeholders, media, prospective employees and the public. Each audience has different needs, but all expect:

• Simple navigation that respects their time
• Trustworthy, authoritative content
• Journeys shaped around real goals, not organisational structure
• Clear next steps (enquire, contact, download, explore)

We recognised that the website needed to do two things at once. Firstly, simplify and unify NPL’s story across research, industry and societal impact and also create an extensible digital hub that could support campaigns, personalisation, automation and performance measurement over time.

In other words, combining brand clarity and platform capability.

The Idea

Build a central digital hub that makes NPL easy to understand, easy to navigate, and ready to scale.

NPL partnered with Brand Potential to design and deliver a new website and platform that would:

• Present a contemporary, user‑centred experience across all devices
• Rebuild information architecture and taxonomy around audiences and journeys
• Strengthen NPL’s commercial proposition without diluting research credibility
• Surface expertise, insight and impact through structured templates and storytelling
• Drive users from discovery to action through clearer CTAs and enquiry pathways
• Enable internal teams to manage content efficiently with robust governance
• Protect and grow search visibility through a structured migration and redirect approach
• Establish a foundation for future capability (gated content, personalisation, multilingual, campaign sites and eCommerce‑ready features)

The outcome was a website that needed to communicate transformation externally, while enabling transformation internally.

The Technology

A scalable platform designed for enterprise content, workflow and digital marketing.

To power the new NPL digital hub, Brand Potential implemented a solution built on Kentico. Chosen for its balance of enterprise CMS strength and integrated digital marketing capability.

The platform provides a robust, future-ready foundation that combines structured content management with the flexibility to support evolving marketing and commercial needs. It enables NPL to manage complex content at scale, while creating more consistent, user-focused experiences across the site.

Key capabilities include:

• Structured content and reusable templates to ensure consistency, clarity and scalability
• Workflow and governance tools to support multiple contributors across the organisation
• Built-in SEO controls and optimisation features to support visibility and search performance
• Responsive, mobile-first delivery to meet modern user expectations across all devices
• Integrated digital marketing capability, enabling campaign activity, landing pages and future personalisation
• A flexible architecture designed to support future enhancements, including multilingual content, gated experiences and campaign-led activity

Together, this creates a platform that not only supports today’s needs but is ready to evolve with NPL’s strategy by connecting content, journeys and marketing into a single, scalable ecosystem.

The Impact

The new NPL website and digital hub delivered measurable improvements in visibility and engagement while laying the foundations for commercial growth.

• 1,200+ content items migrated for launch
• 149% increase in organic search acquisition
• 265% increase in returning visitors

Beyond the numbers, the new experience has enabled clearer user journeys and a stronger proposition for commercial audiences all helping drive and route enquiries more effectively across the organisation.

The programme included a controlled content migration and structured SEO page mapping to protect search equity, ensuring the transformation strengthened performance rather than disrupting it.