A Unique Business with a Complex Digital Challenge
Grainger PLC is the UK's largest listed residential landlord, owning and managing a vast portfolio of rental properties across the nation. Their unique business model is centered on providing high-quality, professional rental experiences. Critically, their long-term growth strategy demands a digital presence that not only serves investors but directly engages and converts prospective renters.
Before partnering with Code, Grainger PLC faced a digital challenge: a fragmented and misaligned online presence. They operated 6 disparate development websites, each catering to different properties and initiatives, alongside a core corporate site primarily focused on CSR and investor relations. These platforms ran on varied legacy technologies, leading to:
Inconsistent User Experience: Visitors encountered varying designs, navigation, and functionality when searching for accommodation across Grainger’s diverse portfolio. While core property and pricing data resided in Salesforce, its presentation and integration across these disparate marketing sites were inconsistent and clunky, hindering shortlisting and comparison.
Content Silos & Inefficiency: Rich media, marketing descriptions, and editorial content for properties were scattered across various legacy CMS platforms. Content teams struggled with managing updates, leading to duplicated effort, slow publication cycles, and a lack of overall control over the brand narrative and customer-facing property information.
Brand Fragmentation: It was difficult to communicate a unified Grainger brand identity while also allowing flexibility for individual property developments. The existing structure obscured the breadth of Grainger's professional offering.
Technical Debt & Complex Integrations: Outdated platforms and disconnected systems, including a mix of content APIs and challenging integrations with core business systems like Salesforce (which held the authoritative property and pricing data), made it hard to scale, integrate new properties, and introduce modern features without significant developer effort.
Limited Direct-to-Consumer Engagement: The core website was not engineered to showcase live apartment listings directly from Salesforce, meaning a missed opportunity to directly engage and convert renters on a unified platform that combined compelling content with real-time data.
Grainger PLC needed a digital transformation – a unified platform that was flexible, scalable, secure, and, above all, could serve as the central hub for their entire business, presenting rich content seamlessly alongside authoritative property data.
The Solution: A Headless Transformation Powered by DatoCMS and Salesforce
Code embarked on a strategic partnership with Grainger, focusing on consolidation, user empowerment, and a MACH-driven technical overhaul. Their multi-faceted approach aimed to create a robust, customer-centric digital ecosystem:
Discovery & Digital Strategy: Deep dives into user needs (through interviews and experience mapping), extensive content audits, and stakeholder workshops laid the groundwork. This phase meticulously defined Grainger's digital vision, aligning it with their business objectives and identifying key opportunities for their new "Technical North Star" architecture, based on MACH principles.
Unified Design System & Product Design: A flexible and adaptable design system was created, allowing for core brand clarity while providing individuality for new development brands. This was coupled with user-centric product design, which iterated through design sprints and prototyping to craft intuitive user experiences, from property search and discovery to seamless application, all powered by integrated data.
Headless Architecture with DatoCMS as the Content Hub: The core of the solution was a modern, headless approach, aligning with MACH principles. DatoCMS was selected as the central editorial content hub due to its intuitive content modelling capabilities and powerful API.
Modern Front-End Integration: DatoCMS's API-first nature seamlessly integrated with a modern front-end framework (e.g., React/Next.js). This ensured lightning-fast performance, enhanced security, a highly responsive user experience, and a future-proof development stack that dynamically combined rich editorial content from DatoCMS with live property and pricing data from Salesforce to create a unified, real-time customer experience.
Empowering Editors & Streamlined Data Flow: A key objective was to empower Grainger's marketing and property management teams with direct control over their digital narrative. DatoCMS's user-friendly interface, live preview features, and streamlined publishing workflows enabled them to easily manage localized content and create bespoke property pages using pre-defined components. This drastically reduced reliance on developers for routine marketing content updates and accelerated publishing cycles, allowing editors to enrich properties with engaging stories and visuals, while Salesforce remained the single source of truth for live availability and pricing.
The Impact: A Unified, Scalable, and Editor-Driven Digital Future
The work resulted in a truly impactful digital presence for Grainger PLC, ready to support its £bn business:
Unified Digital Experience & Brand Clarity: All 6 disparate websites were successfully consolidated into a single, cohesive, and user-centric platform. This provided a consistent brand experience across all touchpoints, clearly communicating Grainger's proposition and making it easier for users to navigate and understand their vast property portfolio, with accurate, live data.
Enhanced Customer Experience & Conversion: The re-engineered core website, now a direct-to-consumer property search and rental platform, significantly improved the customer journey. Features like interactive property tours, and clear property status displays (combining rich DatoCMS content with live Salesforce data) directly led to a more engaging and efficient experience for prospective tenants, driving higher conversion potential.
The result? The proceedable lead conversion doubled, meaning the site was driving a better quality, highly motivated future tenant that the sales team were able to onboard more effectively.
