Silverstone - More than just a racing circuit

Silverstone Circuits host the two most important motor and motorcycling racing events every year in the UK as well as a range of other events. For private individuals and corporate clients, there are experience days, where people can take high performance vehicles out on the track. There's a conference centre and business park as well as merchandising.

"We are highly adaptable and can offer a huge range of events," says Katie Tlyler, Head of Communications, Silverstone Circuits. "We have built the new website to make the most of what we offer and keep capacity as full as possible for all the different driving experiences we have."

Empowering content input and removal

Using EPiServer CMS, the feed of news and content on the site is constantly kept up to date. "We can be so much more responsive and reactive than before, if we have a driving Experience that has some remaining places we can quickly create a last minute campaign and popluate different pages with the content automatically," says Katie.

Before, it might take more than a week to make a change because we didn't have direct input on the website. An event would have already happened before the new content would have been posted. Now we can experiment and choose to add or remove content when we need to. If a driving experience fills up then we can remove it as an available date from the site."

Special offers can be scheduled to expire and be removed from the site automatically. For example, a Valentine's offer came off the site on a Sunday when no one was in work. "I feel very reassured that the system is reliable. It means the site works as efficiently as possible," says Katie. "It's also great to know it is robust in terms of load. We have peaks of visitors when tickets go on sale."

Streamlined and effective sales

The digital agency Yucca created the layout and modern design, and built the whole site. The goals were to ensure the site would appeal to different audiences and have create lots of calls to action.

There is a group of individuals interested in the sporting events, Grand Prix and MotoGP as well as other professional races that the track hosts. Another is for the driving Experiences where people can drive high performance cars on the race track. And finally there's the corporate audience looking to host events at the venue or entertain their own clients either as spectators or participants in a driving Experience.

Richie Jones, founder of Yucca comments, "EPiServer is very user friendly, both for editors, who can be quickly up and running in uploading content and adding pages and for developers who have .NET experience, as they can harness that knowledge and adapt it for an EPiServer installation. It's a really powerful CMS, powerful in what you can choose to do for a site with easy steps to create engaging content."

Katie adds, "We have found that site visitors are finding most of the information they need on the site and only going to the call center to book their Experience. Where we have found that information being repeatedly requested in calls to the center, we have quickly added a new FAQ to the website. Now the call center only gets to handle more important requests and take bookings than have to give out general information. It's really streamlined the sales process and made us much more efficient and effective. Conversion rates have shot up by 170% and pages visits and time spent on the site have also increased. We know visitors are using the site for as a source for race news."

Community content

Interesting features on the Silverstone site include a calendar which highlights days when driving Experiences are available. Events news is content that is automated pulling in an XML web feed that creates pages on the fly. Editors can choose which pages they feel are most relevant to publish. There are also video overlays and allowances have been made for social media as a prelude to what will come later in the year.
"We are planning on adding a community area to the site with EPiServer Relate+," says Katie. "It's an important part of our online strategy and we want to make it as seamless as possible."