ABOUT

Nominet has been proud custodians of the UK domain name registry for the last 25 years.
In 2023, the company came to us with a dilemma. UK domains were facing a showdown against dot com to grow their slice of the market pie in the UK. Furthermore, although Nominet already has a huge 11m UK domains under management and around 1.9m new registrations every year, the market for domains, in general, is actually in a small decline.

Given the shrinking UK domain market and the competition for market share with dot com, Nominet’s challenge was to reel in more registrations from its target audiences – predominantly a variety of SME business segments – and reverse the trend line in growth against dot com over the long term.

To make this happen, we needed to develop an awareness-building campaign for them that centred on encouraging UK domain adoptions among SMEs and making UK domains synonymous with a range of positive characteristics – Britishness, recognition, trust, safety, credibility, security and professionalism, to name a few.

While the long-term business objective was to buck the trend of decline against dot com, the short-term goal was simply to begin moving the needle in that direction. At the same time, testing creative, content and media tactics would unearth what was most effective – so that Nominet could optimise budget and resources towards the best solution.

So, when presented with the challenge of a ‘test and learn’ three-month summer campaign to experiment with strategy and ideas, we jumped at the chance. Our game plan? Test, tweak, and take those lessons to craft an even bigger and bolder strategy for the long haul while taking a positive step in driving UK domain awareness in the short term. The core KPI for our campaign was to evidence that our approach was beginning to enhance the perceptions and awareness of UK domains in the UK SMB market.

Building a foundation that would enable Nominet to keep pace with dot com's registration velocity was key. We dug into the data to learn and quantify exactly what we needed to achieve to meet our long-term objective of growing UK domain market share against dot com. We also checked out the figures for dot com registrations and renewals, which enabled us to compare and produce a quantifiable objective for the long-term.

To outpace dot com and expand Nominet’s market share, we had to make a positive impact on registration, renewal rates, or both. Not one to shy away from a challenge, we took a ‘registration first’ approach for our campaign as this held significant potential in ultimately growing market share for UK domains.