Whether selling to businesses or consumers, buyers need access to various types of product content — emotionally-driven visual assets and objective information. This helps them feel most confident when making buying decisions.

Delivering this experience requires digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) tools.

Join this webinar and learn how to create a 360-degree view of their product content will be best equipped to create experiences that empower their customers across websites, social media, digital ads, packaging, in-store displays, and more.

Register today for “Create Consumer Confidence With a 360-view Content Strategy,” presented by Acquia.

Click here to view more MarTech webinars.

The post Webinar: The 360-view content strategy you need appeared first on MarTech.

Given all of that promise, marketers are certainly evaluating these technologies and one crucial part of that process is the demo.

It’s important to set up demos within a relatively short timeframe of each other to help make relevant comparisons. Make sure that all potential internal users are on the demo call and pay attention to the following:

• How easy is the platform to use for the day-to-day tasks handled by each department that will be using it?
• Does the vendor seem to understand our business and marketing needs?
• Are they showing us our “must-have” features?

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Sitecore, Optimizely, Pantheon, WordPressVIP and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital experience platforms.

Click here to download!

Here are 13 questions to ask each vendor that will help you narrow the field:

• What kind of content delivery speed improvements do you typically see with your clients?
• Why have you adopted the approach you recommend (fully headless or hybrid content delivery) and what does that specifically mean in terms of how the whole system comes together?
• How is the DXP hosted? PaaS? SaaS? Private cloud? On-premise software installation? Or some combination of these?
• How does the platform integrate with other martech platforms (i.e., CDPs, marketing automation platforms, CRMs, DSPs, DAMs)? What capabilities are native to the new platform and how is it modularized?
• Do you have pre-built connections to solutions we already use or sources of content or functionality that we need?
• What reporting do you provide that will document the ROI from our efforts?
• What kind of customer support is included? Can we pick up the phone to report problems?
• Will we have a dedicated Account Manager and technical support, especially with the initial migration?
• Do you have other clients in our vertical?
• What kind of professional services are available? And how much do they cost?
• How does the company handle requests for product modifications?
• What new features are the vendor considering?
• What’s the long-term roadmap and launch dates?

Good luck!

The post 13 questions to ask digital experience platform vendors during the demo appeared first on MarTech.

Your organization should start with a comprehensive self-assessment of its business needs, staff capabilities, management support and financial resources.

The following questions should help your team decide whether purchasing a DXP is the right call:

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Sitecore, Optimizely, Pantheon, WordPressVIP and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital experience platforms.

Click here to download!

The post Does your marketing team need a digital experience platform (DXP)? appeared first on MarTech.

The core capability of the digital experience platform is managing and delivering the digital user experience — primarily web pages, but also mobile apps and other types of content — a need that has long been served by content management systems.

While the growth of content management systems (CMSs) has allowed marketers to wrest control of websites from the IT department, which was largely in charge of the early web, marketers’ needs have grown beyond CMSs’ abilities to meet them in recent years. 

Digital transformation drives tool adoption

Over time, businesses have undergone digital transformations to drive efficiencies, remain competitive in the marketplace and respond to changes in customer behavior. To perform everything expected of a modern marketing operation, marketers adopted adjacent technologies to enhance what their CMS was able to do.

• Web analytics helped marketers gather data about user behavior and the conversion funnel, with more sophisticated optimization systems allowing for A/B and multivariate testing. 
• Customer journey analytics (CJA) gave marketers a more sophisticated sense of the path users take on the route to purchase. 
• For many businesses, ecommerce capabilities became essential to their digital operations.
• Connecting all the data in these systems to the right customer or prospect and keeping track of it all required a customer relationship management (CRM) tool or even a customer data platform (CDP).

Though each of these technologies provides a way to improve the user experience and helps modern marketers meet the demands now placed on them, this hodgepodge of systems has increasingly become a liability. In some cases, marketers are weighed down by the costs of licensing all of these disparate systems. 

Enter the DXP

These challenges, along with developments like the increased digitization of business brought about by the COVID pandemic and ever-heightened customer expectations, are some of the factors that have led to the rise of the digital experience platform (DXP).

Customers increasingly expect marketers to deliver consistent, personalized experiences to all of their devices, and they often use multiple devices to interact with brands and complete transactions.

Just delivering appropriate content to all of these channels and devices is a challenge in itself, because each of them requires its own interface and mix of content to perform ideally. More importantly, though, both consumers and business buyers expect to be known and understood in digital contexts, and delivering that personalization requires data and a means to act on those insights. 

Speed and modularity

Another significant aspect of the modern user experience is that it is fast. Besides the desire to please users, marketers focus on speeding content delivery because Google penalizes websites with poor landing page experiences — which includes slow loading — by ranking them lower in its search results.

At the same time, many front-end web developers have been chafing at the limitations of programming in PHP, seeking to take advantage of more modern methods and craft the slicker and more flexible user experiences they’re able to deliver with those technologies. 

Both of these developments have led businesses to seek alternatives to traditional content management approaches. Examples include headless or hybrid CMSs, often within DXPs. In these types of deployments, the CMS disconnects the underlying content from the means and manner of displaying it. Because of this, developers can employ modern frameworks to create the user experience, and it’s easier to leverage the same database of content assets across multiple platforms, devices and formats. 

Also, the pandemic and recent worldwide volatility have taught marketers an important lesson about being responsive and agile. Businesses that were quickly able to identify and adjust to shifting societal conditions and consumer sentiments have been the most successful at riding out the storm. One approach that’s gaining currency in this environment is the “composable DXP.”

A composable or modular DXP approach lets marketers pick and choose the modules that meet their business needs — or even connect modules from other providers — rather than being stuck with an all-in-one solution.

Core capabilities

A DXP enables the creation, management, delivery and optimization of digital experiences in a variety of channels and contexts. It serves as the hub that brings together capabilities from multiple applications or modules to deliver a seamless digital experience. Marketers considering the adoption of a DXP should understand that the way these platforms have come together — through acquisitions and integrations, for the most part — means that native capabilities differ from one offering to another. 

Additionally, the modularity of these offerings is a point of differentiation — some vendors offer more composable configurations than others. However, all should feature either native functionality or connections that enable the full range of capabilities explored here. The core capabilities of DXPs, provided either natively within the platform or via an integration include:

• Content management, which may include digital asset management and/or product information management (PIM).
• Support for multiple platforms and types of experiences.
• Delivery, presentation and orchestration of content and experiences.
• Personalization.
• Analytics and optimization.
• Search and navigation.
• Customer data management. 
• Strong functionality for integration and extensibility.

A number of additional capabilities may be included in some specific DXP offerings.

Today, strong functionality for integration and extensibility is probably the most important capability offered by DXPs, because it is fundamental to their role of bringing together all of the technologies that contribute to a customer-centric experience.

Is your marketing team ready for the future of content and experience management? Explore top digital experience management platforms in the first edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

The post What is a digital experience platform or DXP and is it the future of content management? appeared first on MarTech.

Amy Kolzow, VP of global digital marketing credits CEO Nancy McKinstry: “All they did was create books at one point in time and she saw the need to start to convert that into digital technology and digital products and services.”

Describing the business today, Kolzow said: “We solve real world problems for a variety of professionals, from doctors and nurses to lawyers, accountants and tech professionals. We help our customers make critical business decisions every day. We provide expert solutions that combine deep domain knowledge with specialized technology and services. We do work with some professions that are still run in very traditional ways, so we have a variety of product styles. We still have books.”

Thousands of disconnected websites

Before the transformation project started, Wolters Kluwer had thousands of websites. “Nothing connected,” said Kozlow, “no cross-linking strategy, no common URLs, no common content strategy. Broken experiences.”

With 19,000 employees around the globe, including about 1,000 marketers, Wolters Kluwer searched for a solution that would scale to meet the needs of the organization. “I have an Adobe background,” Kozlow admitted, “so I felt really brave when we picked Sitecore because it was different; but the fact of the matter is that it was right.”

The partnership with the DXP, she said, has been like a marriage — it has its ups and downs, but the downs were always fixed.

Mike Shaw, platform manager, outlined other aspects of the challenge Wolters Kluwer faced. “1,000 marketers,” he confirmed, “but diverse. They were not equally mature in terms of experience. The hardest part I found was making the building of pages and that web experience simple for a marketer for very little experience — while flexible enough that someone with a lot of experience can build something too. It’s that balance we found with Sitecore that we couldn’t find elsewhere.”

Shaw has been at Wolters Kluwer for almost three-and-a-half years, but he has about twelve years of experience with Sitecore and briefly worked for them. “In 18 months, we built 30,000 pages; we publish about 100 pages a day now, all through the drag-and-drop components,” Shaw said.

A central destination for users

There’s now a central online destination for users and for the marketing teams. Since Sitecore is a composable platform, not an all-or-nothing proposition, we asked what components Wolters Kluwer had adopted. “We use Content Hub,” said Shaw, “we use the DAM.” It took about six to eight weeks to migrate some 50,000 digital assets to Sitecore’s DAM solution. “We used Sitecore Services to help us through that transition, and we’re now about to launch the Content Marketing Plaform; the idea is to have a really strong workflow before moving everything out of emails.”

They plan to look at the headless CMS option but currently they’re working with the traditional CMS, and they’re not yet using the CDP.

Embarking on personalization

One part of the transformation has been to group products by interest area or topics rather than by divisions within the company. “We have robust onsite search and a big initiative we will launch before the end of the year is personalization,” Kolzow told us. “We needed to prove to our legal compliance team that we had a secure website that would allow us to start to collect some of the data that is required for that.”

The goal is to offer a personalized experience based on previous behavior on the site. Initially, the only data to be collected is an IP address, so personalization will be very much session-based. “Eventually we’ll get to that area of first- and zero-party data,” said Shaw.

Feedback from users, Kolzow explained, comes in the form of behavior. “People are coming and taking the next-best-action; they’re filling out a form to download a white paper; they’re asking for some to call them and schedule a demo.”

The transition to the new way of working allows the company to now pay attention to content freshness, to SEO performance and page visits in general. Once the personalization module is set up, they will look at Sitecore’s testing module to experiment with content variants. “We will choose hypothesis-based tests,” said Kolzow. “We will measure against them and repeat them two or three times, and then have global learning so we don’t have to have 1,000 marketers repeating the same test 1,000 times.”

Dig deeper: Sitecore adds new products to its composable DXP

Growing digital maturity

“We weren’t very mature in digital marketing when this project started,” Kolzow confesses.

That’s changed. The business now has an annual survey of their digital sales and marketing activities conducted by Accenture. “They hold us accountable to our benchmarks and goals as well as to industry standards. We’ve created something called ‘The Best of Wolters Kluwer’ which features people who are doing a great job.”

One of the benefits of the project has been to give widely dispersed marketing teams a reason to talk to each other. “When you think about the fact that we’re a global company, really run as individual businesses,” said Kolzow, “those marketers never talked to each other in the past. This project has pulled them all forward by understanding each other and learning from each other.”

The post The digital transformation of a traditional business publisher appeared first on MarTech.

The future is composable

Although the overt theme of Symposium was “Meet every moment” — highlighting the challenge of engaging customers with immediately relevant content at each moment of their journey — the constantly reinforced message from a technology perspective was composability.

While some vendors feel the tension between trying to sell a complete platform to customers and allowing them to pick the components they need to complete their stacks, Sitecore is evidently all-in on composability; the proposition, as Chief Product Officer Dave O’Flanagan put it, that customers should be allowed to assemble “a stack as unique as their business.” This may mean one or 10 Sitecore products in the DX stack, but connections to as many other third-party vendor products as needed.

“We are on a mission to redefine this category with our composable DXP,” said O’Flanagan. Sitecore thus boasts, not just an end-to-end suite of DXP components, but an end-to-end suite of composable products — and it claims to be the only vendor in its space with that specific offering.

This does not mean, however, that Sitecore does not want to be the center, hub, or indeed core of the stack. Sitecore Cloud Portal offers an opportunity for administrators to manage the stack — including permissions, product access and payments. What’s notable is that the Portal allows the management not just of the Sitecore modules, but also third-party products in the stack (a demo slide showed Salesforce and Marketo, for example).

Introducing three new products

Sitecore announced the addition of three new modules to its product portfolio: Sitecore Search, Sitecore Connect and Content Hub One.

Sitecore Search

This is an AI-driven and personalized search engine, capable of searching content beyond just text. It will predict relevant search results (using autocomplete) and promote content based either on the customer’s behavior and search needs or business objectives.

As a plug-and-play solution it can be deployed on a website within hours. Marketing teams, said O’Flanagan, can manage the search experience without technical knowledge. On the composability theme again Search can be deployed to index any CMS, Sitecore or not.

Sitecore Connect

Emphasizing the composability of its product offering, Sitecore Connect, developed in partnership with Workato, is aimed at allowing brands to integrate Sitecore products with existing solutions within the martech stack. It promises a low/no code drag-and-drop UI. It expects to offer more than 1,000 connectors.

O’Flanagan readily admits that building a unique, composed stack, rather than adopting a monolithic suite, can introduce complexity. Connect aims to “solve some of the integration ‘tax’ of the composable DXP,” he said.

Content Hub One

Content Hub, Sitecore’s existing CMS solution, enables content planning, creation, production and managment within a single collaborative system. Content Hub One is an agile, headless iteration of Content Hub, available to brands wanting to deploy a holistic content strategy across a wide range of channels: web, mobile, smart screen displays, voice assistants, etc.

The offering envisages developers building front-ends for content delivery while marketers work in parallel to create the content.

Sitecore also said it was improving editing interfaces and testing capabilities within the Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) Cloud which offers Sitecore’s core CMS, along with other capabilities, as a native cloud product. (SItec’s traditional Platform DXP will continue to be available on private cloud with a subscription.

Consumers are ready for the metaverse

Sitecore also unveiled research at Symposium suggesting that consumer expectations for metaverse-type experiences are growing, even as the metaverse itself is still in the early stages of development.

• Perhaps surprisingly, almost 90% of consumers believe the metaverse will be important to the way they shop and interact with brands.
• Almost 80% expect to spend more time in the metaverse than on social media apps.
• Around 70% of marketers expect to develop metaverse-like experiences in 2023.
• Of those, around half anticipate devoting 10-25% of their marketing budget to those experiences.

The data was based on a survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers aged 18-70, and jus over 300 brand marketers.

Accenture partnership enhanced

Sitecore also announced an extension of its partnership with Accenture. Accenture, in part through its majority owned consultancy Avanade, has a long history of working with SItecore implementations and collaborations.

Sitecore will become a member of Accenture’s relative exclusive strategic platform group

Dig deeper: Sitecore transitions core solution to a modern cloud architecture

A fast pace

In 2020, when he joined Sitecore as CEO, Steve Tzikakis outlined his vision to MarTech: “We now need to become a ‘billion-dollar company.’ That’s not so much a financial objective, it’s more a behavioral change. The pace with which we release products, the integration of our products, the level of service we provide to our customers, how we operate with our partners and taking advantage of our biggest asset, our own employees.”

Product releases are coming at a fast pace and attention is being paid to integration through the Connect offering. It will be interesting to see the extent to which the bet on composability pays off.

The post Sitecore adds new products to its composable DXP appeared first on MarTech.

“The digital execution gap is wider than it’s ever been and gets wider every day,” Kirsten Allegri Williams, CMO of Opticon, told media and analysts at Opticon, Optimizely’s conference in San Diego this week.

The gap is between the experiences customers increasingly expect and demand from brands and the struggle most brands face in coming even close to fulfilling those needs. In his mainstage keynote, CEO Alex Atzberger categorized the main elements in the struggle as uncertainty, complexity and inertia.

Uncertainty is caused by a volatile environment in which every marketing plan can be buffeted by anything from a virus to climate change and from a disrupted supply chain to runaway inflation. Complexity refers to the far-from-linear customer journey created by the continuing explosion of channels and content types. Inertia? Largely caused by having too much data, little of it actionable.

The challenges are clear — how to address them, less so.

Marketing without limits

Optimizely’s approach can be seen as two-tiered. Top tier: proselytising for “Boundless Digital Invention” based on scientific insights derived from experimentation. Second tier: an environment in which teams can collaborate to achieve the top tier vision. Let’s break that down; but first a quick look at recent history.

Episerver, as most marketers know or knew it, grew out of the 2015 merger of Stockholm-based Episerver and New Hampshire-based Ektron to create a new commerce and CMS offering under the Episerver name. Even in 2015, Episerver was locating itself in the digital experience platform category.

Against the background of COVID, with many brands forced to raise their digital game, Episerver went on an acquisition spree, the most significant acquisition being that of Optimizely, an experimentation platform enabling rapid, multiple testing of digital design decisions and features — even enabling the testing of different options on different audience segments.

Episerver rebranded as Optimizely in 2021, and its web experimentation and feature experimentation (formerly known as Full Stack) capabilities have become increasingly central to the vendor’s vision.

In the case of Boundless Digital Invention, a culture of continual testing across multiple elements of digital strategy should boost confidence, reduce risk, and produce measurable — even if incremental — improvements in performance across important KPIs (increased conversions, reduced cart abandonments, more clicks, etc.

That culture of experimentation calls on teams to fail fast, learn on the fly, and constantly reiterate. But it does seem to call for the involvement of multiple teams and a degree of orchestration between their efforts.

Orchestrating the entire content lifecycle

That’s where the second tier comes in — a new Orchestrate solution announced at Opticon this week. This offering is based on another acquisition, that of Welcome, the collaboration and orchestration platform purpose-built for marketing teams, picked up by Optimizely in December, 2021.

Simply put, Optimizely is bringing together content marketing (Welcome), its long-established CMS, and its digital asset management tool, into one environment usable by business teams and not just developers. The dashboard will give visibility into the full lifecycle of projects and campaigns and allow collaborative creation of marketing content outside the CMS, reducing risks of CMS use by non-experts.

The environment can be used to plan, preview, publish and manage content across channels — and of course test different versions across selected audience segments. In mainstage demos, the offering was contrasted with approaches to collaborative content creation based around email chains, text messages, spreadsheets and phone calls — a contrast that audibly resonated with the audience.

But this collaboration, Atzberger emphasized, needs to reach beyond marketing and embrace product and engineering too (because some of the experimentation is likely to indicate changes that require developer skills). “We have to first establish that marketing is no longer alone,” he said.

Dig deeper: Optimizely partners with Google Cloud

The reality check

Optimizely executives were forthright in acknowledging that the perspective they are offering can’t be executed by the technology alone. There are crucial customer-side changes that are needed. For example:

The digital maturity curve

Many businesses, especially in some of the far-from-digital-first B2B verticals that had to rethink their commerce strategies under COVID, are simply not yet equipped for the unlimited digital invention envisaged here. A midmarket or large but digitally immature brand simply might not have the teams or talent to run continuous experimentation and execute on the results. A real world challenge for Optimizely, as it has explicitly pitched to traditional B2B businesses and not just established ecommerce brands.

Optimizely recognizes this. It’s about building a bridge, said CCO Chad Wolf: “How do we get them there?” Part of the answer lies in a consultative relationship before and after purchase, and Optimizely’s extensive eco-system of implementation partners has a role here too.

Full platform versus à la carte

The Orchestrate approach, and in general Optimizely’s holistic solution to uncertainty, complexity and inertia, seems to assume teams coming together on one digital experience hub (certainly, with some integrated point solutions too). And yet, like Episerver, it continues to allow customers to select and adopt individual products rather than the entire digital experience platform.

This is real world challenge number two for Optimizely, not least because the pre-acquisition Optimizely developed a strong portfolio of major enterprise clients who came to them for testing and experimentation, but not for a CMS or DAM. Chief Product Officer Justin Anovick conceded that this required “threading the needle.” On the one hand, it was essential to offer customers what they want and need; at the same time there was a belief in the value of the products in the platform all working together.

Organizational transformation

A third challenge confronts, not so much Optimizely, as some of their customers. If it is the case that marketers need to strategize and execute alongside other teams like product and engineering, it’s not the case that every client is ready to do that. There are many brands with siloed teams; many with no culture of cross-team collaboration.

That’s something Optimizely can’t fix by fiat. Again, consultation, including with implementation partners, can only suggest the most fruitful paths to follow.

Dig deeper: Enterprise digital experience platforms: A marketer’s guide

The promise of simplicity

Ultimately, Optimizely is betting that the promise of simplicity — in data-driven decision making, in workflows, in exchanging guess-work for experimentation-based understanding — will compel brands towards the kind of solution offered here.

“The digital transformation era brought with it the promise of limitless innovation. But as more
technologies were adopted and data became overwhelmingly unstructured and siloed, it created the
opposite effect – forcing marketers to lower their expectations as they were pressured to deliver
outcomes within restricted workflows,” said Atzberger in a release. “The future of
marketing hinges on removing these limits.”

The post Marketing beyond boundaries at Opticon appeared first on MarTech.

“[Content] plays a critical role in attracting new customers as well as fostering existing customer relationships,” said Anthony Welgemoed, founder and CEO of creative work software company Ziflow at The MarTech Conference. “It also sets the brand apart from competitors and visually demonstrates a broader purpose or mission. And when brands and agencies produce great creative, it makes an impact.”

Here are three major challenges to content creation and how to overcome them.

1: Scattered feedback

In order to produce content as a team, all hands have to be on deck. With more people involved, however, feedback can come from anywhere and gunk up the content production if the feedback isn’t orderly.

“A fundamental part of our creative process is getting feedback on all our creative assets,” said Welgemoed. “It’s mission critical for us to get fast, relevant, accurate feedback. Without this, we can’t deliver great work, and we certainly can’t deliver that work quickly.” 

He added, “Unfortunately, the process that most teams use to manage all the feedback is broken and often badly broken.”

Solution. Determine a single destination for feedback and establish clear systems of record that welcome feedback.

“The team should be clear and specific when providing feedback, and the feedback should be precise,” Welgemoed said. “Identify the exact location page or frame of the creative asset and what changes are required. Solving these challenges provides richer feedback to the creator and gives them the autonomy to deliver their best work.”

Dig deeper: We’re implementing DAM! Where do I start?

2: Lack of visibility

Content creators lose valuable time tracking down the feedback mentioned in the previous challenge. This can be due to an overall lack of visibility into the content project and its workflow.

“Increasing visibility and control across asset management may seem overwhelming, but teams can easily improve collaboration with some of these tips,” said Ryan Dunagan, Ziflow’s vice president of marketing.

Solution. Define the project with a summary of what assets the campaign will include.

“Give everyone involved in an overview, including the purpose of the campaign, assets required, the goal [for the campaign], and milestones with the right information,” said Dunagan.

Also, keep the assets organized.

“This one is easier said than done,” Dunagan cautioned. “Don’t let brainstorms and multiple versions get out of control. Organize assets and relevant files while collaborating so the most up-to-date version and historical look [of the assets] are easily accessible. Staying organized will help teams to recall what worked and what didn’t in the future.”

To increase visibility even further, provide version transparency so team members can see the evolution of a project and what decisions were made along the way.

Finally, appoint a person on the team who will make the final decision about an asset to avoid stalemates and project fatigue.

3: Adapting to change

Buyers’ demands have changed. They look for more content across a larger number of digital channels, plus they require a cohesive experience across these channels. These changing demands, in turn, force marketing teams to produce more content at a higher rate, often with the same number of people on the team, or with a reduction in staff.

“And to compound these challenges, a survey of marketing teams indicated that nearly half of their technology goes unused, which makes reaching the true potential of these tools impossible,” said Welgemoed.

Solution. Map out the creative workflow. Make sure the tools that are used to create assets are integrated in a way that mirrors the creative production process.

“These amazing platforms typically come with really great native integration capabilities,” Welgemoed said. “Teams can maximize business investment while adapting to changes by finding vendors that integrate with where they already are. [Creative teams should] look at existing systems and their available integrations.”

He added, “Connected systems have the added benefit of improving adoption across the organization and ultimately speeding up project delivery.”

These improvements to the creative process will help make the team more adaptable as the content landscape continues to grow more complicated and demanding. Meeting these challenges also sets up the marketing team for success in a remote work environment, when team members are looking to collaborate efficiently using remote, digital tools.

Deliver exceptional creative, faster from Third Door Media on Vimeo.

The post 3 content challenges and how marketers can overcome them appeared first on MarTech.

It was clever, maybe even revolutionary. The company changed its name from InfoOffice to RedDot Solutions and joined the numerous European WCM vendors which migrated to North America in the early 2000s. 

But there was a problem. In-context editing was quickly mimicked by nearly all WCM competitors not named Drupal, and RedDot lost its unique selling point. After middling growth RedDot was acquired by document management vendor Hummingbird before making its way to the content management retirement community known as OpenText. 

I recall one of my take-aways was: Never name your product after a feature.

What does this have to do with headless?

I’m going somewhere with this…really, I am.

Fast-forward a decade to the 2010s to find a new wave of (mostly) European WCM vendors emerging with another important innovation: Completely decoupling content management from content presentation and delivery. To be clear, separating content management from experience management wasn’t new. What made it a big deal this time was a tsunami of investment funding, a simple moniker (“headless”) and alignment with newer architectural models – all packaged into modern, cloud-native platform offerings.

Headless platforms were a fresh take on the problem of how to supply content to multiple different environments, especially the many new customer-facing web and mobile applications. Traditional WCM platforms didn’t do that very well, if at all. They managed your content and then served up your “website.” Not good enough.

The headless plateau

The people selecting the headless technology for a company are more likely to be IT than marketing. As a result, most vendors pitch themselves explicitly to them. This frequently doesn’t end well for business-facing tools, and indeed at Real Story Group we often see serious adoption problems with headless WCM platforms. 

Here’s the challenge: Content managers spent more than a decade trying to win control over not just content authoring, but also experience management. Pushing the marketplace, they ultimately won capabilities like easily-modifiable template and page componentry, dynamic previews and self-service testing/personalization subsystems. With headless they lose all that. Appeals to “don’t worry your little self about what the content looks like” can feel condescending.

Want an anecdote? An architect at a large global firm had selected a well-known headless WCM vendor for a product marketing team’s public website. Unfortunately, his business stakeholders rejected it. Their business unit produced mostly long-form, top-of-the-funnel thought leadership, with content dictating quite arbitrary layout choices – which they wanted to control. The new headless platform favored short-form, “chunked” content with minimal preview, along with page assembly in a remote application they couldn’t touch. They rebelled. 

When the architect called the headless vendor with his dilemma, the salesperson coached him to “teach his marketers about multi-channel publishing.” Well, that didn’t work. They just needed a simple way to produce micro-sites featuring rich articles, arbitrary page components and responsive design frameworks.

The future is hybrid

A modern enterprise, particularly a large one, needs to support multiple publishing models. Some are surely headless; e.g., sending marketing content to your ecommerce platform. Others are more coupled, for a variety of reasons. There’s a wide spectrum here. RSG frequently sees enterprises that made major commitments to headless solutions now having to support other WCM platforms as well. 

Why not have both instead of either/or? Well, many (though not all) traditional WCM vendors have come a long way in making their platforms headless-enabled. These older systems are rightfully criticized for not being all the way there. But these hybrid platforms are gaining in the marketplace. Part of the reason is because they often embrace capabilities most “pure” headless vendors have eschewed. Things like multichannel preview (very hard, but very useful) or single page application editors.

Many headless vendors have put themselves in a box. Having embraced an architectural model with near religious fervor, they’re unable to adapt to a more ecumenical world. I’ve been privy to some internal discussions at headless vendors on these topics, and from afar it sounds like a debate between true believers and heretics. 

WCM logo landscape on a complexity spectrum

In RSG’s WCM vendor evaluations, we categorize platforms primarily by complexity. Architectural models – along with business and license models – are important but still adjunct discriminators. So, as the diagram shows, we mix headless vendors in with other competitors. It’s tempting, though, to create a separate “headless” box, because those vendors do seem on a bit of island here.

I don’t know any WCM vendors that have actually renamed their platforms with “headless” in the title. But the lesson of RedDot remains apt. Headless is a feature, not a holistic solution. I believe the future lies with hybrid WCM platforms that can support a range of use cases.

The post The future of headless web content management appeared first on MarTech.

Average subscribers paid 12% more in 2022 than in 2021. The company attributed the increase to existing customers adding capabilities to their marketing automation instances and the growth of enterprise-level customers. 

HubSpot also continues to add customers; 8,200 were onboarded in Q1. The company now has 143,000 customers, up 26% year-over-year. 

HubSpot now offers a suite of applications: customer relationship management (CRM), customer experience, operations and content management software (CMS), in addition to marketing automation. More than half of the company’s customers subscribe to more than one, HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan said in a recent call with analysts.  

Why we care. Two things jump out. 

First, that average customers pay only $11,000 per year demonstrates just how successful this billion dollar company was at penetrating the small-business market. 

Second, the 12% YoY revenue-per-customer growth affirms how much success HubSpot is having in cross-selling additional products to existing customers, and that it’s successfully moving up-market into territory occupied by Marketo (Adobe), Eloqua (Oracle) and Pardot (SalesForce), to name a few of the enterprise-level incumbents.  At it’s third quarter analysts call, HubSpot said the number of enterprise-level customers paying at least $36,000 annually increased more than 80% year-over-year.

Our MarTech Replacement Survey found that marketing automation was one of the most frequently changed applications in the martech stack. HubSpot is undoubtedly contributing to this upheaval. 

Download the 2022 MarTech Replacement Survey here. It’s free and no registration is required.

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