Australia – Digital product and venture studio Grade have teamed up with Storyblok to transform Compass, the Australian national elder abuse knowledge hub. This partnership has empowered Compass, a project of Elder Abuse Action Australia (EAAA) with funding from the Australian Government Attorney-General’s Department, to effectively deliver valuable content and impactful digital campaigns in the fight against elder abuse, directly benefiting Australian elders, their families and surrounding communities. 

Before engaging with Grade, Compass faced challenges with its website and struggled to provide a seamless user experience for its diverse audience, hindering navigation and content updates. To address these issues, EAAA sought Grade’s expertise to overhaul Compass’s digital presence.

Recognising the need for a user-centric approach, Grade took charge of the project, collaborating with multiple stakeholders and securing crucial Government approvals. The comprehensive solution included redesigned user experience, advanced CMS integration, content migration and optimisation, cloud-based hosting, enhanced search visibility, and ongoing support and innovation.

The implementation of Storyblok’s CMS empowered the Compass team to confidently deliver content and campaigns, driving greater engagement and raising awareness about elder abuse. Furthermore, Compass gained valuable insights into audience behaviour through advanced analytics, enhancing its strategic decision-making process.

Matt Bachle, CEO at Grade, said, “We couldn’t be happier to see the results that Compass is now experiencing as a result of our collaboration. By leveraging Storyblok, we empowered the Compass team to deliver valuable content and create digital campaigns that raise awareness about elder abuse, directly benefiting elders and the community around them.”

He added, “Having recently been made an official Storyblok partner agency, we look forward to working with Storyblok in the future as we continue to provide our clients with quality, human-centred digital experiences.”

Meanwhile, Barry D’Arcy, VP of partners at Storyblok, commented, “We are proud to partner with Grade in empowering Compass to address the critical issue of elder abuse. Our CMS enables Compass to efficiently manage content, engage users and raise awareness about this important cause. It’s exciting to see the transformation that Compass has achieved.”

Australia – Designer brand Paul Smith has partnered with enterprise headless CMS Storyblok to modernise and future-proof its website and customer experience.

Paul Smith’s team developed the new back-end internally, while eCommerce specialist agency Limesharp built the front-end, implementing Storyblok’s headless CMS technology.

Additionally, Paul Smith’s content teams are benefiting from more flexibility and are able to update designs and layouts, schedule content, implement bulk updates, and access data in multiple ways all by themselves.

Storyblok’s headless technology allows Paul Smith to connect its CMS with a vast array of external apps, such as Larevel for middleware, Magento for eCommerce, Cloudinary for digital asset management (DAM), and Klevu for search, product recommendations, and visual merchandising.

Paul Smith’s partnership with Storyblok comes as the team sets out to transform the way they approach and communicate with their customers, re-establish their brand, and rebuild their website to emulate the unique customer experience of their flagship store in Los Angeles. Most importantly, the business wanted a solution to future-proof its online business and help it remain relevant for the next fifty years.

Hannah Bennet, head of digital at Paul Smith, said, “When we decided to switch to a headless CMS, we had a lengthy review process of headless platforms, analysing Contentful, Prismic, and GraphCMS, among others. We wanted to find the right mix of composable architecture, easy integrations, ease of use, and flexibility.

She added, “We found that Storyblok was the most established vendor with great developer support. Storyblok also has some fantastic, unique features, such as the visual editor. It supports improved performance and provides our teams so much flexibility and freedom. It was an easy decision to make.”

Meanwhile, Dominik Angerer, co-founder and CEO at Storyblok, also said, “At a time of economic uncertainty, the role of flexible and efficient marketing with a high ROI is becoming increasingly important as businesses seek to respond to new requirements and trends with agility.”

“Our recent work with Paul Smith is a perfect example of this. The vast capabilities afforded by our headless CMS architecture enabled its legendary brand to achieve a new online look, recreating the customer experience from its unique physical stores. It also places the business in a good position to easily evolve its digital presence with new tech innovations,” he added. 

Australia – Content management system (CMS) Storyblok was recently utilised by Spendesk, a fintech platform, to scale its website and consolidate all of its content into one CMS. 

Previously, Spendesk used two CMSs to manage its content, but the developers experienced technical limitations and the content team could not edit or build pages quickly without breaking the website. 

Upon experiencing this, they decided to migrate to a single CMS that met the needs of the marketing, development, and design teams and optimise both internal collaboration and the overall experience for clients.

After making the move to Storyblok, Spendesk reduced page creation time by 80%, experienced up to two times faster CMS speeds, and achieved a 25% smaller codebase by using dynamic pages.

Lionel Paulus, senior front-end engineer at Spendesk, said, “Pages that used to take hours to build now only take minutes with Storyblok. The Visual Editor gives our content team complete autonomy by delivering a live preview of the pages they’re working on. While our previous CMSs were expensive and didn’t provide the benefits we needed, Storyblok’s CMS capabilities deliver great value.”

Meanwhile, Dominik Angerer, co-founder and CEO of Storyblok, commented, “Spendesk’s experience proves that modern content requires future-proof ways to manage content with a CMS that is optimised for performance and works for every team.”

Malaysia – Personal transformation company Mindvalley has recently partnered with Storyblok, the enterprise-level headless content management system, to launch its digital experience. According to Storyblok, it has helped the self-help digital platform deliver such experience with a 50% cut in development time as well as a 2x faster time to market in 8 languages. 

Storyblok shared further the dilemma presented by the platform. Although Mindvalley wanted to build its own CMS in order to leverage customisation opportunities, it still turned out to be too difficult to use for non-technical marketers.

“Looking back at our pre-Storyblok days, it continues to amaze me how much the CMS can do, and there is still so much more to discover,” shared Prosper Chiduku, software engineer at Mindvalley.

Storyblok’s case study on how it helped Mindvalley manage its digital experience delivery.

Chiduku added, “The marketing and design teams can do so much on their own now with Storyblok, where there has been a regained freedom in the team’s work and the ability to launch as many new pages and campaigns as they want independently 2x faster.” 

Meanwhile, Storyblok’s Co-Founder and CEO Dominik Angerer said, “When you’re helping millions of people improve their lives through educational content, it’s important that those digital experiences are able to scale very quickly. We’re delighted that Mindvalley is experiencing the productivity benefits that come from headless content management.”

Storyblok’s tech enables content teams to create and manage content independently with drag-and-drop visual editing, custom collaboration workflows, and a ‘world-class’ digital asset manager.

The Mindvalley case study can be read HERE.

California, USA – Digital experience management software, Sitecore, has launched its new CMS offering, ‘Experience Manager (XM) Cloud’, completely transitioning its core CMS solution including personalisation and the content authoring experience, to a modern cloud architecture.

Sitecore XM Cloud aims to help solve the globally recognised problem of powering instantaneous, global digital experiences in the cloud without sacrificing the customer experience. This latest product release will provide brands with unrivalled speed to market in the implementation of customer experiences, simplifying design and deployment, and eliminating upgrades, which dramatically decreases the cost of ownership. With XM Cloud, marketers can instantly create, manage, and deliver engaging omnichannel experiences with an industry-leading enterprise-ready CMS.

Moreover, Sitecore XM Cloud provides a comprehensive SaaS CMS for the Enterprise solution for brands by overcoming global scaling problems including variable traffic, supporting multi-brand architectures, and site security. 

Meanwhile, for business users, XM Cloud offers the ability to build pixel-perfect digital experiences via a WYSIWIG authoring experience that can access content anywhere as well as embedded testing & personalization, and integrated visitor analytics. For developers, XM Cloud can also be used with headless development techniques and will work with modern frontend frameworks and support all deployment scenarios.

Dave O’Flanagan, chief product officer at Sitecore, shared that consumer behaviour has changed rapidly over the past two years, and audiences have become very digitally savvy and have an expectation from brands to deliver highly personalised customer experiences.

“This puts marketers in the unenviable position of trying to meet this expectation, but with tools and solutions that don’t deliver, and in some cases hamstring, the needed agility to meet demand. Sitecore XM Cloud provides marketers with a truly end-to-end, SaaS-based solution that not only helps brands meet consumer expectations but also delivers a best-of-class omnichannel customer experience,” said O’Flanagan. 

Through Sitecore XM Cloud, the company’s entire digital experience platform can now be delivered through a modern cloud architecture, providing brands and marketers with continued innovation, elastic scaling, composability, on-the-fly engagement, and multi-channel content management, as well as simplicity for marketers, and agility for developers.

Why do marketers need digital experience platforms (DXP)? The answer is simple. Most people check out a brand online before they walk into the store, or check out its physical office, or if they even have one at all. And this touchpoint has become even more ingrained in a consumer’s journey in the new normal, where lockdowns have dampened the relevance of brick-and-mortar stores.

According to the latest E-conomy report by Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company, the Southeast Asia region is charging ahead at full steam, having added 60 million new digital consumers to the internet economy since the pandemic started, with 20 million of them joining in H1 2021 alone. And this will further increase as e-commerce becomes the be-all-and-end-all of consumers’ shopping demands.

DXP as the vital baseline of consumer experiences

When we walk into a store, say Uniqlo – the entire experience matters – from the lighting, the smell, and the layout to the customer service and the checkout experience. Now imagine trying to replicate this online, purely digitally – you take away the physical elements like touch, smell, and feeling of being in the store; so what you have to do is to ensure the online experience is as powerful as possible to instill positive emotions in the customer.

In the case of digital experience, this will be the user interface, the simplicity of navigation, the speed of page loading, the personalization of the page itself, and micro components to make the experience enriching while being bespoke, along with the checkout process remaining seamless, the omnichannel engagement fulfilling, among many others. If the experience is positive across the customer journey and all the multiple touchpoints, then the customer’s experience towards the brand will naturally be uplifting, leading to more engagement, advocacy, sales, and loyalty.

Digital experience has been way underrated – brands spend many more times the budget on traditional campaigns, loud billboards, and posters, but all these are turning into spam and noise for the customer. Even if the advert catches their eyeballs, and they land on a website that is poorly designed, all that money spent will be in vain. However, a superbly executed website or app has the potential to go viral effortlessly simply because of human nature – we experience something good and we want to share it with others, and if the site is made to be shareable easily, then it will proliferate.

There are many ways to measure DXP ROI – but rather than using a template and then measuring that against variables which may not matter or are very intangible, using a composable DXP allows you to build a martech stack against a specific business objective. So, for example, with all things being equal, you want to measure increase in conversions – adding a shopping cart + marketing automation and then tracking the differences over a period of time, or against the same interval as compared to last year or years before – this will allow you to see the incremental gains which you can then use against the tech/resource investment to get the ROI.

Breaking ROI down into specific objectives will allow marketers to pinpoint what really works for them and what doesn’t, rather than get a digital transformation solution that costs millions and waiting for a couple of years for that to ‘transform’ the revenue. It simply doesn’t work that way; apart from the tech investment, there is also change management you need to take into account – the retraining of people and reshaping of processes in order to fit the new ‘solution’, not to mention the attrition as well.

Asia is one of the most creative and competitive markets in the world, and they are constantly leading the pack with innovative ways of engaging the customer. For some of the brands, there is a ‘family business’ approach where marketers work in silos, and for the others, they pay millions of dollars a year for solutions that they barely even use 10% of. 

As marketers get savvier digitally, and the role of digital leaders become more empowered, they will be able to focus their investments better and get better ROI from those investments, as well as use agile solutions to adapt rapidly to changes in the market in order to take advantage of these disruptions.

The new marketer is the one who sees change as an opportunity, not as a tragedy. And with this new normal, the future of DXP in Asia is really the only way to go – whoever can embrace digital first, will displace the competition first. And once you gain that foothold, the others can only play catchup. Our younger generations are digital natives, and digital is the future as the world becomes a giant online city.

This article is written by Don Lee, managing director for APAC of CMS provider Magnolia.

The article is published as part of MARKETECH APAC’s thought leadership series What’s NEXT. This features marketing leaders sharing their marketing insights and predictions for the upcoming year. The series aims to equip marketers with actionable insights to future-ready their marketing strategies.

If you are a marketing leader and have insights that you’d like to share with regards to the upcoming trends and practices in marketing, please reach out to [email protected] for an opportunity to have your thought-leadership published on the platform.

Singapore – The digital experience platform of Magnolia, a global content management systems provider, has recently been recognized at the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant by Gartner.

The Magic Quadrant are market reports published by consulting firm Gartner based on qualitative data analysis in demonstrating market trends, such as direction and business nature. The report is conducted every one or two years to several technology industries.

Magnolia is the newest entry to this year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant, and recognition is afforded to its digital experience platform (DXP), the Magnolia DX Core. 

The said DXP, categorized under the ‘Niche Players in the Magic Quadrant’, carry capabilities that include content management, personalization, search, campaign management and digital asset management (DAM). It is often deployed by organizations in banking, manufacturing, communications, and travel and hospitality verticals for business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-employee (B2E) use cases.

“We believe that Magnolia provides the powerful capabilities that marketing teams need to quickly launch customer experiences without having to involve IT. Through its Visual SPA (Single-page app) Editor, Magnolia offers best-in-class authoring experience for omnichannel publishing by enabling marketers to fully design, control and preview experiences for any channel,” Magnolia said in a press statement.

For Magnolia CEO Tim Brown, the recognition from Gartner is a testament of a greater shift in “market demand from single-vendor DXP suites to ecosystems of integrated best-of-breed platforms.”

“Our vision of a composable DXP, built of deeply integrated best-of-breed solutions, enables brands to incrementally build out a high performance DXP that leverage existing proven components and services. Our advanced experience authoring and content management features coupled with a modern tech stack empowers all stakeholders. This combination enables the launch of new digital products and differentiated experiences at unprecedented speed,” Brown explained.

Meanwhile, Rasmus Skjoldan, CMO at Magnolia, commented that last year has seen enterprises moving towards the direction of forward-thinking business movement by “bringing high-quality digital experiences to their customers considerably faster than their competition.”

“We’re essentially seeing the sun rise for composable platforms that give enterprises a much faster way to launch digital experiences – and the first but clear glimpses of the sun setting for the suite platforms as they eventually become too slow for the modern enterprise. It’s a natural evolution for this market in which overly complex suites are replaced by a new approach,” Skjoldan stated.

In a statement provided for MARKETECH APAC, Magnolia Singapore’s general manager Don Lee stated that Magnolia’s recognition is a ‘big win’ for the future of flexible DXPs.

“We are incredibly proud to be featured in this quadrant for the very first time, and on top of that, leading the quadrant in vision. This is testament to the affirmation by our clients of our project success promise along with the flexibility of our composable DXP, allowing brands to build their digital experience platforms in any way they desire, either on premise or as a service,” Lee stated.