We recently wrapped up DrupalCon Global 2020. And we’d like to give you a sneak peek into our session. Our session Content Delivery of Tomorrow, Created by Drupal Today revolved around why content should be considered a part user experience and how Drupal enables content writers to reduce content roll-out time. With real-life examples and success stories where organizations that have adopted Drupal and empowered their Marketing teams to create a sustainable competitive advantage.
Over recent years, new features and roll-outs have evolved Drupal to become more than a CMS platform. Today, it is a Digital Experience Platform! As marketers, we are in a constant rush to bring forth contextual and targeted content for users. Drupal makes this content delivery seamless, effective, and faster.
Let’s take a look at Digital Around the World 2020
Digital platforms have experienced a surge in 2020 and Digital Marketing is getting more competitive. COVID-19 has uncovered different stress points for Marketing and IT.
Marketing acknowledges the need to connect with people - quickly and authentically. And we can’t emphasize enough on the need to deliver content at an elastic capacity and accelerated pace
Marketing matters now more than ever!
The world is full of innovative products, services, technologies, and solutions today. Innovation alone cannot sustain a business; it must be paired with marketing. The pandemic is pushing marketers to re-evaluate their digital marketing roadmap. For this:
- We Need to Elevate the human experience
Customers are more connected and empowered than ever before, it’s essential to deliver tailor-made and memorable experiences. We need to connect design, technology, and content to unlock the power of the human experience
- Qualify and quantify brand resilience
You need to ensure that your brand is capable of meeting disruptive behaviours and trends. This helps your brand anticipate and respond in moments of uncertainty.
Marketing’s forte is consumer connection, and the pandemic has taught marketers to do it quickly and authentically. And to thrive in a disrupted world we need to Adapt, Innovate, and Integrate.
Viral vs Long tail marketing
Brands usually adopt either a viral marketing approach or a long tail marketing approach
Viral marketing is more like producing content that catches fire. The concept of viral marketing definitely deserves some revisiting as we enter a new decade/year.
- Viral is cool, but difficult to predict
- Long-tail marketing is more viable and can be built into practice. And we stand by Longtail marketing :)
Challenges marketers face
Marketers are facing trouble with collaboration across teams, which also acts as a hurdle for them to execute marketing experiments at a faster pace. Managing change is also becoming difficult for marketers and they struggle with agility. These challenges are preventing the alignment of goals when it comes to marketing and IT functions.
For example, if we have to create a landing page for a webinar that we are hosting. Once the content is ready, we will have to be dependent on the dev team to help me build a page and place the content, maybe integrate it with analytics, redirect the audience, add a contact form, etc.
Content Marketing
Content marketing lies at the core of every marketing team and the more content you put out there – the better for you! But when you have websites, social pages, and blogs, to work with, it can feel impossible to deliver everything with quality and speed. This results in a ‘The Content Crisis.’ One cannot solve the Content Crisis by just working harder. Instead, you need a plan and a platform that will help you deliver the volume and quality of content your audience demands.
A good editorial experience
While we have been emphasizing on the challenges of marketers and stats around content marketing, we’d like to shed some light on why a good editorial experience is important. Content editors/managers are likely the ones who use/visit your website the most. If they don’t like it, your CMS implementation is a failure!
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation tools help automate repetitive processes, provide personalization, improves efficiency, performance and also drives more leads and revenue!
Automation Offers:
- More Efficient and Effective Marketing Campaigns
- Conserve Resources and Be More Creative
- Create a Better Customer Experience
With the endless benefits of Marketing automation, a considerable chunk of marketers thinks creating quality automation is their number 1 challenge. Marketers still struggle with data management, optimization, and segmentation or finding the right marketing automation tool.
Adapt your technology - overcome disruption
With the explosion of content, and the influx of digital users you need to adapt your technology to overcome the disruption. And this is where Drupal and Digital Experience Platforms come in!
Digital Experience Platforms - Drupal
Brands need to provide content experiences outside a website, justifying the shift from web content management to DXPs.
Today brands need to provide content experiences outside a website. CMSs like Drupal that go beyond the web, are the backbone of a Digital Experience Platform! Drupal can bring together marketing information systems, SEO, advertising, analytics, tracking, and content to create robust digital marketing campaigns.
Drupal empowers marketing individuals and teams to:
- make decisions
- integrate their chosen tools
- manage content better
- and make the most out of their Drupal websites
They can drive team success with easy content authoring tools that put their goals within reach - faster.
Why does Drupal have an edge?
Drupal is a powerful tool for agile marketing and content management, and it doesn’t require any prior tech knowledge! Drupal’s content-first, commerce-first, and community-first marketing solutions help achieve the most ambitious business goals. With Drupal, it’s about giving your team the tools to move smart and agile. To make the biggest impact whether you’re seeking lead generation, conversion, or online sales. Drupal plays well with others, offering endless automation and integration opportunities
Making content admins contextual with
The first level is creating the content, but then managing it afterwards, being able to edit it, and interact with it also becomes very critical. Drupal puts many controls in the Admin experience, it allows site builders and editors to create content types, configure the fields that they use, and even configure some of how that data will be displayed to users.
Drupal delivers:
- Smart Content
- Allows for flexible content delivery
- Offers translation and localization opportunities
- Seamless third-party integrations
- And omnichannel personalizations
Content Admin UI
Drupal’s Admin UI offers Intuitive tools that facilitate ease in content creation, workflow and publishing. Content admins can go and sort through the content in the content view. With filters for Publishing status, the Type of content, Title, Language.
Workflows - With all the tools in place Drupal offers a controlled content editing workflow. Content starts as a Draft - Gets Reviewed - Goes through a Revision Cycle - Is then Archived - Published.
Content moderation - displays who changed what, when, and can also revert to an older version of that content
New Editor
And aren’t we all excited about The New Editor? This out of the box Drupal 8 and now Drupal 9 brand new editor is built on CK editor and empowers content admins to create their own content, allowing the tech team to focus on development rather than tweaking content. Along with the usual formatting, this editor is now customizable!
- You can now embed content from external sources like Youtube or Spotify
- Custom styles can be applied directly to your text
- Offers better previews
- And a Mobile-friendly interface for content editors to edit content on-the-go!
In-place editing
Drupal’s In-place editing allows content editors to edit the content on the screen itself and doesn’t require editors to go to the edit page, making the content even more flexible
Media Library
Drupal 8 and now Drupal 9 comes with a Media Library! This media library is Built into the editor and it acts as a repository to manage and upload/bulk upload your media
Layout Builder
And how can we not talk about the Layout Builder! The layout builder basically transforms the whole experience of creating web pages. Our marketing team can create beautiful case studies, service landing pages with the layout builder in no time! And with zero dev dependency!
Layout builder offers:
- Template Control - it puts the creation and “design” of content types in the admin experience. Layout builder enables site builders to create visual templates and lets authors just fill in fields
- Convenient Interface - featured with the drag-and-drop option and not just for the blocks but to the fields of a content type. This gives content editors complete control while building their layouts.
- Customization - You can customize all the individual entities.
- It offers Layouts ranging from one column to two columns bricks to 3 rows 3 columns in 2nd row by simply creating or updating a few template files.
A few Advantages of Layout builder includes:
- The ability to Review your changes whilst building
- Easy user experience
- Spin up landing pages for campaigns or promotions in no time!
Flexible Designs
Flexible pieces of media that can be moved around at will and not weaved in one way to use them together, you can use the components in different ways. Flexibility and scalability, structural variations and options that are smart, flexible layouts, etc. The author shouldn’t have to think about responsive design, as it provides a really good mobile experience.
Third-party integrations
Customer experience is not solely defined by your CMS, your system must be able to integrate seamlessly with other technologies, CRM’s, channels, and other marketing tools. Enabling marketers to deliver a cohesive customer experience. Drupal integrates seamlessly with a wide ecosystem of digital marketing technology and other business applications. Drupal’s API-first approach connects content to other sites and applications, making content more powerful.
Acquia Site Studio
While the Drupal community is continuously striving to improve the content editing experience, we’d like to talk about a couple of no-code/low-code platforms that make content marketers lives easy! Acquia Site Studio is not only a low-code technology for Drupal developers but it is also a no-code tool for marketers.
Acquia Site Studio offers features like:
- Site-Building - this enables building new components effortlessly with an intuitive component builder tool in the UI. This can be achieved without writing a single line of code, enabling the development teams to focus on high-value features, while your marketing team can create beautiful experiences with Site Studio’s admin interface.
- Styling - Site Studio not only equips marketers with creating/building but also allows them to style components - such as colour, background image, font. This means marketers can tweak components without making design revisions or assigning a developer to implement them.
- DIY Components - provides the freedom and flexibility to respond to varying marketing demands by creating new components in no time.
- Reuse - allows features and content to be reused across pageshttps://www.qed42.com/sites/. This is especially beneficial to marketing teams that have numerous sites they need to get up and running quickly.
Read more about Acquia Site Studio here.
Faster, easier personalization for Marketers - Acquia Personalization
Another no-code application is Acquia Personalization also known as Acquia Lift:
- It helps marketers quickly and easily optimize customer experiences.
- Enables you to segment your audiences and deliver personalized experiences across any channel or device
- Acquia Personalization is optimized for Drupal and it allows you to take customer data and customize your content distribution
- It also enables marketers to create complex personalized campaigns
- Its Enhanced scheduling helps marketing teams align personalizations to promotions and events
- It also comes along with real-time dashboard and analytics to review activities and metrics for both optimizing and validating your marketing investment
Digital Experience Platforms that Deliver
"DXP is an integrated software framework for engaging a broad array of audiences across a broad array of digital touchpoints".
– Gartner
Brands like Nestle, Pfizer, Novartis, Bayer, Grofers, and many more are thinking beyond websites and creating robust digital experience platforms. Enterprises are standardizing their marketing stack on Drupal -- funded by Marketing, driven by the knowledge of the customer journey, and powered by the explosion of non-browser channels and the new ecosystems of SaaS, Martech, and Microservices. This new landscape brings with it the ability to monitor, analyze and control the customer journey which the Marketing department expects.
Drupal's flexibility allows for standardisation of branding, Design systems, Authoring Experience, Content efficacy across hundreds and thousands of sites.
- This leads to saving costs and improving efficiency.
- Launch of a new micro or regional site doesn’t take months but weeks or even days (for instance Pfizer, was launching one website per day at a point).
Use Cases
Multi-site Rollouts for a Fortune 500 Swiss FMCG Company
Leading brands are navigating disruption with Drupal. We delivered Multi-site Rollouts for a Fortune 500 swiss FMCG company with Acquia Site Factory. We Built and designed 70+ websites using the same design philosophy and a single codebase using Acquia Cloud Site Factory architecture. Looking at the stats we can’t deny that Drupal has empowered their teams! Rolling out 75 sites in 3 months.
HCP Engagement & Onboarding portal for a Leading Global Medicines Company
We built an accurate, relevant, and easily accessible healthcare provider portal.
Landing page - choice of sections provided to create various landing pages with various options to apply different type of layout blocks on a single page.
We Enabled the client to create landing pages effortlessly by applying different types of layout blocks on a single page. And Eliminated the need to redirect to other platforms by enabling the client to build microsites for various product pages. We also integrated their platform with Salesforce and enabled Personalized Content - Sites now behave differently based on the area of expertise or the role of the current user.
Marketing CMS for Grofers Native Mobile App
We worked with Grofers on their CMS strategy for their Mobile App intending to reduce dependencies between marketing and engineering teams, easy and quick content publishing, run marketing experiments, and improve the overall throughput and velocity.
Enabling Ashoka.org's Presence Across 90+ Geographies with Localisation
Ashoka’s website is served in 90+ countries, every page on the site has the potential of having a localized version for all the countries.
What does the future look of Content look like?
- We see more organizations adopting Digital Experience Platforms
- Omnichannel publishing
- Brands opting for Decoupled architecture and Centralized Content Management
- We see more low code platforms like Site Studio
- Of course tons of automation