How to sky-rocket your marketing through custom software.

Software has become indispensable to modern marketing. Together with your team, you’re surely using numerous off-the-shelf solutions in your company’s marketing technology stack.

However, true digital transformation does not take place exclusively by means of one-size-fits-all tech products. Serious digital challenges require apt digital enablement, that is, owning your marketing technology so that it gives you a competitive advantage.

That said, let’s talk about 3 major problems most marketing organizations are facing that can and should be solved with innovative solutions:

1. Getting great-looking content out the door takes forever

Content creation is labor-intensive, but it doesn’t stop there. Publishing awesome-looking content to your website and putting it in front of your audience is hard too. You sure care about speed to market, so waiting on frontend devs to launch new components for content may be extremely stressful.

However, there’s not much you can do about it in a traditional setup of content being hard-wired to the frontend. This is due to the fact that, in today’s omnichannel reality, websites have become increasingly complex. Obviously, their design and UX needs to represent your brand well and make it stand out from the competition, so you don't want to be hindered by the amount of workload required by a traditional CMS.

What you need then is the flexibility and freedom that comes from decoupling content and the frontend. This decoupling is achieved by employing what’s called a headless CMS.

“Headless” is a software term that roughly means there’s no frontend. How so? A headless CMS handles the management of content but not its presentation. The presentation layer (UI) can then be governed independently, retrieving content from the CMS by means of an API.

This has immense consequences for the way you work. Content teams and frontend devs can work in parallel to get things done quicker. Devs are not limited by the frameworks and programming languages imposed by a traditional CMS, so it’s easier for them to code a great-looking website quicker using the tools and practices they are familiar with.

Best of all, a headless CMS is more future-proof when compared to relying on a regular CMS. Want to rebrand and entirely redesign your website? No problem. Unlike a traditional CMS which has layouts tied to content, the headless content management system won’t stand in the way. Need to roll out to a new platform? Sure thing, a headless solution will feed your existing content to new channels with ease.

2. A ton of manual work eats up time and productivity

Ok, so you’ve got a collection of systems in your martech stack. Now ask yourself one question: what are the repetitive manual tasks that your team performs? I’m not asking ‘if’ because I’m sure there are plenty!

Is there data that is regularly changed in spreadsheets before being manually entered elsewhere? Does data have to be gathered from multiple sources to keep proper track of your company’s digital media performance? Does the team manually edit ad copy across multiple platforms? Is content localization and internationalization a manual process? What about A/B testing and experimentation?

There are typically endless spreadsheets and e-mails flying around to facilitate the production of the above-mentioned things, coupled with frequent manual uploads and human error that inevitably occurs in the process. All of this can be terribly inefficient and a mess, and ultimately leads to delays and reduced productivity.

That’s where custom martech software can truly make a difference. Most of the manual work burdening your team can be automated through bespoke solutions that integrate across your tech stack.

Why haven’t you thought of this before then? The truth is, there are no off-the-shelf product categories for a solution of this kind because each and every company has different needs and processes. Every marketing organization has a very specific way of working. It’s no surprise then that you might have taken the status quo for granted.

Your martech stack doesn’t need to hold you back though. Custom software can expand it so as to truly move the needle on your organization’s productivity. At the end of the day, that’s what digital enablement is all about—making the most out of technology for the business.

3. Website development is costly and time-consuming

We’ve already discussed the issues surrounding content management for websites, however the problem runs deeper.

Oftentimes, marketing departments rely on multiple teams to get their features delivered. In large organizations it’s common to have a separation between the design team, the development team and the operations and infrastructure teams. However, all of these teams need to work together in order to deliver a feature end to end.

I know for a fact that this is a struggle for many marketing organizations and it goes beyond what seems like the purview of the marketing team. The interaction across multiple teams inherently has gaps in communication and creates a disconnect that ultimately leads to long delivery times, when there’s never enough time in the first place!

The disconnect between design, tech, and content is compounded when multiple websites and products are being created by an organization. In this scenario, the costs and delays are multiplied.

What if I told you sites can be developed cheaper and faster and with higher quality? Just like we discussed under point 2, a lot of this is a matter of automation through bespoke software. Again, you won’t find any off-the-shelf solution to this problem, because each company has different processes and workflows. These need to be analyzed in detail first, so that a holistic solution can be put into place.

While it’s true custom martech projects are no piece of cake, when done right, they’re well worth the cost. In the context of web development automation, Xolv.io helped the gaming company 2K create a bespoke publishing platform that saved them over $1,000,000 per year.

Needless to say, that’s quite a large chunk of change that could be put elsewhere in your marketing budget, especially that digital media spend hit an all time high last year and is likely to grow further.

Wrapping up, here are the 3 ways in which bespoke software solutions can skyrocket your marketing efforts, in a nutshell:

1. Switch to a headless content management system that’ll give you much needed freedom and flexibility with both content and its design in multiple channels, while allowing you to publish much quicker.
2. Automate all of the manual processes your team’s burdened with to maximize their productivity.
3. Reconnect design, content, and tech to up your web development game. Website coding automation will save your company both time and money.