Assemble intelligent experiences at scale with Contentful Studio

Last fall, we gave the world a first look at Contentful Studio. Building on the openness and extensibility of the Contentful Platform, we made clear our aspiration to address the needs of the entire digital team — not just developers but also key user groups like designers, marketers, and content editors. 

Think of it as the enfranchisement of tools for better copy, layout, and design. As articulated by Ben Lempert, Director of Web and Content at digital insights platform Heap: “We’re working to democratize content production. This means enabling people from across the company to produce content and put it on the website. Contentful gives us the guardrails for that so our site doesn’t turn into the Wild West.”

Today, we’re excited to announce general availability of Contentful Studio so that more of our customers can try it for themselves and see the benefits. We’re confident that Contentful Studio will be an indispensable tool for the entire digital team, supporting marketers and designers to better assemble content into differentiated experiences, built from their own design components, and tailored to each audience and customer.

Bring your digital teams together 

Every digital team wants to collaborate to build something amazing. You want to build something incredible, memorable, thrilling, educational, entertaining, perhaps even all of the above. The two factors required to make that happen consists of two things: the content itself, and how that content is displayed. The experience, in other words. 

Contentful Studio brings your digital teams together and provides the structure needed to visually assemble intelligent experiences at scale — reducing the time-to-impact from months to minutes.

How do we make this happen? Contentful Studio shares a common thread with Contentful Platform, which places an emphasis on the importance of “structure.” 

In the same way that structured content is the market-beating advantage that comes with adopting composability, Contentful Studio offers you the flexibility of structured design on a visual canvas where you can quickly assemble dynamic experiences that can be changed, experimented with, and refined at scale.

Assemble

Your teams can easily bring the design components you already use from your design system or front-end code, structure them for use with Contentful Studio, and use them to assemble experiences that scale across all of your markets and customers.

Intelligent

Non-technical team members are empowered to create and deploy experiences at speed, and update them quickly when needed. With Contentful Studio, we’ve introduced a new way to define and structure components for consistency and scalability, whether human or generated with AI. With our canvas, you can visually assemble these quickly and propagate changes across your experiences. 

Consistency and scale

And there’s no concern over maintaining consistency, since the design components uphold brand standards for them. Once these experiences are built, the team can work in harmony to manage and reuse them everywhere to grow rapidly across brands, teams, and markets.

What’s stopping you from building faster?

Let’s look at a typical scenario in a world where Contentful Studio doesn’t exist. On an organizational level, your developers are often pulled away from their most impactful work to make tweaks and revisions. Here’s a couple of examples.

“Our marketing team gets a lot of pressure to deliver conversions,” one customer in the healthcare industry told us. “They need to experiment by moving a button,” but they’re unable to do it without developer support.

Another customer from the financial sector shared this eye-opening anecdote: “Adding two unique benefits to a table and changing color to black required submitting a JIRA ticket to our central development team … and took about six months to change this component.”

Six months. Let that sink in for a moment.

Sure, asking a full-stack web developer to move a CTA button or add a few lines to a table is like asking a professional athlete to play with a yo-yo. It’s not the best use of their talents, so simple requests like these are shunted to the back of the line.

And what if your marketers and designers require more than making a change, but to create entirely new experiences –– landing pages, campaign pages, or entirely new marketing sites, based on existing patterns and components — without the help of a developer?

The bottom line is that your marketers and designers can’t publish, edit, or optimize experiences independently — meaning they can’t move as fast as they need to when a brilliant idea strikes. Nor are they able to test out tactics that might make all the difference for the business in terms of higher conversions and lead generation.

The friction between the two parties may result in short-term solutions that are not ideal. Your team, being creative, will likely come up with workarounds, but these may be expensive, clunky fixes that keep their content isolated and break frequently. As a result, developers are often required to clean up the mess.

Change is here

The situations outlined above are common to many customers we’ve spoken with. The same tiresome routine that starts with a lack of autonomy, leading to jerry-rigged solutions, and then being trapped in a creative AND technological cul-de-sac… Rinse and repeat.

It’s time for a change. ​​By freeing digital teams to do impactful work with Contentful Studio, they’ll be more efficient and effective, reducing the turnaround time required to get more sublime digital experiences into the market.

Case in point is one enterprise customer we worked with in early access for Contentful Studio. This is a leading telecommunications company with a global footprint; after an initial setup of two working days, their content team successfully rebuilt many of their most impactful pages without the need for developer intervention.

Now they’re able to design their own components when they’re needed, and can reuse content as necessary across multiple channels and use cases. Mission accomplished.

What’s next

So, there you have it. Structured content meets structured design, and content production is further democratized for the benefit of all. 

Based on extensive feedback from our customers, we’ve been hard at work building a set of capabilities to support every branch of the modern digital team and the most innovative way to design within Contentful. The result is Contentful Studio, which empowers your digital teams to visually assemble intelligent experiences at scale. 

Contentful Studio is generally available now to all customers on the Premium tier. Please contact your account manager for more information about pricing and a personalized demonstration of its features and capabilities.

More details in our press release: Contentful Studio Launches, Transforming Digital Team Efficiency While Shortening Time-to-Impact From Months to Minutes

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