Introduction
Demand for Celonis’ process mining technology has been growing rapidly for several years. While the company was quick to seize the opportunity, their marketers and web developers felt limited by the company’s legacy technology for managing digital content.
Content makers had to ask developers to deploy even simple web pages. The website relied on one CMS, and a separate solution was used for landing pages tied to digital campaigns. Content had to be ported manually from one digital channel to another. All the overhead of managing these separate systems made it harder — and slower – for different teams to collaborate.
Adopting Contentful allowed content creators in marketing, demand generation and customer success to publish and manage their own digital content without help from developers. The ability to preview content exactly as it will appear on the website lets creators fine-tune and edit content themselves, saving time that used to be spent going back and forth with a developer to get to a final version.
Contentful enables strategic collaboration
With Contentful as the single unified platform for content management across the enterprise, content marketing and web teams are more unified. As a result, they are delivering better experiences.
“Together, we’ve built out a new strategy around content management that really democratizes it for all our internal folks,” says Brandon Ortiz, vice president of marketing & content at Celonis.
The customer success team can now run webinars for current customers on the website, while demand generation is able to add tracking codes to any item the team wants to integrate with its campaigns: landing pages, assets such as ebooks or white papers, and webinar signup forms.
With control of content given back to those who create it, the development team has been able to improve the website itself and create tooling to support Celonis’ growth.
“We’ve built a ton of awesome features that would definitely not have been possible if we had to create each page manually, or with a page-template approach,” says Pekka Hiltunen, head of web design & web development at Celonis. New features include localized microsites; fast, easy A/B testing; personalization and tag-based content architecture; a new site-wide search function; and instant on-demand publishing for time-sensitive content such as press releases.
Contentful’s omnichannel model: enter once, propagate everywhere
As creators enter content into Contentful’s system and categorize each component, the omnichannel model ensures that the right content will appear in all the right places. Any update to a piece of content will be propagated to every occurrence throughout the digital estate.
Another benefit of Contentful’s model: The sandbox that creators use to build their content is not just a safe working environment for creating, previewing and editing content — it’s also a self-documenting website style guide. If the development team makes a change to a validation rule, or adds a new field to the website’s backend, that change is instantly reflected in the sandbox. There’s no need to manually update anything, and both the design system and its documentation are always up to date.
Fast and easy to implement
Celonis was able to migrate its website completely to Contentful from the legacy content management system in just two weeks, a remarkably fast turnaround. “It took one of my previous employers over a year to relaunch their website,” says Pekka.
Easy, fast publishing for all departments – not just marketing
Celonis initially adopted Contentful so the marketing department could move faster and help the company reach its growth targets. But the platform is so useful in all functions that Celonis quickly expanded its license from five employees to 85. Now departments across the enterprise can control their own content: customer success, engineering and many internal operations functions. All departments can now easily stay up to date with their communications, both to internal colleagues and to customers, suppliers and other stakeholders.