Stop waiting on devs, start creating experiences

Marketers: Ditch the dev bottlenecks. Get back to making your website experiences brilliant.

Building and maintaining brilliant digital experiences shouldn't be this hard. If you're accountable for complex websites with large volumes of content, multiple content editors, and integrations with other systems to maintain - this blog is for you.

The buck stops with Marketing, Comms and Digital teams. You're on the hook for demand generation, brand building, customer engagement and experience delivery. You're managing everything from brand compliance, to high-performing campaigns and marketing ROI.

But you just can’t seem to get it done without IT or developer backlogs, or external resources.

Why? The tools you have at your disposal are inadequate. To get a new landing page created or a campaign spun up, you need a developer. Even small updates, like adding a new component or button, get stuck in a long development queue.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Creating, personalizing, testing and securing the sites under our remit shouldn’t take months. It shouldn’t require a degree in coding.

I’ve lived this life, and Squiz is looking to reimagine it for marketers, content editors and digital teams.

A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) like Squiz helps teams do these five key jobs quickly and independently:

1. Create webpages and campaigns, fast

Assembling webpages and end-to-end campaigns should be quick.

You simply want to add headers, images, copy, and forms. But often, it’s just too hard without developer support.

DXPs offer a solution. Easy-to-use functionality that enables fast content updates, in just a few clicks.

Low-code tooling: get jobs done faster and without the need for developer support.

Squiz's visual page builder offers a no-code way for non-technical teams to build pages and campaigns. They can scale by cloning pages and tweaking content. No need to start from scratch every time.

Marketing teams can also use the Squiz no-code form builder to create custom forms with drag-and-drop functionality and pre-built templates, without code.

Pre-built components: self-serve with a library of pre-built components to build webpages fast. These include hero banners, card listings, accordions, and more.

Squiz also incorporates design systems into these components – meaning you can easily maintain your brand across pages and sites.

TAKEAWAY: with low-code and no-code features, marketers can work autonomously, without relying on developers – making it quick and easy to spin up a webpage or campaign landing page in hours, not days (or weeks!).

2. Manage content with ease

Marketing teams need to have ownership of all website content. That’s your copy, images, videos, documents, page layouts – the works. But this becomes tricky and time-consuming – especially if you have multiple sites and channels to govern.

Manual processes can open marketers up to out-of-date and duplicate content, broken links, a confused brand, and, above all, a disjointed user experience.

You need tech that allows you to:

• Know and control who has access to add or change content
• Maintain a consistent design, brand, and tone across the site
• Monitor for duplicate and/or conflicting messaging
• Ensure outdated and redundant content is removed

A DXP includes features that combat these challenges.

Permissions control: you can create role-based access controls to ensure only authorized users can create and edit content.

This helps maintain brand consistency, mitigate risks – such as publishing sensitive or inaccurate information and broken links – and ensures compliance with relevant regulations.

Content consistency: create once, publish everywhere. Update copy and images in one place and push out these changes across all sites. This removes manual duplication, saving time and ensuring consistency across multiple channels.

Content reusability: with Squiz, you can bring content together from different CMSs. For example, if your organization publishes news and updates in multiple places, you can reuse this content and share it on your official news site. Saving time and removing the need for manual duplication.

Content discoverability: to ensure site visitors can find content, no matter where it lives, our clients use our search functionality, multi-source indexing. That includes all your domains and sub-domains, social media, databases, directories, and more.

The results curator also allows you to customize the results displayed on your search page based on the user's query.
This delivers more relevant search results to your users, meaning they can find the information they need, really fast.

TAKEAWAY: With a DXP you can take back control of your content – with features that ensure all content is up to date, on-brand, error-free, and discoverable.

3. Use insights to improve performance

So you’ve governed who can create content and made it discoverable for users – now you’re faced with a new challenge.

How do you know if your users like what they see? A DXP can help.

A/B testing: test different copy, images, and CTAs to know which performs best. Use this data to constantly improve – boosting engagement and conversion.

Search analytics: Understand what users are searching for using an intuitive search analytics dashboard. View unanswered queries, most popular pages, where your users are from, and search trends. Gain insights to make data-based decisions on how to improve performance.

Content performance: Understand areas to improve content with a content auditor that offers an in-depth understanding of your site content and metadata. Make improvements to readability standards, page load times, and SEO.

SEO insights: the SEO auditor provides insights into how well a page performs based on a particular keyword, number of indexed words found, and tips to improve its rank.

TAKEAWAY: gather insights into how your content performs and where to improve. Then use this data to drive future projects.

4. Target users with the right content

Personalization is a marketer's dream. But it’s often seen as too hard, overwhelming, and a waste of resources.

You may have a range of audiences you need to target with your website, which becomes nigh-impossible without the right insights and connectivity between solutions.

With the right tech (cough, cough, a DXP), personalization becomes easy.

One source of customer data: the DXP will connect your siloed solutions – allowing data to flow across different systems, channels, and devices. So you can better understand user journeys and track customer interactions in real time.

User segmentation: Group your users based on behaviors. User segmentation creates user groups based on specific criteria and enables data-driven decisions and personalized experiences.

Tailored content: with the data you’ve collected, you can understand what resonates with your audience. Then, use your segments to serve different content, webpages, and campaigns accordingly. For example, personalize:

• Banners
• Images
• Layouts
• Copy
• CTAs

You could deliver content in multiple languages, provide region-specific information, or deliver content targeted at returning users.

This, coupled with A/B testing, allows marketers to constantly improve user journeys to increase engagement and conversions.

TAKEAWAY: Increase your user engagement and conversions by personalizing user journeys. Serve different content to different user segments based on preferences.

5. Create accessible experiences

An often overlooked but crucial task is ensuring digital experiences are accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. This involves adhering to web accessibility guidelines and implementing assistive technologies.

But, it is hard to remain compliant. And is often another task that gets pushed to the back of the priority list. With a DXP you are covered.

Accessibility checks: a DXP offers built-in accessibility checkers to identify and fix issues. These tools scan your websites for accessibility problems and provide suggestions for improvement.

The Squiz DXP provides a series of in-depth reports. These help to identify and fix accessibility issues against WCAG guidelines – ensuring you’re meeting requirements for:

• Color contrast
• Keyboard navigation
• Fonts
• Page hierarchy

TAKEAWAY: Ensure your experiences are accessible from the get-go and receive suggestions from accessibility checkers to identify and fix current issues.

Wrap up

DXPs are changing the game for marketing teams trying to manage content-heavy and highly complex websites.

By streamlining crucial tasks, teams can work faster, make data-driven decisions, and create more personalized, engaging digital experiences.

Take it one step further with the Squiz DXP. Put the power back in marketers' hands by removing developer reliance:

• All the capabilities you need to build personalized experiences
• Low-code tooling, so you can do it fast without developer support
• Continuous testing and optimization to incrementally improve
• Easy integration with other systems
• Speed, security, and ease, driven by SaaS. No expensive, painful upgrades and no more security vulnerabilities you have to manage on your own.