The Digital Advantage: How to build a tech stack to grow revenue

In our ongoing series The Digital Advantage, we chat to today’s marketing leaders to explore and unpack all the current trends, challenges, and solutions senior marketing professionals need to know about. 

This blog series dives into some key highlights from the episodes, and we continue now with Dónal Ó Mearáin’s conversation with Jasmin Guthmann, Head of Corporate Communication at Contentstack, where they center their discussion on building tech stacks that grow revenue. 

Dónal and Jasmin discussed everything from creating ‘holistic content experiences’ to how to approach customizing your tech stack. The following excerpt provides some highlights from their conversation, but you can also watch the full episode below:

Dónal: Can you tell us a bit about Contentstack?

Jasmin: Contentstack is a headless CMS that acts like a ‘nucleus’; a ‘base’ for your tech stack — to which you can then attach different technologies. 

The spirit behind it is composable software. It’s all about building a flexible infrastructure so that you’re not ‘stuck’ with one solution. 

Related to this, I’m Vice President of the MACH Alliance — a not-for-profit, neutral institution that was founded to help organizations understand what ‘composable’ technology can do for them. 

It exists because, truth be told, most C Suites do not care too much about the details of their business’s tech stack! 

There are clearly many benefits to be gained from composable technology, and the Alliance is there to actively push the topic into the marketplace so that it becomes more aware of it. On top of this, it’s also about organizations actually understanding how to go from a legacy tech stack to a modern, composable tech stack.  

Dónal: I think it links right back to how people discover your brand, how they engage with your brand, and how they buy from your brand. We know that the number of digital channels available for marketers has increased exponentially — but the capacity to effectively deliver content experiences and user experiences has not kept up. 

Companies, post-pandemic, are feeling the pressure to deliver content — particularly in eCommerce/retail. With that in mind, are there any examples you can think of relating to the ‘strategic importance’ of content? For example, is there anyone you’ve noticed in the marketplace?

Jasmin: Here’s a practical example. If you think about ASICS, the sports company — a popular brand — the way that they think about content these days is so much broader than some of their rivals in the marketplace. They basically create a new channel for themselves every day. 

Their thinking is that they want to “get to” a consumer before they “discover” ASICS themselves. What ASICS is actively working on is creating an ecosystem where they start targeting someone from the point where they might be starting to consider, for example, taking up running as a hobby. 

Someone may then want to sign up for a running event in their area, and this next step in the user journey is mapped by ASICS. Saying this, it’s incredibly difficult to ensure that a tech stack’s components are all seamlessly integrated so that they are all ‘speaking to each other’, can map the user journey correctly, and can then push content out in the right way to all the different channels and touchpoints required. 

A touchpoint can be anything from the gas pump when you fill up your car to the register in a supermarket when you're paying for your groceries and it might display a little personalized message that says, “Hey Jasmin, don't you want to join another race once you've put away the groceries?”

That’s where a platform like Bynder comes in. You play a pivotal role in helping organizations manage all those different assets and channels.

And maybe we should stop using the word ‘channels’ actually, because it’s all ‘one’!

Dónal: It’s ‘omnichannel’ now! In fact, we know from the research we undertook last year that 66% of marketers are utilizing 11 or more channels. 

It’s also about the entire content experience — of which digital experience is a part — but we have to remember that ‘content’ is at the core of everything.

Saying that, I know that during the month of February, Bynder powered content delivery to over 18 billion requests across 5,000 websites. And that's just websites!

Bynder is a one-stop shop for managing your digital assets. Organize and locate exactly what you need in seconds with an intuitive filter structure that’s tailored to your business’s unique needs.

Dónal: Moving on now, are there any examples you can give me about companies who have been able to increase their speed to market because they’re using the right tech stack?

Jasmin: It’s all about speed — the faster you can move, the more successful you're likely to be. A good example would be Emma Sleep,  the mattress company. They are a direct-to-consumer (D2C) business, and you can just imagine how important revenue is to them. 

They needed a different tech stack because it was taking them too long to launch new projects. We’re talking about from several weeks to perhaps months here.

They recognized that their technology was holding them back, so they needed to do something about it. 

They can’t just stop operating a $240 million-dollar business to do some technological ‘maintenance’ though! So, they swapped their engine while still open for business — and it all worked out fine. 

For Emma Sleep, they were focused heavily on launching new websites in new countries, so what they ended up doing was — once they left their legacy system (which was already highly-customized by the way, but even then, it was too slow for what they needed) — launching 39 new, country-specific websites in a mere 12-months.

They didn’t take the ‘rip and replace’ approach either. They ‘chipped away’ at one piece of tech at a time, and soon they were able to fully harness the capabilities of the new composable tech stack. I know for a fact that it’s been a huge success for them.

Enjoyed these episode extracts? The Digital Advantage is a regular video series by marketers for marketers who want to create engaging content experiences to differentiate their brand from the competition. Catch up with the previous episodes.

*Please note that some of the wording in the above conversation has been edited for clarity and conciseness.