MarTech Interview with Thomas Peham, VP of Marketing at Storyblok

Please tell us a little bit about your role and responsibilities in Storyblok. How did you arrive at the idea of leading a high-value martech company?

I am the current VP Marketing at Storyblok and joined the company in 2020. Since then I’ve been building up and leading a marketing department of now 30+ team members operating in our core markets – US, Europe and APAC.

Before that, I lead marketing and growth at Usersnap. As the first marketing hire at Usersnap, my work included various strategic and operative activities in the area of marketing, product and customer success, helping grow revenue by 10x and team size by 4x.

Until April 2019, I worked as a Digital Marketing Manager at Dynatrace, a growth-driven B2B SaaS company that is the leader in software intelligence and application performance monitoring (IPO in 2019).

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What are your core offerings? Could you please tell us more about your customers and how you customize your Martech services to meet their requirements? CMS, USP, customers + results for any requirements

Storyblok is a headless CMS that enables developers and marketers to deliver powerful content experiences on any digital platform, one block at a time. Developers create flexible components that are independently managed by content teams using a visual editor and customisable workflow. Published content is available through an API, so changes are made once and will appear everywhere: websites, mobile, IoT, AR/VR, and beyond. Leading brands such as Marc O’Polo, PAYONE, and UPC use Storyblok to manage and share their content with the world.

We focus entirely on the benefits, not the features. Headless CMS is a very powerful innovation but most marketers don’t obsess over the technical details, they just want something that will enable them to do their job well.

As a result, we look at what we can do to make everything as simple and intuitive as possible. That’s how our Visual Editor came to be and why the visual editing within Storyblok is so much easier compared to other headless CMS. Providing a better editing experience also means that marketers and editors can push updates live within seconds which used to take them hours, or sometimes even days.

We know first-hand the challenges developers and IT teams face juggling all of their responsibilities. This is why we built Storyblok to be as seamless and easy to integrate as possible.

The last 5 years have been dramatic for the content management industry, particularly with Google and Apple advertising trends picking pace. Could you tell us how you managed to scale your martech development business in the last 5 years?

We have experienced amazing growth. Starting with a handful of small clients in 2019, we have grown to power more than 110,000 projects across 130 countries and recorded a six-fold increase in enterprise client growth in 2020. In 202,1 we even grew our team from 24 to now 150 people. We now work with some of the world’s largest companies on a huge range of projects.

We have used an approach that is now a big theme – product-led growth. We wrote articles on long-tail keywords that we wanted to rank on. With the main intention of informing, educating and later on, converting users to our product. For us, it was headless CMS. Headless CMS was bombarded with advertisements.

We produced many tutorials and articles written by us. Once we had established ourselves as a brand on Google, we continued to invest in content marketing for developers and marketers and started with local demand gen and field marketing activities, such as event sponsorship.

That’s how we’ve scaled. We didn’t pay anything for content marketing in the beginning. We didn’t have money. We started out trying to make money. We had time, so we wrote articles.

Over the years, the marketing scope has grown into the areas of demand generation, brand awareness (PR, AR, Social), content, product marketing, partner marketing and marketing operations.

CMOs are looking to invest in more secured martech solutions. Please tell us about enterprise security framework and data governance policies that help customers stake their faith in your CMS?

Storyblok’s robust set of features is supported by an ingrained dedication to security. We follow international standards of quality and take preventative measures for organisations of all sizes.

We’ve gone through the rigorous process of becoming ISO 27001 certified.

ISO 27001 is a set of internationally recognised standards for managing information security. It covers areas such as financial information, employee activity, and user data. Given how meticulous these standards are, ISO 27001 isn’t necessarily commonplace among CMSs. Storyblok had to demonstrate stringent compliance to security standards in a variety of areas, including but not limited to:

• Inclusion of information security practices during the development stage including threat modelling and risk assessments
• Correct implementation of business-enabling information security practices
• Encrypted, GDPR-compliant communications both internally and externally

Additionally, demonstrating adherence to these standards is an ongoing effort. Storyblok must continuously prove its commitment to safety to retain the ISO 27001.

Proactive preparations are essential to a secure enterprise CMS. Not only does this approach stop threats in their tracks, but it also offers peace of mind. You can devote more energy to your projects without worrying about what may happen to them in the worst-case scenario.

Thanks to the API-first nature of headless CMSs, threats are naturally contained to the area of the breach. Storyblok builds on this benefit by offering a variety of in-engine tools designed to enhance your safety.

One way is with an advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF). Our WAF automatically keeps your web applications and APIs safe from bots, excessive resource consumption, and other common security threats so you don’t have to.

Similarly, Storyblok offers AI-based intrusion detection through AWS Guard Duty. That means our system will continuously be keeping an eye out for any unauthorised activity, compromised data, and malicious IP addresses.

By following rigorous standards, we’ve set ourselves apart as an organisation that’s internationally recognised for our adherence to top-tier security standards. With enterprise-friendly features that prevent disastrous consequences while also making room for scalability, Storyblok stands out as one of the most secure headless CMSs available today.

What challenges do you face in leveraging AI and machine learning for CMS software development? Who owns, copyrights, authenticity?

One of the biggest hurdles is ensuring data quality. AI and machine learning algorithms require high-quality data to deliver accurate results. In a headless CMS environment, data is often distributed across different systems and may be inconsistent or incomplete. This can make it challenging to apply AI and machine learning algorithms effectively.

Another challenge is integration. Integrating AI and machine learning into a headless CMS solution can be complicated, especially if the solution is built using microservices and APIs. Ensuring that AI and machine learning algorithms can seamlessly integrate with the existing CMS architecture is crucial for success.

Additionally, ownership, copyrights and authenticity can be a concern when implementing AI and machine learning in CMS software development. It’s important to ensure data privacy and security are maintained and any intellectual property rights are respected.

Despite these challenges, AI and machine learning have the potential to revolutionise the way we approach content management. By leveraging these technologies, headless CMS solutions like Storyblok can improve data analysis, optimise content delivery and enhance the overall user experience.

Are you following all the buzz talk related to generative AI and GPT4? What are your key takeaways from bringing GPT4-like technologies to martech software development?

When implemented correctly, generative AI has the potential to help companies produce faster, more personalised customer communications based on historical data and interactions around the clock. It could also help companies qualify leads and respond to common queries much more rapidly. In the future, generative AI may even assist in creating new product names and strategic proposals.

However, one of the most thrilling prospects arising from this advancing technology – especially for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) looking to boost efficiency and reduce costs – lies in its potential to revolutionise content management systems (CMS).

The modern consumer demands much more from the online experience. More than ever, it’s about hyper-personalisation and customer-centricity. Brands need to be able to anticipate and address their customers’ individual needs and inspire demand.

Of course, this is no small feat. It requires businesses to work steadfastly to scale their brands. They must evolve their offering and communications to the ebb and flow of this dynamic behaviour. And marketers and developers must work closely together to develop a content approach that delivers the best business results.

Already, headless CMS technology, where the back-end content management functionality is separate from the front-end presentation layer, has played a big role in this. Headless CMS technology enables developers to create bespoke front-end experiences with any programming language or framework while providing content authors with a simple and intuitive interface to manage and distribute their content across all channels.

Its easy-to-use nature eliminates the need for manual reformatting of content for different interfaces, making the process more efficient and accessible even to those with minimal technical expertise. Unlike traditional monolithic stacks, headless CMS empowers teams to deliver customised digital experiences with greater flexibility and ease.

But this is just the beginning. Beyond enabling greater ease and flexibility, applying AI can take the headless CMS to a completely new level of smart operation. As many busy marketers and developers will know, modern content requirements can be challenging. For a brand to be taken seriously, it must produce high-quality content consistently. And it can’t afford to simply create more of the same content others are already producing. It must do something revolutionary – this takes time, effort and focus.

This is where generative AI comes in. With the ability to constantly process and analyse all associated variables in real-time through machine learning (ML), the integration of AI can deliver a much more effective content operation.

What is the future of AI in CMS adoption? Where do you see your company Storyblok heading to in the next 2 years with AI and big data science?

Generative AI is powerful on its own, but the real value comes from using it less like a standalone tool and more like an integrated part of content creation.

Recently, we got a taste of generative AI when our partner Virtual Identity applied it to its platform, creating a plugin to enable content creators to insert images generated by DALL-E whilst working on webpages without ever having to leave the CMS.

In one fell swoop, Virtual Identity had removed both the tedious nature of searching image libraries and the cost associated with buying stock photos. Creators could finally generate the image they needed in an instant, without ever having to leave the Storyblok CMS. And whilst once a distant vision, the reality is that the AI revolution is happening. It has the ability to change everything and create a content journey that is truly out of this world.

As for the future of AI in CMS adoption, this technology, undoubtedly, raises longevity questions around the companies that supply stock images. More importantly, however, it frees up time for employees to handle more complicated tasks. Innovation of this type is contributing to modern CMSs becoming great drivers of productivity.

In fact, Forrester recently found that aligning Storyblok with modern content operations could result in cost savings of roughly AU$335,000 over three years due to faster content lifecycle time to market.

Whilst this space is still evolving, much like other generative AI categories, DALL-E is trained only on pre-existing material. As such, it can only create new content that is similar to that work. DALL-E cannot be impulsive or spontaneous, generate fresh ideas or invent something new.

Of course, it also lacks the ability to replace humankind’s capability of original thought, ingenuity and empathy in line with the wider context. So, at least for now, there must some level of human oversight.

Whilst once a distant vision, the reality is that the AI revolution is happening. And it has the ability to change everything. This is especially pertinent for SMEs, offering an effective means of streamlining and optimising efficiencies amidst the current downturn. However, truly unlocking this opportunity will require a delicate balancing act between robot and employee. This is what will create a content journey that is truly out of this world.

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A message to new CMOs looking to invest in cloud-based CMS solutions for their organization

The starting point for any CMOs is ensuring that their website is the best it can be. Or to start small: That their website (which most often is the largest brand asset) is not embarrassing. After all, it is a complete waste of resources to invest in driving users to your website if, on arrival, the website fails to function properly and the potential sale is lost.

In fact, our recent Webarrassment survey of 6,000 consumers and 500 business leaders reveals a large divide between what e-commerce businesses think consumers want and what they actually need. Specifically, when asked what the three most important factors are in the online experience, 65% of consumers said ease of navigation, 50% said visual appeal, and 45% said simple design. In contrast, only 28% of businesses cited improving the design of their website as a priority, and 43% said they would add more features.

As for majority of CMOs and Heads of Marketing, here comes one of the major obstacles as updating tech.

Many CMOs to date don’t compare their Martech investments to other investments, such as media buy or ad spend. But they should. A better-performing martech stack can sometimes lead to better ROI than more money spent on Google or Facebook Ads.

It can still be daunting, in the current economic environment, to consider spending money on your website, especially if you seem to be ‘getting by’. However, muddling through by continually patching or bending your outdated solutions will ultimately be more costly and inevitably lead to your business losing its competitive edge.

In fact, Storyblok research revealed that 60% of consumers regularly abandon purchases due to poor website user experience, with businesses estimating it costs, on average, $72,000 in lost sales per year.

And remember, you do not need to do everything all at once. Undertaking small pilot renewal projects will enable you to keep costs down and give you the opportunity to better assess your ROI. We have seen firsthand how updated infrastructure can very quickly pay for itself with large increases in customer engagement and satisfaction leading to substantial growth in sales.

In fact, we recently launched the Storyblok ROI calculator to help businesses easily calculate their potential Return on Investment with Storyblok’s Content Management System.