Josh Martin
Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Brightspot CMS

Today, brands need to create great content, distribute it across dozens of channels, in many forms, and in local languages. We spoke to Josh Martin, Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Brightspot CMS, to understand the overall state of CMS in the Content Marketing industry.

Tell us about your role at Brightspot CMS and the team/technology you handle?

As a product marketer, it is my responsibility to ensure we understand our prospect/customer’s needs, the state of the market and our competition. By blending these three data streams together, we can more efficiently reach prospects with the right message, in the right place and at the right time. By understanding these areas our business development team doesn’t have to sell, they consult and advise helping prospects reach the right decision for them.

In terms of technology relied upon, I leverage many tools: Salesforce, LinkedIn, Marketo, Hotjar, Google Analytics, etc. What’s most important is not necessarily the tool, but instrumenting the right analysis framework. We spend considerable efforts to look at our data through the lens of our personas to ID if we’re targeting the right people, using the right message and/or potentially missing out on a group.

What is the overall state of CMS in the Content Marketing industry?

The old adage of Content is king is showing its age. Now, it’s not just about the amount of content you create it’s the value, usefulness, and accessibility of that content that reigns supreme. Today, brands need to create great content, distribute it across dozens of channels, in many forms (audio, video, text, photo, voice controlled, etc.), and in local languages. Ultimately, your choice of CMS can be an enabler, or an inhibitor, allowing for — or preventing — the rapid distribution of content.

Tell us more about Brightspot’s technology and your target audience.

Brightspot was developed specifically to make publishing faster, more efficient and more enjoyable. Our product focus is to empower the right user with the right capabilities to eliminate obstacles on the path to publishing. This takes many forms, from tools for IT to deploy new sites quickly, to allowing marketing/editorial teams to easily make substantial front-end changes to their website.

How well do Brightspot’s products integrate with third-party APIs?

Brightspot was designed as an API-first platform and we have dozens of out-of-the-box integrations. The services for which we do not offer a predefined API, we make it easy for developers to connect to the service of their choice. We view Brightspot as a part of the Marketing Technology stack and, as such, it needs to interface with public and private APIs easily, which it does.

What is the best way to optimize Brightspot’s CMS?

Brightspot is very easy to use — with content creators publishing articles in less than 10 minutes. We host many of our customer’s sites as well so there is little for them to do to optimize the site from a deployment perspective. The simplicity of our interface could hide the powerful underpinnings of the platform that can allow users to create increasingly unique, forward-looking experiences. These capabilities include:

• The ability to push content/navigation/UI to mobile apps (and preview the changes easily)
• Support for headless implementations
• The ability to override standard design elements with a library of options
• The ability to create custom audiences to deliver personalized experiences to users

Brightspot is so easy to get started with that it’s useful for users to be inquisitive and continue to explore the platforms to offer ongoing website enhancements.

How important is the role of Artificial Intelligence in the CMS domain?

The idea of Artificial Intelligence is a natural progression for CMS technology. However, the term holds different meanings to different people. For Brightspot, it means the ability to eliminate manual tasks that can be better handled with technology. For example, we partner with AWS to automatically tag uploaded images leveraging Rekognition technology. Automated tagging leveraging AI and ML, eliminates the need for CMS users to identify what is in the image and tag appropriately. This saves time, increasing the speed in which content can be published. In 2019, we will continue to invest in partnerships augmented with our own technology to provide customers a comprehensive suite of tools that enhances their publishing workflows.

What Sales and Marketing technology tools does Brightspot currently use?

Brightspot is designed to be part of your Marketing Technology stack and, therefore, can be integrated with many MarTech platforms out of the box. For those that we do not support already, our API-first approach makes integrating with other offerings simple. The marketing team at Brightspot, which manages, updates and evolves our website via the Brightspot platform has integrated many marketing solutions into our implementation. Some of these integrations include marketing automation, CRM, Google Analytics, heatmaps, forms, and other reporting tools. We have also integrated with several partners such as Shutterstock, which allows the marketing team to search for images directly from our CMS to accelerate our publishing workflow.

What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?

In my role, I leverage many tools for research, analysis, and enablement. So, it’s no surprise that Google probably ranks as number one on my list. As a very collaborative team, our reliance on G-Suite, which makes commenting, sharing and group work simple and is a big benefit for our team’s productivity. Finally, as a content publisher who contributes regularly to our blog, I often leverage Brightspot. In past roles, I could never publish content myself, but the power of Brightspot allows me to create content, share and edit content all within the CMS. Our workflow capabilities ensure I’m always notified when changes are made and ultimately empowers my team to publish content quickly and efficiently.

What is the best piece of professional advice that you have received?

If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first – Mark Twain

It’s so easy to focus on small wins: Responding to the email that just came in, making minor edits on a document or hopping on a call to help out a colleague. While these certainly all have value, the question is: Are they the most valuable thing you can be doing? Often these activities are completed at the cost of harder substantial projects that inevitably get delayed as a result. Instead, I try to focus on activities that drive higher level business value and ensure they are done expertly and efficiently (i.e. buyer personas).

These projects often take a long time and require days or weeks before payoff — so it makes sense to push them off for more satisfying projects that can be checked off your list. But you’re not helping yourself or your company when you do this. Focus on the big wins, get them done (or chunk them up into parts so you make regular progress) and then take care of the smaller requests.

Thanks for chatting with us, Josh.

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