About Contentful
Contentful’s content platform helps over 30% of the Fortune 500 and thousands of brands around the world create and manage digital experiences for their customers.
Contentful has around 800 employees and has doubled its revenue annually in the past four years. The PMM team is responsible for messaging and positioning to share with the rest of the marketing department and to “activate” across the company.
The Problem
Paul Biggs, Director of Product Marketing and Stephanie Perozo, Sr. Product Marketing Manager were experiencing the challenges of keeping up with Contentful’s fast growth. Not only were additional people being added to the company, but they were also adjusting their positioning to keep themselves as leaders in the market.
“We were constantly redefining the boundaries of our space. We had to move, build and test quickly. We experimented with messaging for different audiences; added messaging for new channels and new use cases.”
And amidst all this change they had to keep all their content and people up to date with the latest messaging.
“We were helping internal folks, sellers, partners and even investors understand our unique position and value. But when messaging also lives on web, in docs, decks, wikis and other tools, messaging refreshes were difficult to manage and consistency became a challenge.”
The Solution
Contentful began using GrokSpark to help them more efficiently manage and scale their messaging while ensuring consistency during their company’s high growth.
The Setup Process
Stephanie was able to use GrokSpark to help build a taxonomy for the messaging with multiple levels to cover the high-level brand narrative with the ability to drill down into the details.
“It was pretty straightforward once we knew what we wanted our messaging framework to be. I uploaded .csv files for the message types that had a lot of messaging to save time and then went through relating everything up and then iterating on an initial set of Messaging Docs to get them the way I wanted them for the launch to the rest of the marketing team.”
Driving Consistent and Correct Usage of Contentful’s Messaging
Businesses that are scaling quickly usually have pain around their messaging….
“Typically, if you grow really quickly as a business, your messaging will get stretched, manipulated, twisted, and in the worst-case scenario, completely discombobulated.”
But by defining the messaging they wanted their people to use and codifying it in the GrokSpark Messaging Hub, Contentful was able to keep this from happening.
“We were able to define what we wanted our messaging to look like and capture the most important elements. By creating this in the GrokSpark Hub we were able to not only help people use it consistently, but also correctly.”
Becoming More Strategic About Messaging
With their Messaging Hub initial setup complete, Contentful Product Marketers were able to worry less about keeping up with the pace of change and instead focus on being more strategic. With the hub rolled out to the Marketing team, Stephanie and the PMM team could see use cases to expand messaging to go beyond the marketing team to Sales Development Reps, Sales Enablement and even Customer Success Managers. Furthermore, the message maps and Docs in GrokSpark helped them understand where they had messaging that was missing so they could quickly flesh out areas where they needed more detail.
“When you have a technical product like Contentful, or any other kind of enterprise software, you need to make sure you articulate certain aspects very accurately and deliberately in order to showcase feature differentiation or how your approach is better. You can’t do this in your main messaging doc because it’s too detailed, so you need a space to be able to drill down into those special tidbits so you can help others understand how it’s articulated, where it should be used and who it’s interesting for. GrokSpark was the tool to help us do this.”
Users Can Quickly Find the Specific Messaging They Need
One of the challenges with messaging as a business scales is just the sheer volume of users and their requests for messaging for specific situations. Whether it’s to create a new piece of content, launch a new campaign or simply follow up with a sales email, there are lots of requests for finding the “right messaging.”
“Each group that uses GrokSpark is now able to quickly find the specific messaging needed for each situation….whether it’s for partners, the demand team or content, they can easily self-serve to find the messaging they need.”
Saving Time and Increasing Consistency
Stephanie and the Contentful PMMs have been able to hone their craft of managing and disseminating messaging.
“GrokSpark has become so ingrained with how we create and communicate our messaging that it’s hard to imagine life without it. I am certain a world without GrokSpark would be more chaotic and inconsistent.”
And they have been able to save time while doing it:
“Plus it would require a lot more time getting things done like creating and auditing content, communicating messaging updates with the rest of the organization, etc.”
What’s next?
With a solid messaging program in place, Contentful’s PMM team is now looking to further enhance what they can deliver users.
“We’ve had requests to include verticals and competitors in our messaging hub. Obviously this was a sales ask and one that we can now easily deliver on by simply relating messaging types… versus creating a doc or deck for each way a customer story can be positioned. Time saver AND Game changer.”
Summary
GrokSpark Messaging Hub helps Contentful:
- Save time by more efficiently managing and communicating messaging across the organization
- Be more consistent and correct in the usage of messaging
- Enable users to easily drill down from high-level narrative to supporting details
- “Change the game” by quickly giving users the messaging they need for every situation
“The phrase we’ve heard the most about GrokSpark is ‘it’s a game changer’. I’ve heard this same phrase from marketers to sellers and even partners.”