Extu accelerates speed to market for reseller marketing campaigns

Extu specializes in through-channel marketing, working closely with nearly 4,000 channel partners, also known as resellers. The digital marketing campaigns Extu creates for its channel partners get the brand’s content in front of the end users. These also position the resellers as experts in their field, keeping them at the forefront of the buyer’s mind.

 “This is an area where our company goes above and beyond,” said Tara Yukawa, Extu's vice president of marketing solutions. “Simply put, our channel marketing solution helps brands better engage their channel partners, clearly understand their customers and drive sales.

Extu’s digital campaigns include thought leadership, brand and lead generation content that is delivered via email, hosted on partner-branded microsites and shared on the partners’ social channels,” Yukawa explained.

Before partnering with Contentstack, Extu used a content management platform to manage all of its content, but the platform lacked the ability to integrate with the company’s proprietary technology. It also didn’t have multi-language capability, which meant hundreds of pieces of content had to be sent for translation and managed via emails back and forth between translators. “It was extremely painful and left lots of room for risk and human error,” Yukawa said. The process also could take weeks, which negatively affected the speed of campaign delivery.”

Extu needed a way to create and manage a vast volume of content in English and many other languages. “So, we thought about outsourcing. And in fact, we have a few writers that we utilized often,” Yukawa said. “But as a business, we realized that there was a big growth opportunity to deliver our through-channel marketing solution in other regions and languages, and we knew in order to do that, we needed a more streamlined and efficient way to build, house and manage this high volume of content. We needed a library that included workflow management, searchability, plus the ability to integrate with the translation partner.”

Based on Extu’s potential for growth and its desire to expand into new regions, its most important requirements were the ability to effectively manage multi-language capabilities and deliver translated content to market faster.

“Next, it was imperative that this solution was capable of integrating with our proprietary technology, to deliver customized marketing campaigns. There was no way we were about to copy and paste all that content, I assure you,” Yukawa said.

“After that, we were really looking for our content management solution to be best-in-class, something that would enable our teams to scale as our technology changed, and more importantly, something that would create efficient processes,” she said.

In the end, Contentstack met all these criteria. “As a headless CMS system, it integrates well with our full stack of technology and services, including a DAM (digital asset management), a translation provider, as well as our through-channel marketing platform that’s our proprietary technology. We also loved the fact that we could manage user workflows across multiple teams in Contentstack itself without needing a separate project management tool,” Yukawa said.

After selecting Contentstack, implementation took place in three stages: pilot stage, integration and user adoption. Contentstack’s solutions architects were outstanding during the pilot stage, according to Yukawa. “Even during scoping, they were really focused on the ability for us to achieve our goals and supported us through an in-depth pilot phase to make sure that this solution was going to work for us in our business.”

Integrating with the delivery API was straightforward and completed on time, with clear documentation and support available.

Extu has been very satisfied with Contentstack throughout implementation and going forward. “We really love Contentstack. Their customer service is stellar. They are extremely responsive, and they help us whenever we run into any issues.”

Contentstack began to make a difference right away at Extu. “We made the right choice,” Yukawa said. “After six months, we were able to start using Contentstack, rapidly expand into new countries and move on new opportunities much faster than we would have been able to previously.”

“We use Contenstack as a content library and our single source of truth to deliver our through-channel email marketing campaigns on behalf of 4,000 resellers each and every month,” Yukawa explained.

 “We create thousands of pieces of content each and every year, and for each of those pieces of content, we’re translating them into multiple languages or localizing them for English-speaking languages. We needed a single source of truth, a place that could house all of those pieces and their variations in a true library format, where it is easy to find, easy to access, and easy to distribute,” she said.

Contenstack’s headless CMS enables Extu to put marketing in control of the presentation layer. “This flexibility is something that we didn’t initially know we wanted, but quickly realized we needed,” Yukawa said.

Translation is now a fast and easy automated process compared to the inefficient, manual process Extu previously used.  

“We quite literally just push a button that says ‘Send to Translation,’ and a couple of days later, the translation comes back with all of the required fields completed. We push ‘Publish,’ and it goes into our integrated proprietary technology, and we’re done,” Yukawa said. “The Contentstack translation integration has removed all risk of human error, not to mention, has sped up efficiencies.”

“Using Contentstack has given us peace of mind, particularly with our internal users who are managing content in multiple languages that they might not speak. So, our users were able to reduce steps in their workflow by 21%,” she said.

Content delivery is significantly faster as well. “For our translated content, we were able to get to market 53% faster, so our launch time dropped from 34 days to just 16 days. And it helped our English content too,” Yukawa said. Extu now delivers English content to market 21% faster, with launch time reduced from 14 to 11 days.

Being able to manage thousands of campaigns faster and more efficiently has empowered Extu to scale faster and to take advantage of new business opportunities when they arise. “Using Contentstack has supported the scalability of our through-channel marketing solution, and now we’re ready for exponential growth,” Yukawa said.