Oetiker powers global, multilingual digital experiences with Contentstack

Oetiker is a global business, with customers across 31 locales and website content in ten different languages. With a legacy CMS, the business was experiencing challenges with getting initiatives live, struggling with a lengthy lead time when launching new content or campaigns.

As a strategic and digital implementation partner, Axis Cross Media was tasked with providing recommendations for a new CMS partner. “The goal was to alleviate those pain points, while giving editors more tools in their toolbox”, Matthew Madill, Director of Web Development, Axis Cross Media said. “We wanted to reduce developer involvement in content editing, and adopt a platform that was more user-friendly, so that it was easier to manage ten languages, and easily replicate data and content across those languages.”

After evaluating a few different options, the team collectively decided that Contentstack was the best fit. “There were solutions that had a lot of bells and whistles, but they weren’t features that Oetiker needed to use,” Madill said.

After a six month migration, Oetiker now uses Contentstack’s headless CMS to power its corporate website, Oetiker.com, using the product’s built-in localization tools to manage content across 13-15 different languages. As well as web content in ten languages, digital downloads are available in additional languages to support the needs of specific audiences around the world. 

The Digital Marketing Operations team leverages templates to easily create new content. While previously a single stakeholder used to be responsible for making content updates, the Contentstack platform is so simple and flexible that Oetiker has opened the back end of the website to additional internal users, so that they can manage their own content instead of sending a request to the Marketing Operations team. This level-loads the workload of the website, and is something the team was not comfortable to do before. 

“In our old system, we had to manually replicate content across all of our languages,” Devon Warren, Head of Digital Marketing Operations, Oetiker, said. “Now we can just publish English content and backfill with different languages as necessary. We’ve even added a language or two since we migrated! Teams appreciate the ability to be able to pull in content, replicate it across languages, and therefore cut down on lead time to getting things launched.” With the CDN image API, users are also able to upload images and videos across different localized sites with less manual effort, and Oetiker reports a steady growth in global stakeholders being able to upload content independently and get it out onto the website. 

Before adopting Contentstack, the Digital Marketing Operations team would receive a lot of requests, but the system was unable to make them a reality. With a more flexible platform, Oetiker can explore many more options, and realize a much faster lead time. One example is how the business has started launching microsites, revamping its application and market sections with more features and content, and making them more robust. This acts as a lead-gen tool by drawing traffic using personalized content for different audiences, and provides a more complete customer journey for each audience. “Previously, even simple things took a long time,” Warren said. “If we wanted to achieve these kinds of results on that system it would have been extremely expensive, and often impossible. We’re getting so much more out of Contentstack, so that’s a win for us.”

“It’s nice to have conversations about expanding things rather than getting emails and messages about what doesn’t work and what’s broken, or which customer is complaining,” Madill said. “With Contentstack, we can focus on enhancing rather than supporting — innovating rather than fixing.”

With Contentstack, Oetiker’s global content management processes have been made easier, faster, and more productive. The Oetiker team is able to access insights into content effectiveness, update content in all languages, and create much faster than they could before. Looking ahead, Oetiker is planning to further enhance its translations process, as they ramp up content in all languages. The team is also keeping an eye on the Contentstack Marketplace, where they can quickly adopt capabilities that align with their business goals. 

Key wins for Oetiker with Contentstack include: 

• Simplified content management: The Digital Marketing Operations team can update and augment content in as many languages as necessary, with a much faster lead time, and more flexible back-end operations. 
• Business analytics: Oetiker can access conversion information and business insights that help the team to understand what’s working — testing and experimenting across their website and specific microsites. 
• Reallocation of budget: By leveraging a headless CMS, Oetiker is able to do so much more with their budget for website and digital. This reallocation meant saving money on high operating costs and putting it where it could add strategic value.