Brad’s Deals revolutionizes its content strategy with bespoke automations

Before deploying Contentstack, Brad’s Deals relied on as many as five different Content Management Systems: some home-grown, others using legacy open source software, but all disconnected from one another. These systems each handled different content such as long form blog material, short form deal content, or the merchandising of the website and various apps.“We wanted to break down these silos,” Keith Mazanec, Director of Software Engineering, said. “We wanted to be able to have a strategy that involved long-form content, but also had short-form deal content embedded in it, and that wasn’t something we could do.” 

As an affiliate marketer, it was crucial for Brad’s Deals to be able to publish accurate links to other websites, but in their legacy system, this linking process was heavily manual and prone to human error, which had a direct impact on revenue. The business was looking for a way to reduce the manual effort and automate this and several other complex processes, with the ultimate goal to modernize every stage of content production.

Editorial and marketing teams were also constrained by the company’s previous setup. For example, the brand was unable to launch seasonal or targeted campaigns because there wasn’t enough lead time for developers to get content live. Without editors and marketers being able to take control over content needs, the customer experience suffered -- and worse, developers were heavily focused on maintaining existing content rather than working on new features and updates.

In 2021, Brad’s Deals deployed Contenstack’s Composable DXP, and today publishes all of its deal content through the platform. One important factor in choosing Contentstack was that it would integrate with its legacy systems, allowing the company to run both in parallel for as long as necessary to make the switch to composable gradually. With Contentstack, Brad’s Deals is able to transition teams and elements to the new CMS and view all content types in a single place, while also maintaining legacy systems which the company is reliant on for core processes such as building and personalizing millions of daily emails. 

“Our legacy solution was totally disconnected, occasionally pulled together with duct tape and bubblegum,” Mazanec said. “For us, the a-ha moment was really being able to combine all our content management into one system and have every team from editorial to marketing to merchandising using the same stack rather than being disjointed.”

Transformation through automation

The company has used Contentstack Automate to create bespoke integrations that have simplified and optimized content strategy and operations across the business. 

“Automate has been an incredibly powerful tool to use,” Eric Agnew, Principal Engineer, said. “We’ve been able to quickly learn how to use the system, build automations as POCs, validate them, and then deliver them to our environments in an incredibly fast-paced manner.”

By using Contentstack Automate, Brad’s Deals has been able to solve a range of business problems, including heavily reducing the manual effort involved in crucial tasks such as pulling in product information for curated deals. Automations pull content from the web for product pages and push content into Elasticsearch; instead of relying on code changes, elements such as cache busting are simple to resolve, with updates published on the website immediately, and content redirected through an integration with a CDN (Content Delivery Network). Using Automate, the business now automates link generation and image caption generation, back-fills information into existing entities within Contentstack, processes images, automatically pushes messages to Slack, and much more. This has empowered Brad’s Deals to not just streamline previously manual processes but expand beyond their previous capabilities and do more with fewer required resources. 

“There are lots of things we’ve been able to do [with Automate], and lots that we’re still looking to do,” Agnew said. “It’s allowed us to create POCs very quickly. Sometimes I think, ‘Can we do this?’ and then we try to quickly spin something up, and it always tends to work out, which is great!”

Adding the human touch where it matters

“There’s so much that was barely happening before, or not happening at all, and now it’s happening every time, automatically,” Mazanec said. "Every image we publish now has a caption. Every URL that gets pulled in is accurate, all the product-level attributes are entered automatically. Editors and merchandising teams can now focus on deal curation, and that human touch is a differentiator for us. These automations have helped teams move faster, and publish richer content from one place, giving a better view of all the products we have. That’s been a huge unlock.”

For the editorial teams, a more feature-rich CMS has empowered them to do much more within the same time frame. “Editors have seen the real benefits of working with Contentstack,” Agnew said. “Features such as version control so they can look back historically and see how things have changed, workflows which allow them to have a review process with their teams, and Modular Blocks which give them autonomy to experiment with how the page looks and feels. They can deliver a much richer piece of content to the end users, and get as much done as they did before, but with better content and better data sources.” 

Using Contentstack has not only simplified the workflow for multiple teams, but also improved maintainability for developers, editors, and merchandising stakeholders. Developers are no longer in the middle, stuck in a cycle of getting feedback, fixing problems, and hand-coding new pages. Instead, editors, marketers, and merchandising teams can take control. 

“In the previous world, if marketing wanted a new page for a sales event or a promotional event, there would be a code change, custom design, months for teams to implement the page as a bespoke asset,” Mazanec said. “Now, we have a library of components and reusable assets, which acts as a continually expanding toolbox that they can utilize. When marketing wants to spin up a new page, they don’t have to come to development at all. We just see it when it goes live!"

As a result of being able to automate more of the end-to-end content process, Brad’s Deals has formed a more trusting relationship between technical and marketing teams, freeing up developers to focus on new features, and empowering editorial and merchandising teams to create a richer customer experience.

Next on the roadmap is to leverage Contentstack to create a community component within the editorial team, allowing editors to see what their colleagues are doing, and providing information and insights using predictive functionality and real-time collaborative tools. This will continue to allow Brad’s Deals to offer the broadest possible coverage of sales events, and make their work more transparent.

Brad’s Deals’ key wins with Contentstack include:

• 70% cost reduction: One marketing funnel found it had 70% lower costs per subscriber on new Contentstack-based pages compared to legacy pages. With a more complex content model, Brad’s Deals is able to publish content at the same speed.
• 95% faster production time: Automation workflows have made bespoke web page production possible in a fraction of the time - from eight weeks lead time for a new page, down to a matter of hours, without developer intervention. 
• 99% quicker publish time: With the legacy tech stack, it took up to 10 minutes from publishing content to it being live on the website. From blog articles to deal posts to specific marketing pages, cache handling means content is now published instantly.