Interview: Headless CMS Storyblok Expands Partner Program with U.S. Agency Campbell Ewald
As headless continues to heat up, some of the leading platform providers are looking to the channel to differentiate their offerings and amplify their growth. That's certainly been the case for Storyblok, which now touts over 600 solution partners worldwide.
While the North American market has remained a greenfield for the enterprise CMS, Storyblok just announced a strategic partnership with Campbell Ewald – an integrated advertising and marketing communications agency with offices in Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York.
Storyblok has certainly been gaining ground in a crowded field of commoditized platforms. Originally launched in 2015, the company has already managed to accrue over 51,000 users in over 130 countries, with more than 81,000 projects created on its platform in the last three years. Through this new partnership with Campbell Ewald, Storyblok aims to expand its U.S. presence and elevate its position in the headless market.
Campbell Ewald offers a wide range of strategic services, from advertising to media to content creation. Integrated digital experiences are core to their practice, and the agency plans to leverage Storyblok’s visual editor and component-based structure to drive efficiencies in their project delivery process.
“At Campbell Ewald, we value speed-to-market and efficiency," said Matt Riley, Associate Director Of Development at Campbell Ewald. "With Storyblok, we can knock out high-quality work quickly. We're excited to use it on upcoming client projects.”
Storyblok’s new and improved Partner Program is designed to provide better service practices and unlock new business opportunities on top of its CMS. Companies currently participating in the program include Portaltech Reply, Overdose, and Mediawave. According to Storyblok, the program has minimal barriers and no required waiting periods, making it easy for new partners to enroll and participate.
In addition to a Learning Centre that provides resources for sales and implementation, Storyblok's Partner Program offers up to a 10% ongoing revenue share for new customers in a monthly or annual subscription. The program also provides free unlimited staff members and development spaces for building and managing customers in one place.
Q&A with Barry D'Arcy, VP of Partners at Storyblok
CMS Critic had an opportunity to connect with Barry D'Arcy, VP of Partners at Storyblok. He shared some of his views on the CMS market, the value of being headless, and what his company is excited about.
CMS Critic (CC): The headless CMS market is growing – but so are the platform choices. What gives Storyblok a competitive edge, particularly in a competitive field where large enterprise players are consolidating and expanding their offerings?
Barry D'Arcy (BD): One of the reasons the headless CMS market is growing is because it’s evolving with the ever-growing users’ needs. In fact, Storyblok was founded as a response to the need of a CMS that was working for both developers and marketers. Some of our value propositions can be found separately with other headless CMSs, but as it stands today, we have a pretty unique offer.
Starting with our one-of-a-kind visual editor with real-time in context preview, our highly customizable Rich Text Editor and editorial workflows, and our unparalleled content model which enables users to build a smart content strategy and to gain efficiency by reusing the content entries and templates they create. When it comes to security, we guarantee safe and compliant data transfer. We use ISO 27001 compliant data centers in EU with an option for separated infrastructure (eg. Mainland China), https protocols, data encryption, two-factor authentication, and daily backups.
Storyblok was also founded on the principle that no matter the size of the business, we should be affordable. Our pricing is scalable, transparent, predictable and it’s not necessarily based on usage. When you weigh in these features and compare our offer to one of larger enterprise players, you will see they fall short. They have high profile clients because they have been longer on the market, but we are catching up.
We are quick to react to feedback and user needs. This is reflected in our reviews in terms of ease of setup, use and admin, quality of support, and ease of doing business with, which are higher than those of most market leaders.
CC: What is the greatest challenge facing headless CMS platforms and how is Storyblok addressing it?
BD: There is a very common expression when talking about headless CMS: “headless CMS is the future”. I believe that at the moment the challenge is to make business leaders (and others) realize that the future is now. Better yet, headless CMS should be our present, now is the time to migrate from traditional systems and embrace the benefits of headless.
One way in which we address this issue at Storyblok is with an informational and educational approach. We dedicate a lot of time and resources to create content (articles, whitepapers, ebooks, presentations, etc.) about the differences between traditional and headless, to point out the benefits of headless with real case scenarios, and to prove with use-cases the changes in speed and efficiency gain after migration to headless.
At the same time, we built a portal for our partners, a learning centre with educational & promotional material, white-label sales decks as well as technical implementation guides to enable faster selling. We also have a dedicated partner team that supports all these efforts.
CC: Your partnership with Campbell Ewald marks a new strategic focus on the U.S. market. Are agencies the primary channel for growing your partner program, or are you targeting other partner verticals?
BD: Yes, we're delighted to have a U.S. agency giant like Campbell Ewald on board as a Storyblok partner. We look forward to enabling them to build out innovative projects for their clients. This partnership is part of our strategic growth plan to enter the U.S. market more actively over the next 3-6 months. The Storyblok Partner Program is predominantly aimed at digital agencies and software development groups that are implementing CMS projects. It is our goal to onboard our partners through the delivery of best practice implementation guides and sales enablement content.
In terms of other partner verticals, we're also activating multiple technology partnerships. We're working on some exciting integrations that will support our partner network to build better with Storyblok. We already have integrations with Lokalise, a feature-rich localization and translation management platform, and many eCommerce platforms (more coming soon).
CC: In your release, you position Storyblok as a “future-proof CMS” for building a partner program. What makes it future-proof?
BD: Customers want a technology stack that they can live on for 4 to 5 years. Our component-based approach allows brands to scrap the traditional cycle of redoing their digital platform every few years and instead focus on continuous improvements. A headless CMS approach powered by APIs helps our partners solve their customer’s content problems while saving resources and cost. For our partners, being able to give a higher quality project delivery while also driving efficiencies in development time is a real no-brainer. This is helping agencies to grow their business with Storyblok and we're delighted to join them on this journey.
CC: Are you able to give us any insight on Storyblok’s future innovation? Are there any new platform features we can expect in 2021?
BD: The recent launch of our new Storyblok Partner Portal is packed with new features. One key update I'd like to mention today is our new Learning Centre. This is an educational hub for all our partners to get acquainted with Storyblok. We want to assist in developing and creating co-marketing and co-selling opportunities, to elevate our partners and ourselves, hand in hand. If you’re not a partner yet and would like to take part, you can sign up at storyblok.com/partners.
We're also launching V2 of our application later this year which will include a fresh new UI amongst many new features for developers and content editors.
About Storyblok
Storyblok is a Headless Content Management System that provides developers with all the flexibility they need to build reliable and fast websites whilst giving content creators with no coding skills the ability to edit content independently of the developer. Thanks to the headless approach your content can not only be used for one website, which is the case if you use a monolithic CMS like WordPress. Storyblok empowers you to use your content on iOS and Android apps, as well as any other platform of choice (IoT, smartwatch, AR/VR) through Application Programming Interfaces (“APIs”).
For more information: https://www.storyblok.com/partners
About Campbell Ewald
Campbell Ewald is a full-service, fully integrated marketing communications agency with offices in Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York. Their mission is to create fans of brands and endorsers of products by igniting conversations and experiences that demonstrate how brands enhance consumers’ quality of life. They take pride in engaging consumers at every level of conversation. They turn consumers into advocates that carry messages across platforms. And whatever the discipline — Campbell Ewald thrivse on solving complex problems and turning big ideas into relevant communications that reach our target every day, in every medium. They have offices in Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York.
For more information: www.c-e.com/