Bringing Technology to Our Creatives

There’s no question that technology is having a massive impact on marketing today.

As the digital world has found its way into so many facets of our lives, marketers are faced with a new challenge that revolves around the way they’re able to channel technology to bring creative ideas to life. Their ability to do so has become a deciding factor in the overall success of their campaigns, and the winners in this new digital landscape are those who have stopped thinking about technology as “just another medium,” and have instead integrated it across their marketing departments to add energy to their creative processes.

This evolving model is not an easy one to keep up with, marketers typically don’t moonlight as web developers. But as marketing needs have changed, so too have the tools at their disposal. Today, there are a variety of solutions available that can help marketers elevate the use of technology across their teams, and WordPress is chief among them. 

We see this firsthand at WP Engine, where WordPress isn’t just the CMS that powers our Digital Experience Platform (DXP), it’s the tool we rely on to fuel our own business. Using WordPress allows us to integrate new technologies across our marketing department and empower our marketers with more creative autonomy.  

It’s also spurred us to change the makeup of our marketing team. In addition to marketers who are focused on brand, content, and demand generation, we’ve added data analysts, a technology partnership team, and WordPress developers who lend their skills to our marketing efforts to help us get the most out of WordPress and address the evolving expectations of today’s digital audiences. 

Here are a few key ways these adjustments have already started making a difference:     

Creative Agility 

In tandem with our developers, WordPress has provided us with a framework for building templated web pages we use across our marketing team. Out of the nearly 14,000 web pages WP Engine created for our own business over the past year—from landing and event pages, to support articles and blog posts—only 24 of them required developer assistance. This ability to iterate quickly has been a massive boon for our marketing team, and it’s allowed us to get more campaigns in front of different audiences faster than ever before. 

Using WordPress, we’ve also been able to quickly provide our different audience segments with content that’s tailored to their interests. WP Engine’s two flagship publications, Torque and Velocitize, are both built on WordPress and provide direct lines of communication with our two major categories of customers: web developers who build sites with WordPress and creative agencies that use WordPress to build projects for their clients.  

Optimized Demand Generation

The benefits of working with WordPress extend beyond our in-house content creation to our interactions with customers and prospects. It’s given our demand generation team the ability to easily integrate a litany of mar-tech tools, like Hubspot and Salesforce, into their daily marketing operations and combine data from those platforms for better insights and highly optimized campaigns that target specific audiences.  

WordPress allows this team to set up campaigns on their own, faster than ever before, and get results back from those campaigns quickly, so they can adjust or amplify as they see fit, allowing our larger marketing organization to maximize paid media spend. Over the past year, our demand generation team has launched over 100 campaigns which signifies a two-fold increase in those types of campaigns from the year before. 

Product Advancement

By bringing WordPress developers into our marketing team, we’ve also been able to build new products that we use in-house, and which further our partnerships with the world’s leading technology companies. The Amazon Polly plugin, for example, which allows WordPress users to add text-to-voice functionality to their content, was created, together with Amazon, by WordPress developers who sit in our marketing department. 

Not only did this create a new product for the WordPress ecosystem, but it’s also a plugin we use across our own branded content. Working with WordPress across our marketing team allows us to build and integrate new technologies and serve as a product demo for the things we’re working on.   

The same is true for tools like GeoTarget and Page Performance which are WP Engine products our R&D team tested and piloted with our own sites in mind. We tested these tools across WP Engine’s digital properties before putting them into the market, and they continue to serve as a product demo for us today. These tools also provide us with an ongoing opportunity to iterate on our products and advance them even further. 

Serving Internal Teams 

Finally, because our marketing department uses WordPress, we’re able to serve as a fast resource for other departments across our company. We’ve been able to help our Learning and Development team build out a fresh content hub that’s on brand. We’ve worked with our counterparts in HR to create a new careers site. WordPress allows our marketing team to quickly create specific assets that other departments need using our own steam—we don’t have to task anyone outside of marketing for help spinning up sites new quickly.

Setting Our Own Destiny

As marketers continue to innovate and find new ways to channel technology into their campaigns, I’m confident WordPress will play an increasing role as a way to lower the barrier of entry for those teams and help them embrace today’s paradigm of creativity and technology.  

At WP Engine, our marketing team’s efforts with WordPress have been met with powerful results, and we hear similar stories from our customers every day. But we’re not done yet. We’ll continue to find ways to leverage new technologies in our own creative campaigns and as we do, we’ll share those stories with you. Stay tuned!