Building a digital experience platform for your agency

Unquestionably, we live in a digital world developed by our desire to make our lives easier and more efficient. Whether we are aware of it or not, digital technologies are involved in most aspects of our lives in this day and age. Believe it or not, there are currently more devices connected to the internet than there are humans, a number that keeps growing super fast. In such a world, we are all craving extraordinary digital experiences. We no longer get mesmerized by browsing a website, looking at products online, or clicking a button to make a purchase. We are hungry for digital experiences that knock down the walls between content and commerce and take us on a personalized journey to convince us a brand is worth our time.

So, what do you, as a business, need to do to deliver this kind of experience? It’s simple: you need to build a digital experience platform (DXP). In this article, I will discuss the importance of building a DXP for your agency and your clients and the role a headless CMS like Storyblok plays in a state-of-the-art, best-of-breed DXP. But first thing is first, what exactly is a DXP?

What is a digital experience platform (DXP)?

Simply put, a DXP provides all the tools necessary to deliver every new customer a better experience than the last. Tools that can help you track these experiences, get valuable lessons from them, and improve your experience delivery across all digital channels. To explain it from a technical point of view, it is an architecture that assists in digitizing your business operations, delivering connected customer experiences, and gathering actionable insights to improve your business operations and hence the customer experience.

A DXP can be an all-in-one platform by one provider. However, based on our experience and collaboration with agencies, we have discovered that the best-of-breed approach is more convenient. In the all-in-one suite, companies are often stuck with tools they don’t need or lack necessary tools for their operations. Being in this situation can be costly and damaging for your business. On the other hand, a best-of-breed suite allows you to leverage industry-leading third-party vendors and integrations specific to your needs at a lower cost. Here, one vendor is selected to manage content, another to handle analytics, commerce, and any other capabilities that the business requires. This approach enables organizations to pick which technologies best suit their needs and combine them to create a customized solution. A solution personalized to the needs of the organization’s team and operations. For a more detailed description of DXPs and their components, read this article.

What role does a headless CMS play in a DXP?

Content is still king! A content management and delivery platform is its queen. Therefore, at the core of your composable DXP is adopting a Content Management System (CMS). However, not all CMSs are the same. The type of CMS that will truly help your business deliver a personalized omnichannel experience is a headless CMS like Storyblok. A headless CMS acts as your content provider and is designed to absorb data from your DXP components to feed into your front-end customer experiences. In order to have an effective and modern DXP, the use of a headless CMS and its APIs is key to combining and coordinating applications while allowing you to leverage the right content for the right context. Because it stands apart in being effective in providing content to other services, the headless CMS works as a neutral center that integrates all of your DXP technologies. Long story short, the headless CMS is the brains of the operation.

Once your headless CMS is set up, build your DXP with technologies that include customer relationship management (CRM), product information management (PIM), email targeting solutions, analytics, and all the other components needed for your marketing program. This approach will allow you to choose the best technologies for your one-of-a-kind customer experience delivery.

Why Storyblok for your agency’s DXP?

To begin with, as a certified partner, you can build your agency’s website on Storyblok with a free lifetime license. In addition, you can add unlimited staff members that you can use on all development and customer spaces – for free! And that’s just the beginning. Being API-based, when integrating Storyblok with other technologies for your DXP, it’s all a matter of “connecting the wires” between these different services. In addition, it’s easy to integrate 3rd party services with Storyblok because of our custom field types, tool plugins, and custom sidebar apps. I invite you to explore this topic more by reading this article. Lastly, a modern and effective DXP requires the tools for collaboration, cloud-native applications, extendibility, multi-channel experience management, and security. With Storyblok, you get all of this and more! Our field-level discussions coming in V2, workflows, and approval system allow for excellent collaboration between team members in achieving common goals. Storyblok is a SaaS-based platform that ensures faster implementation, lower costs, scalability, and easy integrations. The best feature of Storyblok is its core DNA: API-first. This enables easy integration with additional apps and services. In addition, it gives the ability to manage and deliver experiences across various channels, including IoT devices, AR, VR, and more. Lastly, we offer peace of mind by providing access control, safety, and authentication through two-factor authentication methods and single sign-on. The platform is future-proof and ensures an improved user experience.

Conclusion

The best way to showcase your agency and how you can deliver the same experience for your clients’ users is by implementing a best-of-breed DXP. A DXP can improve the digital experience capabilities of an organization, and a headless CMS like Storyblok should be placed at the heart of its architecture. Our partner agencies enjoy multiple benefits, and the free license and unlimited staff members, in addition to all its technical advantages, make it the most logical choice for you and your clients’ digital experience platforms.