Claranet
How Claranet saved 200 hours of development time per year after adopting a CEP
An inefficient content management system was draining Claranet’s development team’s time and resources. Developer intervention was required every time the site needed a change, and things were quickly becoming outdated. Rob Brown, Web Development Manager at Claranet knew a more efficient solution was needed to scale the marketing team’s content and demand generation strategy. Uberflip was the perfect solution, offering a versatile and engaging platform for their marketing team, web developers, and customers. Best of all, the integration with their existing technology stack meant that their demand generation strategy could scale as their business did.
Founded in 1996, Claranet is a leading global technology services provider. With over 800 employees based in 16 offices worldwide, Claranet are experts in migrating and running critical applications and infrastructure. The company experienced rapid growth in recent years through a series of acquisitions. However, their internal web development team was becoming overwhelmed with publishing marketing content for each new acquisition. There was little time left to devote to revitalizing web pages, building new email templates, and other web-based content experiences.
As a result, things quickly became outdated and, ultimately, content consumption suffered
A cumbersome approval process for content meant the marketing team couldn’t be agile and respond quickly to market opportunities—they had to send a draft and creative brief to the developers, who would design the layout and assets, then go back to the marketing team for approval. Finally, the content would be published days later. Something had to change to allow the Claranet team to achieve its ambitious revenue targets. One of the options was to build their own, customized resource center.
A well-designed resource center would have to allow front-line marketers to publish content quickly—in a matter of minutes or hours, not days. SEO optimization needed to be easy to achieve and maintain. The ideal center would also ensure that content had brand consistency, and offered a user-friendly web experience across all platforms. And, finally, it would have to integrate seamlessly with Pardot and other tools in Claranet’s existing tech stack.
Implementation of Uberflip has given team months back in schedule
“Trying to create a resource center internally would have taken months. My team would have had to develop a resource center from scratch within our CMS that allowed the marketing team to centralize all of their content and pull together custom collections any way they wanted. It would have required templates, a laundry list of plugins, and a ton of technical debt. The idea of managing that on an ongoing basis was not scalable,” said Brown. Instead, they chose Uberflip, which let them rapidly build and customize a resource center that perfectly fit the aesthetic of their website, and had all of the features they needed and more.
Turning every piece of content into an experience
Claranet’s web team loved that Uberflip had snippets of code already created, allowing them to be autonomous and creative while implementing changes quickly. Compared to their original CMS where everything needed code, building content in Uberflip was a breeze, and marketers could publish content and build on-brand pages without using a single line of code.
During the implementation phase, Claranet designed a mockup of their resource center and passed it along to the Uberflip onBrand team for help in creating a seamless experience that matched the look of their main website. The UX design needed to allow for optimized search functionality, keeping visitors engaged longer, and moving them along the buyer journey quicker.
“As a web developer, I was shocked at how accurately the onBrand team delivered on the mockup we submitted. We didn’t need to revisit the design at all. This established trust from the onset of our relationship and now our team views them as an extension of our own. Not only that, but everyone on the success team helped us stay on track. We always knew the status of our design from one week to the next,” said Brown.
“When we first thought about moving to Uberflip, we had worries around how it would impact us from an SEO perspective. If you don’t do it right, moving content around on the web can hurt you. We also weren’t sure how moving our content to a subdomain would impact our rankings. But our implementation team at Uberflip worked with us to make it a smooth migration and ensure we had everything we needed to fully optimize our content. Since launching Uberflip, we’ve actually seen an increase in organic traffic and much better engagement across the board.”
– Rob Brown , Web Development Manager Claranet
Rising to the top of the search results with efficient SEO
With a functional and beautiful resource center in place, the Claranet team has been able to implement detailed, customized content journeys for its users that far exceed anything they have ever offered before.
In addition to the efficiency and time saved in publishing content, better SEO, and an overall better content experience for users since implementing Uberflip, Brown estimates his team has saved over 200 hours a year in development time. These have been put towards key company initiatives like data management and brand development. “As a webdev, what excites me is the opportunity to be creative and devote my time to developing new apps for our website. Uberflip gives me back time in my day so I can focus on the things that excite me,” said Brown.