Charles Waltner joined Boomi, a leading iPaaS company, at an exciting time of change in the business. It’s parent company Dell Technologies made a decision to invest in Boomi, both financially and strategically, to help capitalise on Boomi’s market leadership and drive growth. This change galvanised the executive team to act with start-up mentality and focus on how to accelerate new ideas and bring game-changing solutions to the cloud services they offer. As the Head of Content Marketing, Charles knew he needed to build a content program which would act as a growth engine by powering all marketing and sales teams with plenty of high-quality content.

At the time of joining, Boomi had a team of about 10 marketers. The corporate blog published 3-6 short posts a month, and the inventory was thin for other assets like case studies and ebooks. Charles set himself an objective to dramatically scale content production for the company.

“At the end of the day, if you don’t have the right people, process and technology in place, you aren’t going to be able to produce high quality content that drives leads and builds the brand. You need to be able to execute and run that operation first. If you can’t, you're not going to be able to scale to keep up with growth and produce more and more great content.”

Charles Waltner, Head of Content Marketing at Boomi

Why GatherContent?

GatherContent was the first process change Charles introduced to help build the Boomi content engine, for three key reasons:

1. Templates prescribe content requirements to contributors

In order to scale the volume of content production without compromising on quality, Boomi needed a way to standardise content types so that a variety of authors could contribute within a consistent set of rules.

“In previous roles I’d tried using section headers [in word docs], and giving direction on word count and even using tables to create structure but they’d break or get ignored. Then there’s spreadsheets, and although you can create structure, it just wasn’t designed for text and creates all sorts of problems.”

Charles Waltner, Head of Content Marketing at Boomi

In GatherContent, Charles has been able to create a library of content templates for blog posts, case studies, briefs and more. The templates provide a form like structure for authors to provide content within, breaking down the content requirements into sections with clear guidelines and rules for word counts.

Templates ensure that each time a new marketing asset is created, Charles can be confident that the content will follow a standardised format. This clears up any ambiguity with authors about what is required and helps speed up content creation.

2. Workflow provides a clear picture of content status

One of the challenges that arises as the volume of content in an organisation increases, is keeping track of where everything is at in production. Even for the most organised project managers, it is not sustainable to know the status of a specific content item amongst 100s if that information is stored in email or a spreadsheet (that relies on stakeholders providing regular updates!).

In GatherContent, Boomi have created project specific content workflows. Content workflow is a set of customisable statuses that can be applied to content items to communicate the stages content must pass through from draft through to published. When a contributor has completed their work, they can simply update the workflow stage to nudge the person who needs to take action next, to keep content moving through its production line. By baking workflow into the same system content is created in, it’s always easy to get a snapshot of a project’s content status or dig in further to identify content stuck in a specific stage.

3. Content collaboration is centralised

To build a content engine, Boomi needed to be able to run an efficient process. As Charles remarked:

“[Content creation] can be a death by a thousand cuts if you don't have the right processes in place”.

GatherContent helped Boomi create an efficient process by bringing content collaboration into a single platform with:

• Ubiquitous access to content for authors and collaborators.
• In-line commenting for editors.
• Comment-only access for reviewers.
• Centralised content management (content assignments and due dates).

Building the content engine

Boomi found that GatherContent excelled as the environment for managing the copy development stage of campaigns and use it together with Asana to manage the entire lifecycle for content from concept through to promotion.

With these two key tools in place, Charles added team members as content demands steadily grew along with Boomi’s double-digit growth. Given the management capabilities of GatherContent, Charles was able to keep all operations in front of him while steadily adding team members. The editorial team now has 7 writers and editors, in addition to contributors across the company.

Because of GatherContent’s efficiencies, Charles has only recently had to add more project managers to the mix. To keep the content consistent, the team also uses style guides, personas and messaging frameworks.

The results

Boomi have truly scaled their editorial operations and credit GatherContent as an integral technology that’s supported this. Three years on, Boomi have:

• Increased blog production 12-fold.
• Increased printed (PDF) marketing collateral production by 370%.
• Kept pace with double-digit business growth as company quadrupled in size.
• Drove countless marketing and demand generation campaigns with new content.
• Provided return-on-investment against budget of 330% in 2018 and 245% in 2019.

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