A Notion of Elevated Education: Improving Content and Marketing Efforts with Contentful

You write a note on the back of an envelope before throwing it away, throw your shopping list into your digital cart before accidentally closing your browser, bookmarking a webpage before forgetting which folder holds it. 

These frustrations in lapses in memory have been recognized by the San Fransisco-based project management tool Notion, which is attempting to remedy these mistakes. 

What started as a notetaking tool transformed into a go-to workspace for a million users looking for an ecosystem of sharable and user-created templates to manage projects. 

Yet it recently noticed a gap in its offerings. The platform offered a broad DIY space which many users take advantage of yet many others found it daunting.  

It found that it needed to build out its educational content in order to better display its capabilities and how to use them.

This meant that it required a content solution to store all of this information. 

Notion began to carry out research into the multiple content platforms all the while recognizing that it wanted to scale sustainability while expanding its digital presence. 

Nation found their answers in the content management system Contentful. 

“If we were going to be a larger SaaS company, we knew we would have to adopt traditional performance marketing practices — which is where content comes in,” said Cory Etzkorn, the designer and engineer that introduced Notion to Contentful.  

“We see content as a way to unlock a huge segment of the market that we haven’t touched yet.” Content such as LPs, FAQ, help centers and learning centers, case studies, and demos.  

Testing 

Once Notion went with Contentful, they first decided to test out the CMS. Its team built a prototype to showcase its customer stories. It only took days to create and required very little support or coaching for both developers and content creators. 

Contentful’s headlessness was a key component. “When content and code are decoupled, an instant preview of what creators make and adjust can really make things click,” said Cory. 

Notion then increases the use of the platform to include the development of LPs and blog posts before deciding to use it to house its knowledge base.

“We’ve migrated all our FAQs there,” added Cory. “The customer support team will come in and update things regularly, so I think people see a lot of value from the product. They don’t have to reach out to an engineer and go back and forth for changes.” 

Elevation 

Today, with so many people using Contentful in the development of parallel projects and tasks, its engineers set up dedicated user roles for enhanced management. By doing this, education content creators can’t accidentally alter projects created by marketing content creators. 

The company then created resources to train users on the platform as well as set up actionable content such as demos, templates, tutorials, and guides. 

For the more visual learners, the company’s assets are synonymous with rich media through a simple interface.  

By implementing localization with translation APIs, Notion managed to alter and scale its product successfully – launching new versions in Japanese and Korean during 2021 and apparently having plans to move into more markets soon. 

The future 

Looking ahead, Notion has ambitions to elevate its digital presence more so by creating closer integrations between its product and its collection of marketing sites. In doing so they can filter product data to Contentful to build references across their sites to create a more integrated, silo-less ecosystem. 

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Contentful integrators. Contact us to see how we can work together.