Relaunching the Chat Landscape: PubNub Streamlines with Contentful

As a communication platform, speed and streamlining processes is absolutely vital for NubPub.

Recently the company replatformed to the content management system of Contentful – a platform that is agile, that is capable of integrating other tools and publish across all channels of a company. 

Bringing in Contentful was an easy choice for NubPub; it had all the functionality that was lacking before. The technology they turned towards was innovative and headless… and they used it to clear out their old tech stacks and begin fresh.

“We have marketing pages, resources, a blog, SCM landing pages, developer demos,” said Wayne Willyard, head of digital experience at PubNub, “things of that nature, all within the Contentful experience.”

Among the issues that PubNub had and needed to settle was its blogs: previously they had been hosted on WordPress. Yet the number of plug-ins, permissions to external tools, the account maintenance… they were all causing headaches within the dev team.

“I would tell people to move everything to Contentful,” added Wayne, “so that you can easily reuse content.”

Time saver

In the pre-Contentful days, PubNub took at least one week to create and launch a page. After the switch to Contentful, the same amount of work takes less than 3 days.

PubNub can now focus more on their customer-facing pages since plugging into Contentful. So they decided to carry out a huge clean-up operation where they have migrated the majority of their pages from WordPress to Contentful.

In addition, they have established SCM landing pages for paid media as well as marketing pages and integrated their new CMS to Vimeo in order to host webinars and other marketing functions.

“Everything you would think of in a traditional marketing team,” added Wayne, “we are using Contentful in some way, shape or form.”

PubNub’s content creators can now update content that frees up the time for more development time. So devs can focus more on UI and UX while content creators have more control over their work. 

“There is a dollar amount that’s associated with having just more people being able to do production work,” said Wayne. “We’re now doing more things that are of high value on the development team, than low value. And we have essentially cut our maintenance bucket of work down to 90% of what it once was.”

Two paths

When work comes through the pipeline at PubNub, it is now channeled into two possible routes: that which needs to be completely built from the group up, which goes to the developers; and that which requires edits and copywriting, which goes to the creative team.

“The team is now fully empowered,” said Wayne. “We’re empowering the team to do work at their own speed. I think the team resonates with that language and likes having this freedom. And the development team likes to feel that they’re valued and freed up to do the most important work.”

Big benefits

“We’ve seen the most growth in terms of conversions since we’ve brought Contentful on,” added Wayne. “We as a team have been able to design and implement better experiences because of Contentful, which I think has a correlating effect on how people experience PubNub.com.”

There are a number of aspects of Contentful that have truly reshaped the digital landscape of PubNub. “We’re just able to move a lot faster,” said Wayne, “and we’re able to react to data a lot quicker. And I think in the end, that’s really the whole purpose of having a content platform — to be able to make adjustments to the web experience in as close to real-time as possible.”

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