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Dynamic Content Management 

MY ROLE:

Lead UI/UX Designer

MY TEAM:

Product Owner (x1)
Product Manager (x2)
Project Manager (x1)
Solutions Architect (x1)
Full Stack Developer (x2)
UI Developers (x4)

 

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Problem statement

Enterprise sales involves 4 important factions of users working together to achieve a successful purchase decision being made: customers who want to buy, resellers who resource the product/service, a source that manufactures and a brand gatekeeping team that ensures the language is appropriate/the driven campaign is relevant. 

So, how can 1 platform ensure all these users work with each other consistently, enable sales and still allow for customization at each user level to facilitate a sticky experience?

History

At this point, I had designed a cohesive experience for customers to submit business interest (through the assessment site), for partners to onboard sales reps and manage lead requests (through partner dashboards), and for resellers and new sales members to onboard themselves (automated authorization through a simple onboarding survey) and for internal stakeholders to view all users, leads and resellers (from a skeletal admin dashboard). 

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Objectives

Give access to marketing leaders to manage campaigns

NetApp Marketing, working closely with the brand refresh in 2021, determined the sales campaigns to be run for every quarter, often changing the focus from new to older Flash products as per demand or inventorial needs. They provided the content for Explore marketing kits that partners and distributors used for messaging across social media and marketing emails. Offering them more flexibility in sharing and managing content was vital, as they were the source of partner-to-customer communication

Offer partners customization options for Vanity URLs (NetApp assessment site with partner names in the URL)

Partners/resellers used NetApp banners, advertisements and assessment sites, but their presence was hidden in most NetApp-branded locations. Allowing for partners to customize within a dynamic template helped increase partner presence and spotlight more relevant success stories.

Build a dynamic content management system that determines the content of every site, link and response in the Explore ecosystem

Marketers needed to manage campaigns. Administrators needed to manage resellers. Resellers needed to manage leads. Collaborators needed to manage recommendations. 

A master management system was needed to maintain the simplicity of all the above processes.

Why does partner experience matter in a lead gen campaign?

- insights I picked up from stakeholder and NetApp marketing discussions during UX research

  • 80% of NetApp business is transacted through partners.
     

  • Resellers manage a catalog of vendors & products — offer the widest scope for better customer experience. 
     

  • Customers and partners are always looking for the quickest path to close transaction, and prefer CMS that helps them manage all sales conversations in 1 application.
     

  • Not all sales reps are proficient in selling NetApp, so there is great potential in giving sales enablement training. 

"CTAaaS" UX Plan

Gather user feedback
Involve NetApp marketing leaders and reseller stakeholders in a discussion about the E2E scenarios in pre-sales marketing and lead generation to gather information about points of collaboration.
Brainstorm ideas
Use card sorting and mind-mapping exercises to articulate which experiences in Explore needed frequent content changes due to campaign updates, and which information about Partner Brands could be included on NetApp sites without shifting brand focus. 
Create and test
Create an epic for dynamic content management and spread it across multiple user activities. Prototype and test 1 dynamic portion at a time (dynamic landing pages that can be created by NetApp and Partner sales / Knowledge center of latest resources built by NetApp marketing / Partner highlights created by Partner sales, etc.)

Run multiple tests consequently to (1) familiarize users, (2) iterate based on feedback.
Release and reiterate
Release partner-driven CMS, and demo it to marketing staff, reiterate and release Marketing Admin CMS, then iterate for localization. 

Release an overall admin with all CMS capabilities (for NetApp Sales), and handover Explore for independent use.

Agile Design Process

Every 2 weeks, we released iterative improvements, so it fell upon me to identify the most crucial improvements based on my observation of user feedback and metrics. Every 4 weeks, I would phase the improvements as minor and major releases. 

Most of our users trusted that their experience will improve every 2 weeks, so sticking to a rigid deadline and planning for releases 6 weeks ahead proved vital.

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Just the process...

Observe

Define

Learn

Ideate

Prototype

Test/Feedback

Iterate

Call-To-Action Hero

The decision to customize every step of the customer discovery and evaluation journey derived from the need to constantly update the campaign-driven content on the customer facing site, as well as create and distribute relevant marketing material every few weeks with resellers. 

The content, right down to the button text, was determined by the campaign. Hence, the project came to be nicknamed "CTAaaS" (call-to-action as a service). 

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Personas

After the introductory studies, I was able to distinguish the major user personas who would be able to accomplish a successful pre-sales digital engagement.

Abstract Shapes

Unique Features & Functionalities

to address user needs

FOR NETAPP INTERNAL

  • Review and approve Partner customization requests.
     

  • ​Release various versions of the assessment site, including questions and responses based on campaign. 
     

  • The control panel of "who" (customer, partner, internal) sees "what" across different geos (AMER, APAC, EMEA, etc).
     

  • Easy GUI to build and send campaign newsletters that tie to Explore CTAs. 

FOR PARTNERS

  • Customization options for "Vanity URL" — an assessment site link appended by the partner name for lead redirection. Updates here will be approved by the marketing admin. 
     

  • Ability to create a custom resource page that will live in the customer dashboard for returning customers to evaluate and gain trust in the partner brand. 

The Simplified User Journey

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A NetApp Marketing Admin creates a campaign, complete with a custom URL, assessment logic and landing page, and then shares it via email with all the resellers in the region of campaign interest. 

The NetApp Reseller picks up the campaign, relevant marketing materials shared and reviews it, requesting customizations like logo, color or services to be displayed in the landing page. Once the changes are approved by NetApp Marketing, the Reseller shares their campaign as well as non-campaign Explore URLs with (different) customers in their region to collect leads. 

Potential customers get assessment URLs from partner/resellers, and discover NetApp products and services that match their unique business needs. In addition, they have access to the latest information from NetApp and their Reseller that are spotlighted for that specific campaign or product, which helps them rely on the success factors of purchasing that campaigned product/service with that Reseller. Customer decides to purchase, and the Reseller walks them through the recommendation packaging and quoting system from Explore. 

A few years down the lane, when the user has a lifecycle event to address, the Reseller aids them in post-purchase opportunities like capacity additions, software renewals and hardware refreshes through Explore. 

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UX Roadmap

The decision to introduce CTAaaS came after a year of Explore, when the platform started to rake in significant leads and worked in scaling go-to-market efforts for more than 150 resellers. 

The first content management system was released for Partners to edit their Vanity URL assessment sites in December 2021. As of April 2022, dynamic contents had been introduced by over 20 distributors.

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"I can easily duplicate my (Adobe Marketo) campaigns in Explore, which makes it easier to manage lead generation from all sources.

— NetApp marketing team member feedback

Design Testing for Iterative Improvements

The dynamic content management system was comprised of 1 gigantic control dashboard, fondly nicknamed the "admin panel". The dynamic contents were everything that the end customer saw and interacted with, like the assessment site landing page, the assessment itself, the recommended results, the company and alternate resources for further learning, test drive and related. This is how we set about creating and testing the different parts of the control panel experience:
 

  • The work to convert all content to dynamic started with internal users, which was tested with sales engineering users (control) and marketing users (test). The users could control the headlines, copy writing, images and links that were displayed on the assessment site landing page.
     

  • Then, internal users could edit the resources provided for further research within the customer dashboard. This included information about each product or service, customer success stories, product sheets and video demonstrations produced by NetApp. 
     

  • The next phase involved the release of customizable landing pages and resource pages from the reseller dashboard, which was released to distributer users for feedback gathering. Once the hiccups and feedback were addressed, a second release was introduced to a wider audience of partner leadcatchers. 
     

  • Once landing page customizations became an easier thing to manage for partners, a larger management system to publish, run and manage campaign URLs was built (April to June 2022). This was the last product in the Explore Ecosystem. Once this was accomplished, with options to manage campaigns and resellers across geos, languages and products, the platform could then be operated by NetApp Marketing without the need for an entire design and development team. 

Final product shots

@ 2024 Harini Venkataraman

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