How to Protect Marketing Campaigns from Developer Shortages

Marketers’ jobs have become exponentially more technical as the number of content platforms and personalization tools has grown. 

Expected to engage customers across multiple regions and channels—and to run several versions of campaigns tailored to different audience segments—marketing teams have become more dependent on developers. But a worldwide shortage of developers is causing delays to campaign launches. 

This marketing bottleneck can have a direct impact on revenue, as marketers are stymied in their attempts to create the interactive, social media-friendly campaigns that engage customers the most.

Marketers are launching content across a growing roster of platforms—from shoppable video to smart home appliances—and have to contend with myriad tools and systems that don’t always play together nicely. As a result, marketing teams increasingly rely on developers to create workarounds or build one-off experiences. 

The outcome is that the content and presentation of digital experiences are often only accessible to developers, meaning that marketers have to file tickets with engineering teams to make even minor changes to content, whether in a mobile app, on a landing page or in a customer support article. Adding to the problem is content management system (CMS) bloat; teams often rely on multiple systems to push out content, so making coordinated updates is often a manual process.

“The amount of technical complexity that marketing teams bring to bear has changed, and that is exacerbating the workload of developers,” says Jeremy Goldsmith, VP of Engineering at Contentful. 

With so many other competing needs on a developer’s roster, marketing asks may not get the attention they need, even when there’s an urgency to launch in response to a new trend or news event. Meanwhile, developers are pulled away from the more innovative work that could benefit their companies to focus on low-impact tasks like layout tweaks and copy edits to web pages, which content creators could easily do themselves if empowered with the right tools. 

The Contentful Composable Content Platform alleviates this tension by providing a structured, accessible and collaborative approach to content creation, allowing marketers and content managers across other functions, such as legal or HR, to make updates on their own and apply them all at once across the entire content ecosystem. 

Generative AI could also ease the workload of developers and marketers alike. By partnering with a range of AI-enabled vendors and personalization engines like Ninetailed, Contentful makes it easier for marketing teams to tailor and track every component of a potential customer’s journey, without relying on developer support. Contentful’s built-in AI Content Type Generator also frees developers from creating complex content models, enabling content creators to use the built-in AI module to propose content models—complete with recommended fields—based on a few keywords.

How, when and where content reaches customers is continuously evolving. The best way for organizations to get ahead of these inevitable changes while navigating developers’ limited bandwidth is by building an intuitive content framework with a user-friendly interface that allows all employees to easily build, iterate on and scale content. 

“With Contentful, you can make changes across all your landing pages, all your websites, across mobile and web and all the areas a piece of content is deployed—with a single action,” says Goldsmith. “That’s a powerful time-saving for marketing teams needing to scale.”