Content has the unique power to drive enterprise growth and audience engagement—no matter the business mission, no matter the industry. Because, at its core, every company is really a content company.

And in an era of great business change, the story—your story—still needs telling. But how?

AccuWeather, the DNCC, OKdo, and Salesforce are just four examples of enterprise leaders reimagining how they create, manage, and deliver engaging content and digital experiences to customers, wherever they are.

Their stories, which contain must-have lessons for all content marketers, share a common chapter. It opens with an agile content platform backed by a powerful enterprise ecosystem. Let’s take a look.

Salesforce Elevates Content Marketing to Achieve Revenue Growth

Salesforce is the world’s #1 customer relationship management software founded in 1999 and now partnering with 99 of the Fortune 100. The company’s revenue passed $17 billion in 2020, growing 29% year over year.

As a world leader in connecting companies with their customers, Salesforce understands the essential relationship between content and business growth. In fact, CEO Marc Benioff sees the future of the company aligning with a shift in their marketing strategy: talking to people in a different way, prioritizing authentic communication over selling a product. That’s why Salesforce is trailblazing the elevation of content across the organization’s entire marketing ecosystem.

“How do we help people in their jobs?” Hayley Nelson, Salesforce’s first-ever VP of Content Marketing, asks herself. “We have valuable insights to share with people across all segments of our user segmentation grid. It’s time for us to organize our narratives and organize our efforts to really take advantage of this moment.”

In the last year, Salesforce has migrated several of its properties to WordPress VIP, including its Newsroom and the revamped 360 Blog. “Tools that can enable us to be agile are crucial,” explains Hayley.

“There’s a lot of ways to be successful. What’s most important is that you’re putting out a great story that someone finds value in and wants to engage with.”

Hayley Nelson, VP Content Marketing, Salesforce

“If you can picture Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I want the chocolate
blueberries shipping, shipping, shipping. I want everyone to see the data. How many blueberries did we produce today?”

Hayley Nelson, VP Content Marketing, Salesforce

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AccuWeather Wins its Competitive Strategy with Decoupled Architecture

AccuWeather is recognized as the most accurate source of weather forecasts and warnings in the world, serving roughly 1.52 billion people per day.

Content marketing is a key competitive advantage for AccuWeather. To create a positive customer experience, the company must deliver lightning-fast weather forecasts across thousands of locations around the world. The content channels they serve include alerts, blog posts, website updates, videos, and more, all of which need to be updated simultaneously.

“We’re in this rapid period of change at AccuWeather … and [our decoupled architecture] allows us to make changes on the front end without having to fully rebuild things in the CMS.”

Rachael Trost, Product Manager, Content

Their innovative use of the WordPress REST API supports over 750 million WordPress calls per day. WordPress VIP powers the backend of their content platform, which unites both developers and creators on one easy-to-use CMS. Because they use a decoupled, or headless, architecture, they have the flexibility to provide any front-end user experience their customers require, all powered from one central content platform. WordPress has become the backbone of a larger ecosystem that involves enterprise solutions, media partnerships, video coverage, podcast coverage, app integrations, and many other endpoints.

“We use WordPress to serve content on our apps, we use it to send content to local media partners, we use it to create different experiences for OTT platforms.”

Rachael Trost, Product Manager, Content, Accuweather

“We work with a couple of CMSes, and the integration with WordPress for decoupled has been the smoothest for us.”

Rachael Trost, Product Manager, Content, Accuweather

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DNCC Makes History Attracting 35.5M Digital Viewers

How do you get voters excited for a political convention when they’re home on their couch in the middle of a pandemic? You organize a virtual balloon drop, of course.

For the first-ever virtual national convention in U.S. history, the Democratic National Convention Committee (DNCC) embraced digital agility like never before.

Orchestrating a national political convention is always a huge undertaking. As the COVID-19 public health crisis accelerated, every day brought a new logistical challenge for the organizers. Soon, what started as a single website, demconvention.org, evolved into a robust, scalable digital experience platform for 35.5 million virtual convention attendees—a record-breaking number of digital viewers.

The DNCC chose WordPress VIP as its digital platform partner well before the pandemic hit, thanks to the platform’s security protections and ease of use. Expert guidance from WordPress VIP engineers helped DNCC leaders ensure best-in-class security and performance at every stage of the convention’s digital transformation.

“Everything from understanding how your edge servers and your CDNs work to how your security teams work and your pen testing works—all of it gave me a sense of calmness to say, ‘Okay. We have a partner who can just go handle this.’”

Andrew Binns, COO, 2020 DNCC

“… [W]e were able to build a connection for people with community that they have not been feeling for a while.”

Hannah Flom, Director of Digital Communications, 2020 DNCC

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OKdo Fuels DTC Growth with Integrated Content and Ecommerce

OKdo is the direct-to-consumer (DTC) arm of Electrocomponents, a large industrial supply business with over 500,000 products and 1 million customers. OKdo is RS Components’ first DTC brand, which sells electronics kits and parts for single-board computing and the Internet of Things.

The new brand was created to launch a global ecommerce business line in seven markets and six languages. Timeliness, agility, and enterprise scale were key project requirements.

OKdo chose WordPress VIP as the home for their platform, and leveraged WooCommerce to unlock the benefits of integrating content and commerce on a single platform.

With the pandemic forcing more people to stay at home, OKdo’s agility fueled their ability to bring new products to market. For example, in a single weekend they spun up a new campaign catered specifically to children learning at home.

The flexibility of their CMS and ecommerce integration simplifies their go-to-market strategy and makes it easy to maintain compliance across varying global tax regulations. Their infrastructure seamlessly handles the traffic spikes that come from successful new product releases.

“[Our products are] used in education. They’re used by makers at home, by schoolchildren, by hobbyists, people who are inventing things.”

Adrian Goodman, Global Digital Product Owner, OKdo

“We’ve had positive feedback from our users
who have said, ‘This is really simple. This is really easy to follow. This is best in class, it’s so clear.’ And that’s what we’re aiming for.”

Adrian Goodman, Global Digital Product Owner, OKdo