Martech Interview with VP, Marketing, Kentico Kontent – Vojtech Boril

Vojtech from Kentico Kontent discusses the importance of content in taking the load off marketers to create great stories and engaging customer experiences.

 

“I always say that we live in a world of instant gratification. People expect to find information (=content) immediately.”

1. Tell us about your role at Kentico Kontent?
I’m VP of Growth & Marketing at Kentico Kontent which means I’m directly responsible for all our global campaigns, demand generation, international team management, go-to-market strategy etc.

2. Can you tell us about your journey into this market?
Well, Kentico has been in the CMS market for more than 16 years now with its traditional monolithic CMS called Kentico Xperience. However, one of the pillars of Kentico has always been innovation. That’s why 5 years ago, we decided to invest in an internal startup to address an unmet need we were seeing among many of our customers. Back then, it was called Kentico Draft and its goal was to improve the content production process for editors. Draft eventually evolved into something much bigger, Kentico Kontent. And, it’s been quite a ride.

3. What role do you think technology plays in streamlining content production?
Nowadays, technology is at the epicenter of content production and distribution. Not only the way we produce content changed. More importantly, the way we consume content changed dramatically. These days, the majority of people consume content on multiple devices – from smartphones and iPads to laptops, and even IoT gadgets and voice assistants. And all these changes were driven by… technology.

4. What is the significance of developers delivering a consistently fast digital experience?
At the beginning, I would like to say that the overall quality and creativity of a digital experience depends equally on the developers and marketers. You can have a blazingly fast website or app, but if it is created without a stunning idea, without a meaningful message, then it will not work.

Where I specifically see the importance and significance of developers is the speed, availability, scalability and security of any digital experience. All these factors are essential for bringing the best digital experience for its users.

Also, if we take a look at the Martech stack, we can see that the number of apps and tools is rapidly growing every year. That means that the importance of high-quality integrations between the systems grows as well. You can have multiple expensive platforms for various tasks, but if you do not have skillful developers who will connect them together, it’s useless.

5. How is a headless CMS better than a legacy CMS?
There are many benefits of headless CMS. However, the very first thing to understand is the fact that headless CMS brings a change of the mindset. Content should be perceived as a strategic asset and headless CMS allows you to separate the content production from its presentation layer. That being said, you can centralize your content in a headless CMS, and then distribute the content chunks to different channels without duplicating the content. Such action would be very challenging with any legacy CMS.

THE SEPARATION OF THE CONTENT PRODUCTION AND PRESENTATION LAYER ALSO MEANS THAT CONTENT EDITORS AND WRITERS CAN WORK INDEPENDENTLY AT THE SAME TIME WHEN DEVELOPERS ARE DEVELOPING THE WEBSITE OR APPLICATION. SOME HEADLESS CMS EVEN GO SO FAR THAT THEY OFFER SPECIAL COLLABORATION FEATURES FOR EDITORS SO THAT THEY CAN COLLABORATE IN REAL-TIME TO PRODUCE GREAT CONTENT.

Also, headless CMS are cloud-based, which means you can enjoy all SaaS benefits – you do not need to care about the maintenance, hotfixes, security or scalability of the CMS, the vendor covers your back.

Let me mention one more benefit that specifically developers love – they get to choose whatever modern JS framework or language they prefer, since headless CMS are not tied with a single development framework. They can experiment, always use the latest technologies and hence, deliver a better user experience.

There are more benefits to headless CMS, but I guess I’ve covered too many already 🙂

6. How does unified content improve its quality?
I would not claim that unified content by definition improves its quality. At the end of a day, it still depends on how engaging and meaningful the content is. However, if you unify your content in one place for all your channels (different websites, apps, ecommerce, product catalogues, even print…), you can rest assured the content will be consistent everywhere. That means the quality of user experiences will improve dramatically. Not only do your editors not need to update the content in too many places, your visitors and customers will always see consistent messaging everywhere.

If we discussed it in more of a deep-dive, we could also talk about structured content and how the fact that you design your content from the beginning to be channel-agnostic improves its quality.

7. Can you explain to us in detail about how Kontent boosts the value of content by marketers?
Let me tweak the question a bit – I’d say that Kontent frees marketers to focus on what they do the best – create great stories and engaging experiences for their customers. Kontent offers them a powerful content authoring interface that includes real-time collaboration features, suggestion mode, advanced content modelling and workflows. Thanks to smart notifications and project overview, everyone always knows when something changed and if some work is waiting for their review or approval. No more content delays! 🙂

8. What is the importance of creating exceptional digital touchpoints?

It is absolutely necessary to stay competitive. I always say that we live in a world of instant gratification. People expect to find information (=content) immediately. Customers engage with those who can meet their needs instantly.

Hence, innovative companies keep looking for new ways, new channels = exceptional digital touchpoints to communicate more efficiently.

9. What movie inspires you the most?
That’s a tricky question. There are a lot of movies that inspire me. Since I do endurance sports competitively, I often get inspired by challenging stories from mountains or nature where people had to overcome themselves to achieve something, sometimes even to stay alive. If I should name one movie, I would go for “Only the brave” which is a film dedicated to the Granite Mountain Hotshots that tells their story of hard work, friendship and tragedy they faced when fighting the wildfire in Arizona.

10. Can you give us a glance of the applications you use on your phone?
Sure, while I do my best not to spend too much time on my iPhone, I of course have way too many apps there. I have all the apps for work (Teams, Outlook, Slack, Trello, Jira…), some social media (Twitter and LinkedIn, I do not use Facebook on my phone), maps/navigation (Waze, Mapy.cz). I need to admit that (except for work apps) the most used app on my phone is Strava – an app for athletes to track their training sessions.

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