Solving the Goldilocks dilemma of mid-market marketing technology
Is Builder.io finally a just right solution?
Tuesday, Dec 12, 2023
To effectively manage evolving customer experience expectations, marketers often resort to one of three digital experience creation and management technology strategies:
- Monolithic Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) such as Adobe, Acquia, Optimizely, or Sitecore
- MACH solutions utilizing a Headless CMS like Contentful or Contentstack
- Website Builders like WordPress, WIX, or Webflow
Mid-market marketers face a Goldilocks dilemma with these options: they’re either too small, too large, or seldom just right. This blog post examines these alternatives for mid-market marketers and introduces a new market player, builder.io, offering a well-fitted solution.
Website Builders: A Starting Point
Let's start by discussing Website Builders such as WordPress, WIX and Squarespace. This approach centers around leveraginglow-cost, low-code tools that are designed for quick, budget-friendly website creation by teams without extensive technical knowledge. They are ideal "off the shelf" options for companies that do not seek to differentiate their brand with their digital experience but rather simply require essential digital marketing capabilities, a clean user experience and good SEO to ensure their digital customer experience doesn’t detract from their brand.
However, challenges with these solutions arise when companies need to:
- Customize the front-end to create distinct customer experiences.
- Develop custom integrations for back-office systems such as CRMs and ERPs.
- Distribute content across multiple channels like mobile apps and kiosks.
- Maintain strict governance and control over branding and content.
Over time, these solutions may become too limiting for the expanding needs of mid-market companies.
Monolithic DXP Solutions: The One-Stop Shop
On the other end of the sprectrum are enterprise Digital Experience Platform (DXP) solutions such as Adobe, Sitecore, Optimizely, and Acquia. These platforms offer comprehensive capabilities, from conception to maintenance. They simplify operations and offer a full suite of services, promising scalability for growing digital marketing expertise.
However, the high cost and complexity, with licensing fees averaging $100,000 annually and demanding specialized skills for implementation, make these solutions less accessible.
These products offer numerous features but necessitate extensive customization, leading to significant investment in time and resources, albeit resulting in highly bespoke and differentiated designs.
As marketers evaluate their options, the choice often boils down to what is most crucial for their organization.
Headless & MACH Solutions: The Best of Breed Approach
The final option is to leverage headless solutions adhering to the MACH alliance principles (Microservices, APIs, Cloud-native, and Headless). Leading the way in CMS are options like Contentful, Contentstack, Sanity.io, and Kontent.ai. These solutions offer a modular approach, allowing for robust customization and control.
This model suits companies servicing various channels, aiming to optimize content reuse, minimize investment in unused features, and prevent vendor lock-in by enabling easy component replacement.
Immensely popular, especially with technologically adept organizations, this approach, while cost-effective when components are few, can become as costly as monolithic DXPs due to integration and maintenance expenses.
A significant drawback is the complex architecture that often requires developer intervention, posing challenges for marketers working on time-sensitive campaigns.
Builder.io: Just Right?
Builder.io has recently emerged onto the Martech landscape and offers marketers the opportunity have the best of all of the options above. It does this by providing:
- A visual page building & marketer self service capabilities found in Page Building and DXP solutions
- Enterprise experience management capabilities like Personalization, AB Testing & Optimization, Analytics traditionally only found in DXP solutions
- The extensibility of a MACH Solution (in fact it is a part of the MACH alliance)
- The cost profile of a Page Builder solution
Additionally, Builder.io has recently launched a killer feature called Visual Co-Pilot that allows the direct translation of Figma based designs into the Builder.io page layout design tool and or as React based components that your developers can use as a starting point to extend.
This feature in my option completely changes the game and provides game changing levels of productivity which now makes custom experiences more accessible to the mid market companies that previously didn't have the skillsets or budgets to entertain.
Conclusion
In summary, Builder.io presents an adaptable option for mid-market companies, allowing them to reduce costs, enhance development productivity, and maintain high customization levels. For the more budget-conscious segment of the mid-market, Builder.io offers a robust and scalable solution that can expedite the growth of digital marketing capabilities, providing a competitive edge.
