How Digital Marketing is Evolving with Drupal

With exponential growth in marketing tools and website builders, why are marketers still adopting Drupal and maintaining their existing Drupal systems? And how has Drupal evolved to become a crucial piece of leading brands’ martech ecosystems?

For marketing decision makers, there are many reasons to choose and stick with Drupal, including:  

• Designed to integrate with other marketing tools
• Increased administrative efficiencies
• Flexible front-end design options
• Reduced Costs

Plays well with others

Your customer experience  no longer just depends on your CMS. Your CMS must integrate with new technologies and channels, as well as your CRM and marketing automation tools, to perform as a cohesive digital experience platform that reaches customers where they are.

Drupal is the most flexible CMS available when it comes to third-party integrations. Along with the power of APIs, Drupal can help you outfit your digital presence with the latest emerging tech more quickly than your competitors, allowing you to deliver an unparalleled customer experience.

Check out how Workday integrated disparate systems and tools, such as Salesforce and Mulesoft, to create a seamless experience that serves both their customer community members and internal support teams.

Increased administrative efficiencies

In large organizations, interdepartmental collaboration obstacles often translate into inefficient content publishing practices. This is even more compounded when marketers and content editors need a developer in the loop to help them make changes. When these hurdles aren’t properly navigated, prospects and customers suffer by not being able to gain easy access to the most relevant and up-to-date product or service information.

Over the years, Drupal has evolved to be flexible and accommodating for non-technical content admins, providing a highly customizable and user-friendly administration dashboard and flexible user privileges. Drupal powers marketing teams to design content independent of developers with modules like Paragraphs, which lets content admins rearrange page layouts without code adjustments while enforcing consistency across company sites.

Flexible front-end design options

Drupal 8 provides increased design flexibility by letting the front and back end architectures work as separate independent systems. Therefore the visual design of a website can be completely rebuilt without having to invest in any back-end architecture changes.

While this may seem a bit technical and in the weeds, this has significant benefits for marketing resources and budget! With this design flexibility, marketers can implement new designs faster and more frequently, empowering your team to test and iterate on UX to optimize the customer experience.

Reduced costs

The number of marketing tools required to run a comprehensive omnichannel marketing strategy is only growing. We add tools to our martech stack to help us grow our reach, understand our customers better, and personalize customer engagement. Each one of these tools has its own associated package cost or service agreement.

As an open source platform Drupal does not incur any licensing costs. While in contrast, a large implementation can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just to have the right to use proprietary software, Drupal’s community-developed software is free, saving companies millions.

Drupal is also fully customizable from the get go--not only when it comes to features and what site visitors see, but also with regard to editor tools, workflows, user roles and permissions, and more. This means the money that would go towards customization projects is freed up to benefit customers.

Digital marketing managers considering Drupal, or those contemplating a migration to Drupal 8, should consider these benefits and how Drupal is helping digital marketers evolve to provide a more agile and user-friendly digital experience for prospects and customers.

Strongly considering a move to Drupal or a migration to Drupal 8? Reach out to us with any questions. And in the meantime check out Drupal 8 Content Migration: A Guide for Marketers.