Mark Wheeler, CMO of Storyblok, shares insights into how Storyblock differentiates itself from other headless CMS providers, discusses the shift from traditional search to AI search, and how an API-first approach can enhance content visibility in the age of generative.
He offers valuable advice for marketers, encouraging them to focus on personalization and to be ambitious in their campaigns. He also advised those starting their marketing careers to embrace failure as a learning opportunity and to strive for impactful marketing that resonates with audiences.
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About Storyblok
Storyblok is a headless CMS for marketers and developers who want to make a bigger, faster market impact. It frees you from the pain of legacy CMS platforms and empowers your teams to ship content quickly and build with complete flexibility.
Brands like Adidas, T-Mobile, and Renault use Storyblok to make content management fun and collaborative. It’s Joyful Headless™ and it changes everything.
About Mark
Mark Wheeler is the CMO of Storyblok and leads the marketing strategy and execution to drive business growth and redefine the CMS category. Recognized as a Top 100 B2B global CMO, he’s dedicated to building communities for marketers and developers. With a deep understanding of digital experiences, Mark ensures Storyblok delivers exceptional value.
Previously, as CMO of LeanIX, he played a key role in doubling customers in two years and contributing to its successful acquisition by SAP. He has also held senior marketing roles at Nutanix, EMC, Sitecore, and Adobe.
Time Stamps
00:00:18 – Guest Introduction: Mark Wheeler, CMO of Storyblock
00:00:42 – Mark’s Career Journey in Tech Marketing
00:01:46 – What is a Joyful Headless CMS?
00:05:09 – The Relationship Between Marketers and Developers
00:07:47 – Who Uses a Headless CMS Like Storyblock?
00:09:31 – The Importance of API-First CMS in AI Search
00:14:09 – AI Tools and Enhancements in Storyblock
00:16:13 – Marketing Challenges with Legacy Platforms
00:19:07 – Strategies for Reaching Marketers
00:21:08 – Successful Campaigns and Content Strategies
00:24:03 – Quickfire Round: Marketing Advice
Quotes
“The Joyful brand or the Joyful Headless brand came about through really just speaking to a lot of our existing customers and partners who just kept on expressing that it got rid of a lot of the pain that they’d been feeling with their previous CMS products.” Mark Wheeler, CMO of Storyblok
“One of the brands that I think I most admire, particularly about 15 years ago, was HubSpot. And the reason I admired them in particular was because they really focused on their content marketing strategy.” Mark Wheeler, CMO of Storyblok
“I think the best managers will always celebrate failures as much as they celebrate the successes. And the best marketers I’ve always met… wanted to do the bigger and more impactful things.” Mark Wheeler, CMO of Storyblok
Follow Mark:
Mark Wheeler on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markwheeler/
Storyblok website: https://www.storyblok.com/
Storyblok on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/storyblok/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Mark Wheeler at Storyblok
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Mark Wheeler
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I’m joined by Mark Wheeler, who’s the CMO of Storyblok.
Welcome to the podcast, Mark.
Mark: It’s good to see you. How are you doing?
Mike: I’m doing well. So, I mean, let’s start off with a bit about you, though. Let’s find out something about your background and what you’ve done. Do you want to tell us, you know, what you’ve done in your career and how it’s led you to working for Storyblok?
Mark: Well, you know, I kicked off my career in sales, actually. You know how it’s like when you leave university, you sort of land in a career, you’re never quite sure if that’s what you want to do. Although I actually was educated through marketing. But I’ve always been in tech marketing. I kicked off my career at Compaq, which was one of the big PC players back in the 1980s and 90s. And my career has then sort of gone through various roles in product and field marketing at companies like Adobe and EMC. And in more recent years, I’ve worked in some fast-scaling companies like Nutanix. And then latterly, a European software company called LinaX, she ended up more than doubling in size over a couple of years. And that ultimately resulted in a sale to SAP in November 2023, which is a very exciting place to be. And then, latterly, of course, I joined Storyblok. It’s a company that I, when I first met the founder, I was really taken by the team, but more especially the product. The reason being is that having run a whole bunch of marketing teams over the years, it started to solve some of the content bottlenecks and inefficiencies that I saw in all of these marketing departments. And Storyblok does a fantastic job of eliminating these frustrations. And so that totally resonated with me. It was one of those preconditions I figured out when I moved to the company, which is, would I buy this product myself? And it absolutely hit the nail on the head with that one.
Mike: I mean, anyone who’s listening, if they’re trying to dig into Storyblok, they will have found out that it’s not just a headless, but a joyful headless CMS. So, Mark, what on earth is a joyful headless CMS?
Mark: Well, hey, look, we just recently rebranded back in January. The Joyful brand or the Joyful Headless brand came about through really just speaking to a lot of our existing customers and partners who just kept on expressing that it got rid of a lot of the pain that they’d been feeling with their previous CMS products. And what we were seeing as we thought about the brand messaging was that, of course, everyone else talks about content is king or queen. It’s really been something that’s been talked about, I think, now for more than a decade. And so, this human aspect of getting work done and the tools that we use making it joyful again really seem to resonate with people. And we headed down this direction talking about a joyful CMS or joyful headless. And so, a lot of people then asked me, so what is a headless CMS? It’s not a decapitation of a former Queens of England. It’s actually a technical term where you’re separating the front-end experience that you might have in a website, for example, with the content itself. The benefit of that means that you can use content anywhere, whether it’s on the web, mobile apps, voice, even AR. And so, it really makes your content more flexible. Whereas what tends to happen today is that a lot of organizations will have multiple content systems serving those different types of screen. And so, you start to get content inconsistencies. But the other, I think, big thing with a platform like a headless CMS is it means a much, much faster time to market, more flexibility across channels. And for marketers more in particular, and this particularly resonates with them, is it resolves the waiting on developers. I think one of the things most marketers will talk about is the number of tickets they raise in a year to just get simple stuff done on the web. It’s really holding them back. Things take days and weeks and not hours like they would really like to wish. So, a headless CMS really starts to unlock your content potential.
Mike: And that’s really interesting. Because I think, you know, intuitively, some marketers might think, well, you’re separating the content from your website, effectively, doesn’t that mean that every time I have a problem, there’s two tickets rather than one. So, do you want to talk a little bit about why headless solve so many problems?
Mark: Yeah. Think about it this way. So, the relationship between the marketer and developer just fundamentally changes. So firstly, what happens in an environment like this is a developer will start to essentially sketch out in code what we call components. Now those components are the elements that start to take typical items like a hero image or a headline, a sub-headline, and core content. And so, they’re essentially structural pieces of tech that go into a page. The great thing about that is it works regardless of the type of environment in which it’s going to be presented. So, for example, if I’m going to see it’s on a phone, it will work accordingly. So now for the marketer, it means that I can now go into something called a visual editor and now simply just drag and draw images, text. Here’s my headline, here’s my subheader, here’s my copy. And really, that becomes an environment that’s as simple to use if you’re, frankly, if you can use PowerPoint today as a marketer, you can use a web visual editor. It’s a sort of similar paradigm. Simply take a text and drag images, super simple. So now, if after two weeks you’ve been running an A-B test, for example, on a new headline or a new homepage hero, and it’s not working, well then, it’s very easy for you to adjust. You don’t need to go back to the developer to make any of those changes. You can imagine that that’s an incredibly powerful place to be. I’ll give you an example. We’re very fortunate. We have a lot of fashion brands as customers today. I think this context of speed that’s really sort of gravitated them towards a tool like Storyblok. Because today now, particularly with the richness of social and Instagram, for example, you’re getting Kim Kardashian, for example, wearing one particular kind of top. And then those brands want to be able to get to market as quickly as they can with those typical fashion trends, not by the end of the week, not by next week, but within a couple of hours. So that empowerment is really what makes the difference. So that’s the fundamental difference today between a monolithic CMS and a headless CMS-like storybook.
Mike: And so presumably the benefit is, is you just do it once in Storyblok and it spreads across all your different channels, whereas if you’re using, I don’t know, AEM for your website, you then need different tools for everything else. Is that really how you’re saving the time?
Mark: Well, it’s not just that. Yes, so the answer is yes to your question, but it’s in addition to that. One of the other things I’ve often found is the other aberration between marketers and developers has been, oh, you know, Mike, I’ve seen this brand doing this. Incredibly sexy, and I want to be able to do that too. And the developer, because they’re locked into a development environment, will then often come back to the market and say, fortunately, I can’t do that. Our framework doesn’t allow us to do that, unfortunately. And so the marketer looks at that individual and goes, oh, it must be their fault. But they are locked into a development environment, and it does constrain innovation. But also, whilst we keep on raising these tickets and keep on going back to developers to remove commas from headlines, they haven’t got time to focus on being able to do the more innovative and cool things that they’d love to be doing. So in a way, empowering marketers has a side benefit to developers, which is they’re now left alone from doing the ad hoc marketing requests and being able to spend the time really on the cooler development opportunities that, you know, of course they want to do.
Mike: Sounds really interesting. So, I mean, who are the sort of companies, you mentioned the fashion industry being one, but who are the sort of companies that would use a headless CMS like Storyblok?
Mark: Well, increasingly, the vast majority of the market is starting to move in that direction. And the reason that’s the case is because, sorry to use another acronym, but it’s API first. What we’re finding is one of the key drivers in this direction at the minute is the shift from traditional search to AI search. One of the problems with today’s websites, particularly if they’re served up on a monolithic CMS, without an API-first environment, is that the only way that these chat GPTs and copilots, for example, can get content off your website is to scrape it. And so, essentially, anything that’s hidden behind a paywall, anything that’s essentially difficult to get to, is not necessarily then consumed into these new AI search engines. Now, if you are an API-first CMS, what you’re now doing is you’re basically saying to the AI search agent, this is what I’d like you to take from me. Here is all my content. Here is what expresses our point of view or expresses our brand and identifies what we would like you to know about us. So now, all of a sudden, when you start to do an AI search on a particular technology or product, whatever it is, then suddenly it’s those organizations that have built up their content within an API-first environment that are going to find themselves at the top of the pile when it comes to the AI agent saying, this is what I believe, or this is what I found, or this is what I see. And so we’re seeing, I think over the next 18 months and two years, I think there’ll be quite a significant and rapid change on high-value content, putting that on an API-first CMS, because it’s going to be a race now to who can make sure their content is best exposed to these new AI search agents.
Mike: We hear a lot of discussion about visibility in generative AI. So, I can definitely see the attraction there. There are, of course, other headless CMSs around. So just in terms of looking at Storyblok, what is it about Storyblok that makes it so good, or perhaps I should use the word so joyful?
Mark: Touche. Yes, Storyblok really originated and was the very first enterprise headless CMS to deliver the visual editor. That was essentially the way in which individuals, marketers, could self-empower to go build out web pages and marketers essentially deliver and publish content without the need of a developer whatsoever. And that focus on ease of use, I think, is what has really driven our entire approach. But now that’s extended from this visual editing to the entire content lifecycle. So now we have tools, for example, that enable teams of individuals, a bit like a bit If you think about how you work in Google Docs, for example, where multiple people can come in at one time and start to ideate on content, we now have capabilities that bring different individuals, whether it be content, individuals, marketers, designers, to one place to start working on content simultaneously and together. So that ability to collaborate and publish content more quickly is a philosophy that permeates through our product, I believe. The second thing, it’s framework flexibility. Now, the marketers on this podcast are probably not going to be too concerned about this, but developers really love it. Over the last five or six years, there’s been a real proliferation of new development environments. that are really important to developers. And that freedom of choice, I think, has made Storyblok especially compelling from that perspective. So those are just a couple of examples. And I think now with the advent of AI, I think one of the ways in which we focused on bringing those capabilities to market has been thinking about the things that Marker is just plain boring. So let me give you a few examples. One of the important things on a web page is called alt text. And alt text is what describes something visual, for example, that isn’t written content or structured content. It’s an image. This is also very important for forthcoming laws around accessibility, for example. So, if, for example, I had a picture of Mike in front of me, and he’s in front of his mic, and he’s about to start a show, then the alt text is basically a description of what we’re seeing. Here is Mike in front of his mic about to kick off his show. And that helps particularly the visually impaired to understand what we’re seeing. But now increasingly, with things like AI search, these can also be embedded in the data we’re collecting from that process. So, we have a little AI tool that now will let you click on something and say, oh, and it will write it for you. Incredibly easy. Another one that I think content people love is AI SEO. We work with a lot of content writers around the world, and they love writing. But then they also now have to think very carefully about how is this optimized for SEO? Now, wouldn’t it be great if there was a one-click tool that helped you to make sure that your copy was SEO ready? Again, this is another type of tool that we’ve put into the product. Our thinking is always around how do we make; how do we get rid of the boring stuff?
Mike: How do we make it joyful? I love it. I mean, I’m sure that there’s people like me who are listening to you thinking, you know, this sounds like a great product, but I really wouldn’t want to market it because you’ve got to go to a company and say, you don’t need to just change your website, but you need to change the technology behind it and actually change everything digital. Just change it all. It sounds like it’s quite a challenge. So how do you go about marketing a product that requires such a big amount of effort and change from customers to adopt it?
Mark: Yeah. Look, if you are on one of the big legacy platforms, beginning with A or S, you know the ones I’m talking about, then you’ve probably been there several years. You probably have thousands of pages, if not tens of thousands of pages of content. And I think one of the things it’s important to perhaps avoid is thinking, okay, I need to basically shift from one technology to another. The best way forward that we’ve seen is to think about your next product launch, a new market that perhaps you want to go into, a new campaign that you want to launch, where you felt the frustration of how long it takes to get things done, or you haven’t seen the performance that you would have hoped from previous campaigns, and essentially to run Storybloks side by side with the legacy platform. And we’ve seen many organizations do that. And what they found is that over time, so the first campaign’s gone incredibly well. They go, oh, let’s put the next one on. Oh, and there’s this part of our previous website that we’d like to see better performance. Let’s bring that over. And so, think of it as a bit like buying two houses, really. You know you want to change house, but you don’t want the upheaval. And so, what we find is a lot of companies will buy Storyblok, run it adjacent to their existing system, and start to gently transition. And you might think, well, hold on a minute. That sounds costly, because you’re adding cost. But what tends to happen is you start to lose your ability to start reducing costs of the legacy platform, which tend to be of an order of magnitude considerably more expensive. You start to be able to switch off that over time and reduce your expenditure. So net, within a relatively small space of time, you should be in a position of making considerable cost savings. Today, the monolithic CMS environments, or DXPs as sometimes they’re also called. They’ve got a whole wealth of features that 99% of most organizations never use, but you’re paying for. And so, as you start to migrate, you can start to say, right, I don’t need that anymore. I’ll start to switch that off. We haven’t been using it anyhow. A good one that I often see very frequently never used anymore is some of the legacy personalization tools that rely on, you know, single data points. And I’ve often been used once or twice by the marketing team with poor results and then go, I’m never going to use that again. A lot of effort for no return. So yeah, over time you can start to save considerable costs.
Mike: And it’s interesting, I mean, you talk about, you know, exciting marketers around the product. I mean, marketers are not an easy audience to reach. So how do you reach out to marketers? I mean, what tactics or channels work best for you?
Mark: Yeah. One of the brands that I think I most admire, particularly about 15 years ago, was HubSpot. And the reason I admired them in particular was because they really focused on their content marketing strategy, not in a way that was trying to sell you their marketing automation platform as it was back then. They were trying to sell you on this concept of inbound marketing. In effect, what they were trying to do is help you be a better marketer. They weren’t ever trying to sell you a product per se. Of course, you bought into their methodology, you bought into their concepts and processes that led you to then look at their product. But I think their core principle, where they set out to go, was to just try and help marketers do better marketing. And I think as I work with Storybloks content marketing team, that’s really the principle we’re trying to apply to our own content now, which is, let’s help marketers to be better marketers. They’re all frustrated with their website. Recently, we ran a survey of about 1,300 individuals where in excess of 40% respondees said that they were embarrassed by their website. And so, you know, with that sort of frustration that exists out there, I think if we can start to help marketers think about how they leverage their most powerful shop front, which is their digital customer experience. then I think we’ll be in a good place. And so that’s really been a guiding light for us, I think. So yeah, well done HubSpot from 15 years ago. I think you left a very lasting effect on me.
Mike: Well, I mean, I think anyone who’s been involved in HubSpot has seen the way that they started this concept of content marketing, or really drove the concept of content marketing, and became this kind of a bit of a bizarre cult. But you know, quite how they made the jump, I never quite knew, but it’s very effective. I mean, I’m interested, you talk about helping marketers and using your marketing to make marketers better. Is there a particular campaign or content piece you’ve done that’s really worked well in terms of doing this?
Mark: Yeah, you know, one of the things I’m particularly proud of with my team at the minute is that we’ve been working on is, over the last several months, we’ve really focused on our tech stack, really refining our ICP, starting to build a propensity model around our accounts. And with that, overlaying it with intent signals that help us to truly understand where a buyer is in their buying journey. One of the pieces of work that we’re working on right now is revisiting our entire Nurture engine. And it’s a sophisticated beast that we’re building out, and with the support of an external agency called CRMT, who focus on the technical side of implementing this. But in effect, what it’s doing, Mike, is it’s helping us to understand for sonar profiles, and then starting present and create a discussion with the prospect based on their context and where they are in their buyer’s journey. Now, it’s taken a lot of work because as the team often will tell me, Mark, this now consists of over 120 different emails that have to be contextually relevant. Where we’ve come from, which has been really a traditional marketing automation drip campaign, that organizations will run. We’ve now connected it with our back-end database, Salesforce, Sixth Sense, Pardot, and brought in all this insight that we have about the persona, their stage in the buyer’s journey, and start to be much more contextually relevant. Doesn’t perhaps sound too exciting, but for a techno person like me, who really focuses on data and results, I’m really excited by it because I think it’s really going to generate some strong results for the team.
Mike: And I think that’s really interesting. I mean, at Napier, we run another podcast looking at market automation. And one of the biggest questions is, why do people spend so much money on market automation tools and then just use them as a glorified email list? And I think the fact you’ve taken the time and spent the money to really put genuine insight into your campaigns, I mean, that’s great to hear that you’ve done that.
Mark: Yeah, yeah. And I think the team are feeling a real sense of accomplishment from it. It’s been a real technical tour de force.
Mike: I’m really quite proud of it. Well, I mean, I think that’s a positive note to leave the main thing about Storyblok. But before you go, Mark, there’s a couple of questions we love to ask people in kind of a quickfire round. So, I mean, the first question is, what’s the best marketing advice that you’ve ever been given by someone else?
Mark: And so, what else? I’ve always been of the view that you should speak to one person and not the crowd. I’ve been a strong believer of tools like personalization over the years, but I think they’ve often frustrated marketers because I’m not sure today’s technology really works. But I’m feeling very positive about where that tech’s heading. The advent of AI is just going to completely change that game so that we can start to really become contextually and personalized down to a particular individual. I’ve always said to my team, you know, why are we sending a singular email, the same email to over 20,000 people? That’s just never made sense to me. And I’ve never chased the 1%, 2% results. I don’t see the point. So, speak to one person, not the crowd.
Mike: Great advice, I love that. I think often marketers, particularly in B2B, see the more focused your ICP becomes, i.e. the smaller audience you aim at, actually the bigger the results. It’s kind of a paradoxical thing. Yeah, exactly that. The other question we’d like to ask is really about people starting their career. So, what advice would you give if you were talking to someone who was just beginning marketing as a career?
Mark: Yeah, be ambitious with your marketing. Don’t be afraid to fail. I think a lot of people obviously always worry about, oh, what does their boss think? But I think the best managers will always celebrate failures as much as they celebrate the successes. And the best marketers I’ve always met, and I hope was part of my own success, was wanting to be daring, wanting to be doing something different, wanting to do the bigger and more impactful things. Always ask yourself, is what I’m about to do going to leave a lasting memory on my audience? And if you can go to sleep at night going, yeah, I think it really did make a difference. I think you’ll have done the kind of marketing that will make you and make your career.
Mike: I love that, Mark. And certainly, you know, I think in some ways you’ve been brave, calling a headless CMS joyful, but absolutely it’s something that’s very memorable. And I know, you know, anyone listening to this will immediately, if somebody talks about Storyblok or CMSes, they’ll go, I know which is joyful. So, I think that’s a great way to get your brand remembered.
Mark: Yeah, you know, I remember when we first coined the idea, at the time I was like, can we really go with this? But then, you know, I let it run with me for a little while. You know what? It really works.
Mike: Mark, it’s been amazing. If people want to find out more about Storyblok or maybe get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that?
Mark: Well, look, of course, our website’s a quick and easy way to go and find out a lot about our proposition. More than that, you can try it for free for 14 days and find out whether you like it or not. But otherwise, look, I’d love to speak to other marketers, whether it’s about Storyblok or just driving marketing forward, then, you know, please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and love to chat.
Mike: Mark, it’s been fascinating. I think everyone’s going to be much more excited about their CMS now. So, thank you very much for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology.
Mark: Yeah, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you, Mike.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favourite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
