Education ProWritingAid’s journey in giving back marketer and developer independence

ProWritingAid is an AI-powered writing assistant platform that offers grammar and style checking, combined with coaching and guiding through in-depth reports and learning to help users strengthen their writing skills. It targets anyone from seasoned writers to those starting their journey of writing English as a second language across 193 countries. ProWritingAid is delivered through its own website and various plug-ins extensions to allow easy access for writers to check any typos, syntax errors, and grammar mistakes on the go to become better writers. 

• 3-month build of the website and desktop application customer onboarding experience

• 30% increase in organic traffic to site in 3 months

• 2000+ migration of SEO articles from blog to Storyblok

Moving from a custom-built setup to a headless CMS

Before moving to Storyblok, ProWritingAid’s setup existed on their own homegrown CMS that they used for their blog, hosting various learning materials and content that accompanied their product. Over time, the team found that it lacked the capacity to scale in terms of publishing. Throughout the rest of their landing pages, a custom-built solution was created to host such types of content within a markdown setup. However, to maintain the company’s increasing velocity of content publishing efforts, there was a growing dependency on developers from the marketing team.

Marketers could not independently update landing-page content and the blog without the help of a developer. This dependency resulted in a slowed-down go-to-market momentum and forced the developers to redirect their attention from their core product. 

On top of this, some content editors within the writing team were unfamiliar with their markdown setup. This created an additional learning curve while adding even more time in their pipeline to get content to market/publishing.

ProWritingAid’s Head of Growth, Joanna Delaney, brought to the table the need for a new CMS. From prior experience, she recommended using a headless CMS that could match ProWritingAid’s ambitions for growth and scalability. Having looked around at various options on the market in early 2022, Storyblok stood out for its unique features: 

• The Visual Editor - a fundamental need for the marketing and writing team to facilitate their content management and publishing experience

• Customizable Workflows - despite having an already established workflow in their previous system, the company desired workflow possibilities that could distinguish, transpose and organize ProWritingAId’s strict content publishing processes (such as writing, proofreading, visual design, etc.) inside the CMS

• Cultural fit - the way Storyblok was a fit as a company that resonated with them 

• Framework agnosticism - the ability to keep the same technologies that they were using before (with their server hosted on C# and templating/imaging via Pug.JS)

Such features not only reassigned time back to their developers to devote entirely to engineering tasks, but also gave back website independence and productivity to their marketers. Overall, the two teams that were key in building and migrating ProWritingAid’s previous setup to Storyblok were their website and growth team, with a build and migration time of just 3 months. 

Using Storyblok across various platforms and running A/B testing

ProWritingAid has been able to use Storyblok’s headless nature to best mix and match with the multiple channels and platforms they serve, including their main website and welcome/onboarding page within their desktop application ProWritingAid Everywhere.
Their main website hosts content related to their main product, such as SEO-targeted content pages. 

The welcome and onboarding page within their desktop application are built with Storyblok. While this is installed software, the brand can go directly into Storyblok to update, change, and even run A/B tests within the onboarding page without actually changing the download executable. When a user opens the desktop application, a welcome screen is presented as a web-view container. This is hosted through Storyblok behind the scenes as a webpage without any headers or footers. Essentially, by just using the HTML rendered from Storyblok, content can be used directly within various versions of the desktop download for both Windows and Mac iOS. 

For A/B testing, the team were able to use this through a custom-built framework with Storyblok to test the various onboarding processes for users and to see which content types worked best for each audience - thus creating the best user and content experience for anyone using ProWritingAid’s products both online and via desktop. For example, two onboarding processes were tested with an inspirational onboarding and informational onboarding processes to see the engagement rate of users and how they interact with them. 

On top of this, ProWritingAid’s browser extension also works directly in Storyblok to help correct any grammar issues and typos. 

Fostering cross-collaboration amongst various teams

Currently, five teams use Storyblok at ProWritingAid (developers, designers, marketers, writers, and content editors). With this, an entire process exists to ensure each part of their process runs smoothly within their content management experience. Everything is created in-house, where all content is written inside Storyblok. The designers upload their designs directly to the CMS, while copy editors proof content also directly on the page they are working on. From there, an approval process goes through a workflow of 4 to 5 people to verify the page before content is published. 

Key Takeaways

ProWritingAid brought back developer and marketer independence while creating a futureproof setup and fostering collaboration amongst teams with Storyblok. In just 3 months, the company was able to build and migrate to Storyblok while launching a hybrid Storyblok-desktop application onboarding process that allowed A/B testing to find out the right content for their customers. On top of this, since launching their homepage with Storyblok in September 2022, ProWritingAid has seen a 30% increase in organic traffic to their site in just 3 months. Currently, the company is in the process of migrating over 2000 SEO articles from its blog to Storyblok. 

ProWritingAid has also just launched a new learning management platform, ProWritingAid Academy, as a cohort-based writing course to help users improve their writing skills. With such a program comes lots of materials and content to upkeep and update. Using Storyblok, the platform will be hosted on their website, a custom mobile application, and Circle.so as a community platform in tandem.