Transforming content momentum: ProWritingAid's 90 day website and app build time

• Headquarters: Oxford, United Kingdom
• Framework: C# and Pug.js

ProWritingAid (opens in a new window) needed to grow and give more independence to developers and marketers. They switched to a new Storyblok-powered desktop application in 3 months. On top of this over 2000 articles were migrated to Storyblok. This helped increase their organic traffic by 30%. They can also run A/B tests of the onboarding process to find the best content for their customers.

Challenges that restricted ProWritingAid’s content momentum

ProWritingAid used to have an in-house CMS to manage their blog, educational materials, and information. Over time, the team found that the CMS could not scale in its publishing efforts.

A custom-built solution was created for their landing pages to host content within a markdown setup. Yet, to maintain the company’s content publishing speed, a dependence on developers from the marketing team evolved over time. The brand faced many challenges, including:

• Marketers needed help from a developer to update landing-page content and the blog
• Dependencies on developers slowed down go-to-market momentum
• Content editors had to learn the markdown setup, creating an extra learning curve

Moving from a custom-built setup to a headless CMS

ProWritingAid needed a new CMS. Their Head of Growth suggested a headless CMS that could handle their growth. They looked at different options and chose Storyblok because of its unique features:

• The Visual Editor (opens in a new window) – helping the writing team's content management and publishing experience
• Custom Workflows (opens in a new window) – make publishing easier by streamlining writing, proofreading, and designing
• Cultural fit – the way Storyblok was a fit as a company that resonated with them
• Framework agnosticism – ProWritingAid can keep using the same technologies they were using before. This includes C# for the server and Pug.JS for templating and imaging

These features helped the developers save time and made it easier for the marketers to work and be more productive. The build and migration from ProWritingAid’s previous setup to Storyblok took only 3 months.

Using Storyblok across various platforms and running A/B testing

ProWritingAid uses Storyblok for its website and onboarding page of their desktop application, ProWritingAid Everywhere. The website hosts content related to their main product, such as SEO-targeted content pages.

With ProWritingEverywhere, the welcome and onboarding page for their desktop app is supported in Windows and Mac iOS. This makes it easy to update, change, and A/B test the page without changing the whole app. The page is hosted by Storyblok like a webpage without any headers or footers. For A/B testing, the team can use this through a custom-built framework to test the various onboarding processes for users.

Fostering innovation with Storyblok

The company has migrated over 2000 SEO articles from its previous CMS to Storyblok. ProWritingAid has also launched a new learning management platform called ProWritingAid Academy. It works 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.