Learning by doing with Drupal and Acquia Cohesion

Remember when building a website was terrifying? The development costs in iterating functionality were punishing, so projects tried to capture every requirement in granular detail before build began; because once the build started, any missing functionality would have to wait 3 months for the next deployment or maybe 3 years for the next re-platform. Businesses lavished on detailed user research to avoid post launch disappointment. Careers began, progressed and ended within the cycle of getting a website live.

Don't sweat the big stuff

We’ve moved past this, thankfully. You’ll hear us talk a lot about Acquia Cohesion and the ability to create design systems that it provides to Drupal. This allows us (and our client’s marketing teams) to evolve the messaging and user journeys on a website after launch and without costly development intervention. Missed a section? No problem. Got the messaging hierarchy wrong? No problem. Need to address the information hierarchy? No problem.

Agile for marketing

We now live in the age of agile marketing. Marketing teams borrow techniques from software development that help them to implement something quickly, test it in real-life, learn and adapt. This process means your marketing efforts deliver value from the beginning of your programme - not from the end, and are constantly guided/course corrected by real world data. Makes sense and we have a lot of cool clients that do this and use their website to drive value everyday.

We also have a box of tricks up our sleeve to help us understand what messaging will resonate with your users. It feels like the speed of travel has increased and we can now reach conclusions in weeks rather than months of effort. 

Go fast or go home

This has pushed us to adapt and learn ourselves as an agency. We still do waterfall projects where appropriate, but we are as likely these days to push for the early release of a thin site which we then build out based on insight. With like-minded marketing clients, it’s often amazing to see how the journey can unexpected turns when the user data comes in. And critically, internal stakeholder conversations become informed by real-world data much earlier in the process. 

We’ve seen these techniques identify, focus on and drive value into the marketing strategies of our clients. The software we develop is strongly geared to support this activity without the constant need for development teams to implement changes. We’ve even seen the web used as a test-and-learn environment for wider marketing strategy change. 

So if your website is not directly contributing to your companies revenue, or reducing your operating costs, then it’s worth having a chat with us!