Optimizely Rolls Out the Welcome Rug for Marketers

Chris Risner

W elcome is a new, exciting layer in Optimizely’s technology stack, enabling the entire marketing team to work together in harmony, connect all their martech tools and produce collateral in a seamless manner.

Optimizely is on a quest to be the best full stack digital experience software. With the recent acquisition of Welcome, an all-in-one Content Marketing Platform (CMP), the Optimizely platform becomes a serious contender for brands in the digital experience ecosystem. Welcome unleashes the potential of what marketing teams can accomplish with the right software. Welcome is a new, exciting layer in Optimizely’s technology stack, enabling the entire marketing team to work together in harmony, connect all their martech tools and produce collateral in a seamless manner. While Welcome may be new to Optimizely, it’s been a long-time industry leader in the content marketing space, having racked up a very impressive five Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader recommendations.

What is Optimizely’s Welcome and how does it work?

Welcome is Optimizely’s new Content Marketing Platform – a software solution that helps content marketing teams plan, envision, collaborate and create materials that successfully raise brand awareness, improve lead generation and increase revenue. As the most complete Content Marketing Platform (CMP) on the market, Welcome helps make marketing not only easier, but better. Welcome brings teams together on a single platform to collaborate and flawlessly execute campaigns. It enables teams to unleash their marketing potential by providing one workspace to plan, track and distribute work. Welcome gives creatives tools to produce, edit and proof their content. Martech teams also have a complete workflow with multiple views to visualize campaigns including calendar, timeline, Kanban, lists and more. Finally, marketers truly have a platform where they can ideate, create, collaborate and publish – all before pushing their work to their website.

Optimizely Digital Experience Lifecycle
Optimizely Digital Experience Lifecycle

The Complete Content Marketing Platform for Marketers

Welcome transforms how marketers do marketing because they are able to understand one very important fact: 80% of the work marketing teams complete is created in house before it’s pushed to websites and other digital channels. Knowing this, Shafqat Islam and Robert Ortiz, the Co-Founders of Welcome, created the leading marketing orchestration platform that strategically aligns teams, takes the friction out of execution and demonstrates meaningful results. Only Welcome offers a platform purpose-built for the complexities of modern marketing. The beauty of Welcome’s software it is fully scalable for all sized marketing teams.

Business team in co-working creative space

Taking the Friction Out of the Marketing Process

An experienced marketer knows the frustrations in the content creation process can be many including dealing with multiple stakeholders, tracking approvals, dealing with multiple repository systems, etc. Knowing all these issues, Welcome solves for all marketing concerns by creating one central system for marketing teams to create, manage and optimize their content within their platform. In fact, Welcome received the highest possible score for content distribution in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms.

Uniting Digital Marketing with Product Marketing

Quite often there can be a disconnect within the various silos in marketing, especially between digital marketing and product marketing. Welcome bridges the divide giving the entire marketing team a platform where they can ideate, create, collaborate and publish – all within one platform agnostic workflow. When paired together with Optimizely Digital Experience Platform, marketing teams can then take the published content or products, share them in their digital channels, perform experiments and optimize their content. Teams can then take this data back through the ideation and creation process to continually improve their content and product offerings.

ow angle close up of a Caucasian male and an Asian female business creative working together and smiling in a casual modern office, with blurred equipment on their desk in the foreground

Competing Head to Head with Sitecore and Adobe

The last couple years has seen the leading digital experience software giants Adobe, Sitecore and Optimizely acquiring software platforms to offer a holistic full stack for martech teams. With the addition of Welcome, a five-time leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms (CMP), Gartner positioned Optimizely strongest for ‘Completeness of Vision’ and highest for ‘Ability to Execute’ for the 5th consecutive year. Meanwhile, other competitors like Sitecore decreased their standing over previous years. The repeated recognition by industry experts is a testament to Optimizely’s commitment to innovation and customer success. In addition to now offering a world-class CMP and DAM, Welcome is also one of a few platforms offering advanced content performance analytics, going beyond SEO-analytics to measure content engagement across the entire customer journey and to demonstrate the impact of content on pipeline generation. As if this wasn’t already enough to entice marketing teams, Optimizely and Welcome have concentrated on delivering a better user experience for marketing teams. All in all, the addition of Welcome transforms how marketers experience the world of work every day.

Finally, A Platform that Offers Price Transparency

There is nothing worse than being excited about a software platform and the improvements it can make for your team, only to be kept in the dark about the true Total Cost of Ownership. For years, software pitches would include grandiose ideas with unrealistic budgets. Still today, teams find themselves getting halfway into a project and realize it is going to come in way over budget because there wasn’t true transparency up front. Thankfully, Optimizely is one of the first software platforms to offer up front real pricing so that you can truly plan your budgets and the needed KPI’s accordingly. Better yet? You can now trial Welcome for free.

Optimizely and price transparency

In summary, if you’re looking for a premium platform to use for your content marketing lifecycle, look no further than Welcome. Pairing Welcome with either Optimizely or your current platform will enable your marketing teams to harness powerful software to produce incredible results. Hopefully in the near future, we will also see Optimizely roll out headless capabilities.

If you’re looking for an Optimizely or Welcome implementation partner, look no further. BlueBolt has been an Optimizely partner since 2013, achieving gold status again for 2022. We are well known in the industry for our technical custom solutions, as well as our creative design and UX strategy work. For more information, please view our work.

Why Selling Direct-to-Consumer is a Game-Changer

Chris Risner

During the global pandemic and in years past, commerce has seen its ups and downs. According to Statista: “In 2021, direct-to-consumer (D2C) ecommerce sales in the United States surpassed $128 billion U.S. dollars. The U.S. D2C online market is forecast to grow to almost 213 billion U.S. dollars by 2023.” Whether your business has been largely impacted or not, one thing remains certain: companies must be thinking about ways to improve or reimagine their selling strategies now and into the future.

One such strategy is Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) selling. To learn more about opening up DTC channels, download our infographic based on a recent report from Shopify Plus, “The Direct-to-Consumer Guide.”

If you have questions we can help you with, please contact us.

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