SmarTone + Magnolia

Without a standard CMS in place, the entire site was developed internally, and developers needed to update it page by page. Having to resort to manual efforts to perform updates meant that SmarTone’s developers spent more time performing maintenance than creating new and engaging experiences with the marketing team.

Magnolia was chosen as the ideal CMS for SmarTone due to its flexible architecture and composable DXP nature. Content could be segregated into different content apps, and the system could be set up to match their operational flow. This was pivotal as SmarTone needed to have an editing environment in a protected environment, a content staging environment in a semi-protected server, and approved content in a completely open server.

Promotions are a prominent part of the SmarTone homepage, and they usually have several going on at the same time. SmarTone’s CMS implementation was completed by Mirum, who used Magnolia to set up the components for these promotions so that they could be controlled using content apps, making each promotion an individual piece of content that could be published on its own schedule.

With various systems storing different types of information, SmarTone was able to use Magnolia’s APIs to gather information into one interface and substantially reduce manual effort. These APIs collect data from both ecommerce and product information management (PIM) systems, allowing transactions and pricing details to be retrieved in real-time along with static content from the CMS.

SmarTone has leveraged two other Magnolia functions, specifically soft locking, and content locking. With soft locking, editors are made aware when someone overwrites their content, while with content locking, only a single editor can work on a page at a time to prevent overwriting. As a result, the groups of content authors on SmarTone’s marketing team can collaborate on the homepage without worrying about overwriting or doing double work.

Since the implementation of Magnolia, daily business operations and content management tasks have been simplified and centralized, resulting in a 40% reduction in the speed of content management flow. Instead of distributing different tasks to multiple business units, all related working groups use the CMS system to maintain content easily. In addition, the simplified user flow and enhanced UX designs provide SmarTone’s customers a much easier way to locate the information they need, consequently increasing online acquisition conversion rates by over 20%.