Is it possible for enterprise marketing technology to actually spark joy? Or are we all just resigned to a future of clunky interfaces and frustrating workflows?
Agility requires adaptable technology and empowered teams. It also requires a willingness to embrace new approaches and a focus on continuous improvement.
Today, we’re going to talk about the intersection of marketing technology, user experience, and the surprising role of joy in driving productivity and innovation. A recent study by Sago and IVP Research Labs has revealed some fascinating insights into how modern platforms are transforming the daily lives of marketers, impacting everything from content creation to localization.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Dominik Angerer, CEO and Co-Founder at Storyblok.
About Dominik Angerer
A web performance specialist and perfectionist. After working for big agencies as a full stack developer he founded Storyblok. He is also an active contributor to the open source community and one of the organizers of Scriptconf and Stahlstadt.js.
Dominik Angerer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominikangerer/
Resources
Storyblok: https://www.storyblok.com
Don’t Miss MAICON 2025, October 14-16 in Cleveland – the event bringing together the brights minds and leading voices in AI. Use Code AGILE150 for $150 off registration. Go here to register: https://bit.ly/agile150
Keep up with the latest B2B Marketing insights by following the B2B Agility Podcast: https://www.b2bagility.com
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com
Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom (00:34)
Is it possible for enterprise marketing technology to actually spark joy? Or are we all just resigned to a future of clunky interfaces and frustrating workflows? Agility requires adaptable technology and empowered teams. It also requires a willingness to embrace new approaches and a focus on continuous improvement. Today, we’re going to talk about the intersection of marketing technology, user experience, and the surprising role of joy in driving productivity and innovation.
A recent study by Sago and IVP Research Labs has revealed some fascinating insights into how modern platforms are transforming the daily lives of marketers impacting everything from content creation to localization. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Dominik Angerer, CEO at Storyblok. Dominik, welcome to the show.
Dominik Angerer (01:25)
Hi, gradient. Thank you so much for having me.
Greg Kihlstrom (01:27)
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Definitely a fascinating topic here. Before we dive in though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Storyblok.
Dominik Angerer (01:37)
Happy to do so. So my name is Dominik Angerer I’m one of the two founders of Storyblok and the current CEO. I’ve been starting the whole thing about eight years ago together with Alexander. I’m a software engineer myself that turned into that what we call CEO now, but there’s so many different facets and last eight years that I’ve been from selling to marketing over back to product all the way, but in my heart, I’m still a software engineer.
Greg Kihlstrom (01:59)
Nice, nice. Great. Well, yeah. So let’s, we’re going to talk about a few things today, but I wanted to start with, the, the first aspect is that aspect of, of joy in products. I mean, I think a lot of us that, you know, use, we use software day in, day out. won’t, you know, name names necessarily, but you know, they’re, they’re not exactly sparking joy all the time, right? They’re, you know, at best functional, when they work and, and, know, at worst, you know, causing frustration, but I think it’s a fascinating thing to look at and the research that I mentioned highlights the emotional response of marketers using Storyblok so, you know, beyond the anecdotal, you know, why is understanding the joy factor so important in the context of enterprise software?
Dominik Angerer (02:46)
Yeah, for us, it all started with us not wanting to lose customers because as you know, acquiring new customers and making them happy should be anybody’s number one priority. And if you keep customers for a long time, usually it’s cheaper for the business to run less well and you want to build a sustainable business. Therefore for us looking into what makes people be happy about what you’re using and be happy what you’re offering to them. Joyfulness by itself is the winning piece and for us.
building that image or the message around joyfulness started actually based on feedback we received. So it wasn’t something that we planned out in the beginning, but if you have a below 1 % churn rate over the past eight years, you somehow question your customers about like, hey, why? Why are you still around with us? And they’ll really like it. So that’s the background on our side.
Greg Kihlstrom (03:31)
Yeah.
Well, and that’s great to hear that it originated from, know, there was, there was something there already that you built on, right? It wasn’t just like, Hey, let’s, you know, let’s, let’s target this thing. And, and, and which, you know, it’s admirable enough, I guess, to want to spark that, but like, it sounds like there was already, there’s already joy being delivered there. And, and, know, so you capitalize that to me, that feels more authentic as well. Do you think that
I mean, this this concept is something that we’re gonna see more of like how I mean, again, I think some companies have a ways to go to get there. But like, do you think this is something that will be more of a trend?
Dominik Angerer (04:12)
I hope so. mean, what you see right now with all the AI enabled software that you can find out there, this joy moments are becoming more and more. I mean, all of us have played around with TGPT, maybe some of you have played around with Lovable and so on. And just typing in a prompt and getting something, what’s the 80 % there, playing around with it to get it to 100 % functional, it’s quite cheerful too.
bring your idea to market really, really quickly. And like FAST, it’s the same thing. What we want to enable is to have developers and marketers both sides to be really quick in getting their idea, their content out there. And turns out that this works for many and the belief if your system or the product you’re building right now is not doing that, you will have a hard time. So I hope so. I hope so.
Greg Kihlstrom (04:53)
Well, and to go into that a little deeper, the I think the the for me, the the generative AI thing is part of it is that you’re co creating, I wouldn’t say completely creating if you’re if you’re using AI to do it, but you’re you’re co creative, right. And I think for a lot of marketers in particular, I mean, I fall more into that camp than engineers. So like, for a lot of marketers, we’ve been kind of we’ve had our hands tied, and because we’ve had to ask,
engineering for something and we’ve you know and so the having a little more you know control is one thing but also having a little more power in the in the creativity and creation of things i can imagine that that’s part of part of the joy right
Dominik Angerer (05:36)
or 100%. I mean, for us at Storyblok we are content management system, right? So for us, the main idea is how can we get your content into format without you doing like a database work and then you can use it actually. So like, how can we make the bridge between your content and whatever you want to create? And there is more to come at JoyConf We have a conference coming up, our very own first one. But the idea is really that we bring in content in various kind of places.
Greg Kihlstrom (05:56)
nice.
Dominik Angerer (06:02)
And since we know who our customers are and we know what their tone is in terms of how they write content, how they produce content, we can help to make even more impact and help be more creative, not just writing more content, but proper content, healthy content, updating the article that was written 10 years ago that nobody touched because nobody wants to do those chores. But there is some potential to doing that,
Greg Kihlstrom (06:24)
Yeah, nice, nice. So the study that mentioned also talks about AI features being a highlight for participants. I touched on that briefly here. how do you look at this, and how does Storyblok look at utilizing AI to enhance the user experience, but also to drive those joyful moments that we’ve been talking about?
Dominik Angerer (06:45)
So we actually launched way more than what we tested back in that study. By now, it was not just an AI text generation and the co-collaboration feature that we had in our ideas room. We have now extended that with AI translation. So usually our customers have a team of translators and maybe some other external tools to work around on like really translation workflows. We brought it down to one button click. So you can literally translate your whole content pieces, all of them with one button click into
Greg Kihlstrom (07:07)
Wow.
Dominik Angerer (07:12)
any language you want. And it’s actually that easy. It’s so nice. And when you are in a pitch situation or when you talk with marketer and they are telling you, yeah, I need to manage 52 languages for like 900,000 pages because it’s a large brand, multiple teams working on that. And like, yeah, or you click that button and like, And then they go into the app and they the screen share because of course we want to see what they did. Yeah, on the top right corner, you see the translate button, hit it. And this really works. Yeah, click it.
Greg Kihlstrom (07:38)
Yeah.
Dominik Angerer (07:41)
So they clicked it, suddenly everything translated like, this is really amazing. So then they started doing workflows and trying to get the translation to a perfect case, know, but just seeing them being able to do like a month’s work of work in like a button click, that’s what the AI should bring you. it doesn’t stop there, know, translation is like the immediate thing, but there’s the European Accessibility Act already coming in full force, right? And I’m a huge fan for bringing content to everybody no matter if it’s visual or auditive. And one of the things that we tried to enable our customers is when they upload images that we generate the alternative text and translate them immediately. So they don’t have to do it by themselves, they only have to check them. So they can then use those information on the website, on the apps to make it all accessible for people that have visual issues, I would say. So I’m really looking forward to see that more enabled and like 90 % of websites out there have problems with alternative text.
Greg Kihlstrom (08:29)
Yeah.
Dominik Angerer (08:37)
So there’s a huge, huge potential there.
Greg Kihlstrom (08:39)
Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, so I think with both of those examples, I mean, I think with the translation example, I mean, certainly, you know, I, in my consulting, I work with multinational organizations. have often, you know, they’ll have a team that works on translations. And so, you know, it’s saving a lot of time, but I think the other thing that can be highlighted with both that, as well as the accessibility is that there are a lot of teams that are not yet doing translation or not yet doing accessibility like they should be doing it. to, so in other words, it’s, not only, you know, it’s saving some costs and some, some resources and stuff, but it’s also enabling companies that don’t have the resources to do translation, to reach more. And I think this is kind of brings me to the next topic, which is, you know, there, there is a lot of talk talk about AI, you know, replacing jobs and, and, and I’m not going to say that
Dominik Angerer (09:06)
Yeah, exactly.
Yes.
Greg Kihlstrom (09:30)
It won’t ever, it already, you it has to some degree, but I think there’s also an upside to that as well as again, enabling, you know, the positive side is enabling companies to do more than they ever could without having to extend resources or anything. But I, you know, from the research standpoint, you know, did the research touch on any of those, you know, concerns and anxieties or, know, how, how is the overall sentiment?
Dominik Angerer (09:43)
So the overall sentiment is actually pretty good. So we actually checked that EI doesn’t scare any marketers. Actually, it brought them joy. We tested the ideation room, which was at about 60 % joyfulness. And the translation was like an uptick of 44%. So it was actually quite a big jump when it comes to like, oh, wow, that’s crazy.
Greg Kihlstrom (10:20)
Yeah, wow. Wow. That’s great. So I want to talk a little bit more about Storyblok and some of the other things there. Storyblok is a headless CMS. And we’ve talked a bit about headless and composable on the show. But for those that are a little less familiar with that term, can you explain what does headless mean and what does it mean for the user experience as well?
Dominik Angerer (10:43)
Yeah, of course. So the term headless comes from the idea of removing the hat, the hat meaning the front end. So the websites, the app or whatever kind of channel you want. And it comes from the idea of having one content repository, which is your CMS and publishing it to an omnichannel world. Whatever channel you want, you can publish it. And you do that by providing an API, content delivery API, as we call it.
And this is purely data, so any kind of developers, and now, of course, all the AI agents and MCP server can utilize that. And you have one central place where you have your whole marketing content and content that you want to get out into the world. And back in the days, it was about free technology choice. It was about how can you build something quicker with the technologies your team knows and have an API available to them. And by now, it has evolved into the idea of having one central place and publishing it everywhere, including LLMs and giving a complexity and similar using ARG to really get content and context. This is now a really, really nice place where we can check that essentially as well.
Greg Kihlstrom (11:44)
Yeah, yeah. And so I know you touched a little bit on this, but you know, how does this greater flexibility enable marketers to be more agile and responsive to, know, the market isn’t going to stop changing, right? So how does it enable them to be more agile and responsive to all the changes that the market demands?
Dominik Angerer (11:57)
Yeah.
Yeah, if you’re now using a monolithic content management system, the chances are that you’re right now publishing just one channel, so most likely websites. And the moment you want to relaunch your website, you need to start from scratch because your CMS maybe has 20 plugins that only work for this kind of theme that you were building, and it’s basically not really maintainable of a long time. And just to give an idea, we have been around now for 10 years since the first prototype. The company exists since eight years, and even our first customer today.
is still using Storyblok without needing to do a relaunch because what they’re doing is they’re really evolutionizing the website. So they’re adding more components. We found a really nice twist between a pure database, which most headless CMS systems are, and a visual marketing tool because that’s what we are. We are a mixture between both and where marketers can build their own component libraries and think of it of if you print the design and you take a scissor and just cut it into different pieces, this is your component. And then you have Storyblok.
basically mix those blocks and we allow you to tell a story with those blocks. And that’s basically also the name Storyblok, right?
Greg Kihlstrom (13:04)
Nice, nice. it.
Love it. That’s great. So I want to talk a little bit now about, mean, certainly, you you’ve you’ve seen a lot in your in your time at Storyblok and seeing trends and upcoming things. So I want to talk a little bit more about the future of Martech and, you know, based on both the research as well as your experience, what are some of the key trends that you’re keeping an eye on and that, you know, you see shaping the future of Martech?
Dominik Angerer (13:34)
Yeah, so what we see right now is that it’s all about marketers becoming more technical. So right now there’s this term of like tech enabled marketers and it’s only a handful of marketers that know where the content is, if they have actually good content, high quality content, content health over a certain level. Sometimes marketers don’t know if the tone of the old content is the same as the message they actually want to provide. And there’s a lot of room for that.
What we see now is the better and more structured your content is and the better your content health is. So how on-prem is it? How active is it? Is it like 10 years old and nobody updates that content piece? I can guarantee you right now there is an LM crawling your old content and you’re going to be found based on stuff you actually don’t want to be found anymore because search volume has dropped significantly. We have seen that with the HubSpot metrics. mean, all of us were like, interesting.
And even fast, can see now actually an uptick in signups, but a slowdown in traffic, which indicates that they are coming from somewhere else, right? In terms of Google search volume. And fast, it’s quite clear they are coming from cloud, from complexity, from all those AI searches. And they jump over the website directly into the product. And that’s what the new reality is like. You need to read where your customers are, and you need to prepare your content through it in a proper way. And what we have seen now is the people and the companies that have prepared the content to have a higher
quality level, not higher quantity, higher quality, they usually also get mentioned way more often. And not just mentioned way more often, are usually also the ones that are being on top when it comes to actually receiving results from those GEO kind of topics.
Greg Kihlstrom (15:04)
Yeah, yeah. Well, and one more question along those lines too. To me, that sounds like it’s kind of a part of a continuum of, know, because Google, you know, was getting better about that too, right? You know, I mean, I remember back in the, you know, to date myself a little bit, you know, in the late nineties, you could put keywords in an HTML and show up very, very high. I did a little bit of that myself back in the day, but, you know, so, I mean, it’s gotten a lot smarter over the years. So I guess
Dominik Angerer (15:17)
Yeah.
Exactly.
Greg Kihlstrom (15:34)
for those like, what do you see as the biggest distinction between, you know, cause again, SEO a couple of years ago was pointing in the direction of like, make better content and stuff like generative AI a couple of years ago was nascent. So it was less of a AI, you know, AI slop or whatever you want to call it was less of a thing. But what, what for the marketers listening out there, like what’s the biggest difference that you think, you know that people should be thinking about their content versus again, just making good content for Google a couple years ago.
Dominik Angerer (16:05)
Yeah, consistency is key now. So if you have outdated content that is not on brand anymore, that is not valid anymore, that is using different messaging and different contexts, this is actually hurting you. So in the past with Google, that didn’t matter. It got downranked because it doesn’t get searched for and you are not going to get any traffic for it, but you still had it your website, not just on the website. Maybe you even had like old pricing tables somewhere in the PDF and you launched it and it got indexed. It doesn’t matter so much on Google because they downranked it.
But right now, this stuff is getting indexed. This stuff is getting used to be trained with an LLM. So the moment you have inconsistent content, because it’s a statistical model, like all the LLMs out there is just large language model, it’s about statistics, it’s a about building up consistency across data points. If you have not valid proper healthy content and consistency throughout it, in terms of messaging, in terms of wording used, and story used essentially, you are actually hurting your business.
Greg Kihlstrom (16:47)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dominik Angerer (17:02)
It’s time to clean up the mess that you have created in last 20 years. It sounds bad, but we all have done that. So there’s still an article from me in 2018 on the website. We need to update that as well. But that’s the thing we now need to do because otherwise we’re going to have a really, really bad time.
Greg Kihlstrom (17:16)
Yeah, yeah. mean, and that runs counter to I mean, I think some have thought of like just volume of stuff out there somehow gives you credibility or whatever. But like, this is definitely counter to that of like, well, I got to dust off a few things myself after after after we finished this interview. But yeah, no, that’s that’s great, great advice there. And I guess, you know, just as we wrap up here.
Just another piece of advice. Do you have another piece of advice for marketing leaders that are maybe struggling with some of those legacy monolith systems or other things? What would your advice be to them?
Dominik Angerer (17:51)
Yeah.
Yeah, don’t be afraid from migrations. I mean, that’s the holy, holy cradle of everybody. Like, hey, let’s do migration. I think we find it and you take like two years. It doesn’t have to be like that, right? There are options where you can start small. You fix the things that are right now your main issue and you go through your content and you only transfer the stuff that actually makes you money. If you focus on the 20 % that makes you money and you removed 80 % of what actually hurts you now, you’re already good. You don’t need to get all of that.
Greg Kihlstrom (17:58)
Right.
Dominik Angerer (18:19)
over to a new system or into a migration project. Try to fix the stuff that you actually know that makes you money and makes your business grow. And then you can still add more of the flavoring stuff later on. And I’ve seen that now multiple times and companies that have done that, they’ve been so much more successful. And it’s counter-intuitive to reduce stuff as you mentioned, because back in the days it was a quantity, quantity, quantity. But now it’s all about high quality content that can be consumed in an easy way.
and also in a consistent way across all the different channels.
Greg Kihlstrom (18:52)
Well, Dominik, thanks so much for joining today. One last question for you before we wrap up. I’d to ask this to everybody. What do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Dominik Angerer (19:03)
Oh, we do have coffee chats in Storyblok. So we have 270 people now here at Storyblok and we have a random connector between everybody. And I literally just jump on a coffee chat with random people in the business and try to understand that. And for the last 12 weeks, was literally driving and flying across whole Europe and the US to meet customers, partners, and talk to as many people as I can to understand where the pain points are, where the fear points are. And man, there’s a lot out there that can be discovered.
What I do is I talk to lot of people, try to get it into our product vision and then set basically our next three years. And that’s what keeps me grounded because of course you want to understand what’s currently going on on their side. Plus you want to understand what’s going on on the technical side. And if you combine that, that’s how you should get updated and focused essentially.
