Why Marketers Should Choose TYPO3 and how to Get Started
As a marketer, you might be wondering why TYPO3 is ideal for you and your team. Where to begin? Whether you’re comparing TYPO3 with other CMSs before buying, or looking to leverage an existing install, here’s a first look at some things that make our favorite CMS great for marketers.
In this article we’ll show you some of our community’s resources on:
- Capturing leads,
- Boosting conversions with on-site search for better UX,
- Optimizing e-commerce conversion rates,
- CRM and marketing automation for strong customer relationships,
- Applying marketing expertise.
Tip: I recommend browsing in Chrome or a similar browser set to translate automatically. You’ll notice many of the resources we link below are not in English. TYPO3 is an international community, so whereas all of the documentation is in English and larger events are run in English, many articles are written in the author’s local language.
Create lead magnet content
When visitors have made it to your site you have an opportunity to educate and convert them to take action. Marketing Factory explains (in German) why you should connect your shop system to a CMS.
- Stand out from the crowd with good editorial content.
- Shop software isn’t built for content management.
TYPO3 gives marketers flexible control when they make new content. It’s easy to add new pages in TYPO3 and assemble page layouts from content elements like images, text, block quotes, and references to other content. You can drag and drop to rearrange how they appear.
You can also add forms to pages like any other content element without any additional software. This is built right into the core: Create forms with drag and drop elements.
Without a comprehensive approach to visual design, editors could run the risk of destroying page layouts (German) as Lisa Kristin Noffke explains on the Marketing Factory blog. This modular approach works well with a style-guide driven approach to visual design so all components work well no matter where they are placed.
Check out the Guide to the Content Editing experience in TYPO3 for a quick tour.
Boost conversions with better usability through on-site search
Once you get customers on your site, you want to help them find what they are looking for. A carefully thought-out internal search experience can drive conversions.
You can provide your users with search out of the box, because TYPO3 has indexed_search in core. T3 Terminal prepared an overview of TYPO3’s Indexed Search and how it compares to other search options.
- It’s built into the core installation. Nothing else to manage.
- You can have custom templates.
- File indexing.
- Scheduled indexing.
- However, there’s no faceted search results.
For more advanced scenarios, a robust faceted search can provide a better on-site experience—and the TYPO3 community has provided plenty of options for achieving this.
TYPO3’s Apache Solr extension provides faceted search and synonym support. Digital agency dkd shows how the community comes together to support the EXT:Solr extension. Check out the showcase of Solr search in TYPO3 for some inspiration.
Solr provides control over how search results are weighted in the index which can improve relevance. Florian Maier of b13 wrote about the potential for fine-tuning your Solr search index to improve results in How to fall in love with your on-site search.
“When you understand who is searching and what they are searching for, you can fine-tune the index to make sure visitors get the most relevant results.”
Florian explains how the search index works, and what tweaks you can make to it. He says you’ll need to know three things to get started.
- Who uses the search?
- How is the search used?
- What are users searching for?
There is more to conversion optimization than onsite search, though.
Transition your business to e-commerce and optimize conversion rate at checkout
If you’re taking the opportunity to dive into e-commerce, then TYPO3 Agency punkt.de has some tips for you (in German). In another article, they’ve weighed up the pros and cons of Aimeos, an e-commerce extension that can be dropped into existing TYPO3 websites to add an online shop.
For an example of a website using Aimeos for e-commerce, see the nph deutschland e.V. case study, implemented by punkt.de. Here, Aimeos helped editors familiar with TYPO3 administer products in an interface they already knew their way around.
Marketing Factory recommends Shopware for seamless integration of content and commerce.
Once you’ve got a shop up and running and have customers on your site, you can maximize your revenue by optimizing the process so that as many of them as possible make a purchase.
Webmatch GmbH has some (German-language) advice on optimizing conversions on their blog. They also explain monitoring the performance of off-site traffic generation with Facebook analytics. This allows you to assess the effectiveness of paid advertisements by taking into account onsite behaviour.
CRM and marketing automation for scalable customer relationships
With marketing automation, you can communicate with potential customers automatically. This opens up possibilities for scaling as well as personalizing marketing activities. At the centre of this is often some form of customer relationship management system (CRM). TYPO3 doesn’t offer this in core (it is, after all, a content management system) but it’s a great system for integrating these and other third-party tools.
Check out the case study for Werder Bremen, a massive top-flight German soccer club that runs the club website on TYPO3, including a CRM integration.
A popular open-source tool for marketing automation is Mautic, which brings all the benefits of open source including full transparency and control—especially attractive where personal data is involved—and the ability to amend it to suit one’s needs. Read all about using Mautic for marketing personalization on punkt.de’s (German-language) blog.
One specific aspect of marketing automation is retargeting: customers who show an interest in a particular product can be targeted through personalized advertising later on, keeping their interest burning once it has been kindled. Redwiki, in the Netherlands, are specialists and explain more about retargeting on their website (in Dutch).
Apply your marketing expertise
As a digital marketer, you know the bread and butter of marketing: you go to great lengths to understand your audience, target content at specific groups, measure performance, and seek out feedback and adapt to it.
TYPO3 supports many of your needs right out of the box, and anything else can be added by installing extensions or integrating third-party services. You’ll get up and running a lot faster if you have help by your side: Use the button below to explore our Professional Service Listing, if you're on the lookout for support.
