What is a DXP? (Digital Experience Platform)

How can the customer experience be improved? That question is the driving force behind several brands' digital strategies today, and with good reason.

A great customer experience can positively impact a company’s bottom line. Customer-centric companies generate 60% more profit than their counterparts. Customers are no longer the second or third thought for brands hoping to increase profits; they’re now quickly becoming the top priority.

In keeping with efforts to improve the customer experience, publish content to a growing number of digital channels, and improve customer loyalty, brands are turning to a new type of technology in the content management space for assistance, the DXP.

More than just a content management system, DXPs provide the DX architecture and flexibility that allow brands to deliver the customer experiences their audience requires in this increasingly digital world.

According to Forrester, a digital experience platform “provides the architectural foundation for flexible, agnostic core services to maximize scale, quality, and insights across channels and systems while delivering context-specific tooling for practitioners to build, manage, and optimize digital journeys on "owned" channels (web, mobile, messaging) and orchestrate third-party experiences (e.g., social, retail marketplaces).”

There’s a lot to unpack within that definition, but the principal purpose of a DXP is to help brands optimize the digital customer journey and improve the customer experience. The number of content channels available today has swelled to enormous heights, and customers want high-quality experiences on all of them.

Options are a customer’s best friend. 59% of shoppers enjoy shopping on mobile when deciding which brand to purchase from, and 87% of internet users rely on more than one device online.

With so many channels and so little time, DXP systems help companies to manage all of their content and data in one central location and connect to other pieces of the tech stack to provide insights and a whole lot more.

The content management world has always been one filled with acronyms to help simplify things. However, CMS, WEM, and DXP aren’t just fancy buzzwords; they go a lot deeper and speak to how industry requirements have evolved over the years.

Let’s take a look at these three tools to see how the industry has evolved to what it is today.

First came the standard content management system (CMS), which organized content for organizations. Whether that content came in the form of written blog material, images, data, or anything else meant for a website, the traditional content management system was able to handle it.

The CMS provided a means of organizing everything and access to authoring tools and workflows that made delivering this content much easier. The traditional CMS platform, as it’s classified today, is perfect for websites that only need to scratch the surface of the digital experience. For everything else, there needed to be another option.

Next came web experience management (WEM). Content was now filtering through to more than just websites, which required a new way to manage these experiences. New channels began to emerge, such as mobile phones and tablets, plus the rise of the internet of things (IoT).

WEM offered the ability to create personalized experiences for audiences and deliver different blanket content to everyone. The technology also began to change with more open-source capabilities and the introduction of headless and hybrid headless CMSs.

With these changes, companies could not only deliver content across multiple channels; they could improve collaboration between departments.

Now, we have the digital experience platform (DXP) - the next stage of the evolution. DXPs provide a more connected experience to go along with everything WEM platforms could offer.

With headless capabilities, web content management focuses on making it easier to deliver to multiple channels. On the other hand, a DXP focuses on connectedness and integration.

Many organizations today favor a best-of-breed approach to building their tech stack. This differs markedly from the suite approach that was common among legacy CMSs. For smaller organizations, the traditional CMS or headless CMS offers everything necessary for managing content. But for a complete digital experience, more than managing content is required.

A DXP makes it easy to connect to other parts of the marketing tech stack, providing access to a suite of tools, including analytics, customer data, marketing automation, customer relationship management, and eCommerce, to provide the ultimate digital experience for customers.

Having a flexible foundation only scratches the surface of what is possible with a DXP. There are also quite a few other benefits. Here are some of them.

DXPs offer brands one central point of control for everything that they do. In today’s world, it can be complicated, if not borderline impossible, to use a suite approach when building a martech stack. There are so many different options that each organization chooses the technology that works best for a particular purpose.

DXPs allow brands to have separate vendors for each of their core technology needs by making it easy to integrate with the preferred automation or eCommerce tools. Data gets pulled using APIs and delivered to the central digital experience platform, giving brands more control over their data. They can track the entire customer lifecycle from a single platform instead of toggling through different tools to find the key piece of data they’re looking for.

Magnolia offers one platform that seamlessly integrates with every other tool in your martech stack. You have everything you need to create the perfect digital customer experience by unifying every tool and available data source.

Building off of the single point of control, DXPs have the architecture and flexibility that make it possible to view everything in one place. The classic headless CMS includes integrations with other tools, but unfortunately, integrations aren’t always complication-free. With a DXP, integrations can be smooth and seamless, allowing for the creation of a connected software stack.

DXPs also rely on microservice-based architecture, making it easy to build, test, and deploy applications. Magnolia’s open and flexible architecture lets enterprises compose their tech stack as they see fit using their preferred digital technologies.

Omnichannel marketing is the goal of most brands today and the expectation of most customers they serve. With traditional content management systems, it can be challenging to build a reliable omnichannel strategy and create the same quality of content for more than one or two channels.

With a DXP, omnichannel marketing becomes a reality. Developers can easily connect the platform to new and emerging channels and touchpoints, and marketers can more easily create and manage the content that gets delivered to those channels. They can also create more consistent experiences across these channels.

Customers can then benefit from personalized content at scale wherever they interact with their favorite brands. Magnolia allows you to create and manage omnichannel campaigns, whether you want to build a new customer portal for your website or facilitate other digital interactions with customers.

Access to the right data can be the difference between a successful marketing campaign and one that misses the mark. The connectedness of a DXP means that brands don’t need to rely on one data source and then guess how that data affects another part of the business.ess.

A DXP provides total control in one location, allowing companies to maximize the data and insights they receive from multiple sources and use it to improve the customer experience.

Magnolia’s digital experience management capabilities are enhanced by integrations with leading analytics tools, which help brands assess user behavior and leverage it to improve user experiences.

A DXP can help brands improve their time to market by allowing them to publish digital content across numerous channels quickly. The marketing team can manage content without being dependent on developers, giving both groups more freedom and enabling businesses to release new products and features faster.

As the world continues to change, so will the world of content management evolve. Channels like digital signage, mobile apps, and more sparked the need for web experience management.

As technology continues to advance and other factors like chatbots, voice assistants, and artificial intelligence become more prevalent, the technology that delivers content will also need to advance.

Gartner already recognized this shift and discontinued the Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management in early 2020, citing a maturity of the market and a shift in demand for digital experience platforms instead.

Some of the core requirements for a platform to be considered a DXP included:

These requirements only begin to scratch the surface of a DXP, but they do indicate where the overall industry is heading, and the requirements brands will have going forward.

Digital transformation has been accelerated in recent months as more brands clamor to digitize their product offerings or improve on the ones they already had. This has created an even larger focus on the DXP as companies need it to meet customers’ demands.

The needs of the customer experience are constantly changing, and organizations are choosing to invest in digital experiences in hopes of closing the gap between customer expectations and reality. A DXP helps to bridge that gap.

At Magnolia, the best-of-breed approach is the center of our philosophy, so our architecture is built in such a way as to provide options and flexibility for brands that need it. Our open source DXP provides the transparency that brands need to innovate at scale and achieve a faster time to market. Magnolia relies on a fast enterprise-grade architecture that is known for speed. Connector Packs help to integrate additional tools that aid in your content management, including eCommerce, Analytics, Marketing Automation, and Digital Asset Management, and the platform has everything you need to deploy in the cloud.

If your business needs to revamp the customer experience from the ground up, break down limiting silos and plan ahead, then it may be time to consider a DXP to create the foundation for a better digital future.