How TMV Group Uses Butter for Clients with Large-Scale Projects

The TMV Group is a Detroit-based advertising agency with nearly 15 years in the business. This experienced agency has launched websites, apps, even Super Bowl ads for some heavy-hitting names, such as the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) and Centria Healthcare.

With so many different clients in different verticals, with such disparate content needs, TMV Group needed to have a headless CMS in its arsenal—an agile, high-performing CMS that can meet the needs of large, sometimes messy content needs. The group leveraged ButterCMS
to launch large website projects for two major clients—NAIAS and Centria—in short time frames, delivering an increase in website traffic, leads, and performance across the board.

The TMV Group services an impressive list of clients with varying content needs. “Because of that,” says Joe Hochgreve, Web Development Lead of TMV Group, “we’re always trying to have as many tools in our belt as possible. We have a lot of clients coming to us asking for a solution that’s more performant, more versatile, and is more secure. We also have a lot of clients looking for that omnichannel presence.” According to Joe, this was a big motivation behind the group’s decision to use an alternative solution to traditional CMS such as WordPress.

One recent project makes for a fitting example. NAIAS came to TMV Group to build its new 2020 website after a less than optimal experience in 2019. The previous year, the NAIAS website, built on WordPress, would crash because it could not handle the large amount of media
content and spikes in traffic. NAIAS had to set up load balancers just to handle all the media and traffic spikes, something they wanted to avoid this time around.

Finally, the NAIAS site (along with some other clients) was not built on JavaScript frameworks, which inhibited resource management capabilities. For all these reasons together, TMV Group decided to go with a headless CMS that could serve up content from anywhere, quickly and without hiccups.

TMV Group now has the ability to use Meteor, React, or Next.js among other JavaScript platforms, with Butter to deliver superior load speeds. Also, this allows TMV Group to offer hybrid mobile applications and other value-adds for its clients—all of it enabled by a headless CMS.

The launch of the new 2020 NAIAS website powered with Butter is a good example of how much more performant this site will be compared to the old WordPress website.

When we launched the [new] website, we sent out an e-blast to the 70,000-plus members of their email drip campaigns. And we were able to get 15,000, 20,000 people on the website at one time. The site barely hit 1% CPU usage. It was a really big win.

Joe Hochgreve | Web Development Lead

Looking back, Joe recounts a number of key ways that ButterCMS helped TMV Group address some challenges it has faced with client sites, namely:

• A really stable API capable of delivering high performance for even large website deployments
• Openness to feedback from developers and a commitment to use this feedback to inform product updates
• A developer-friendly approach that doesn’t force one way of doing things and gives engineers options to execute their specific project
• A multi-account option, which gives an agency like TMV Group the ability to easily and securely invite contributions and collaboration from anyone with an email address from the agency
• Responsive customer support, including live chat with flexible hours to help meet tight deadlines (“there’s never been a time I had to wait more than 30 minutes,” adds Joe)

Setting up the NAIAS website, at least as it relates to ButterCMS, took the TMV Group just a couple of hours. “There’s really nothing to it,” says Joe. “Your NPM package is just so easy to use. And your API documentation always seems like it’s just been updated—like it’s always up-to-date.”

Another benefit has been the use of Page Types within Butter, something that has benefitted Centria Healthcare, one of TMV Group’s largest clients. “It’s a multi-billion dollar company that’s the biggest autism healthcare provider in the country. We have the ability to create landing
pages for them—just at a rapid-fire pace with those page types that you guys offer. And we’re able to dynamically generate these landing pages almost off the line, which is super powerful.”

As a result, TMV Group has been able to support an aggressive Google Ads strategy for Centria that has created a spike in leads and superior performance overall. More importantly, it helps Centria get valuable content out to parents of kids with autism. Joe points to Butter as a key factor in getting Centria pages to rank on Google.

They went from zero pages ranking six months ago to more than 1500 pages ranking with Google search engine right now.

Joe Hochgreve | Web Development Lead

This kind of highly performant, agile approach is something that TMV Group can now bring to the table for all of its clients who need it. “It’s such a fast site,” says Joe. “The API has really kept up nicely, so we can just crank out landing pages left and right and that really has been a big win for our clients.”