How a Content Marketing Company Uses ButterCMS to Relaunch Its Blog

As a company widely regarded as experts in content, Scripted.com helps thousands of organizations around the world execute highly effective content marketing. Recently, the executive team at Scripted made updating its own marketing blog an organizational priority.

The goal of this update was to bring the Scripted blog up to date to meet current web best practices, and to deliver better user experiences on the front end. On the backend, however, the Scripted team wanted to move away from a heavy reliance on custom-built website solutions.
Moving forward, their team wanted full control over their website experiences, something common “out-of-the-box” blogging or content management system (CMS) could not provide.

Having heard of and worked with ButterCMS before, the Scripted executive team selected Butter for its headless blogging engine. The team was able to launch the new blog—including content migration, refreshed layout and branding, and search optimization—in just a few days. On the backend, the team now has a more flexible blogging engine they can leverage to deliver highly engaging content their business depends on.

To continue delivering crucial content marketing ROI, the Scripted team needed to update their blog from front to back. “Put simply,” says Doug Breaker, CEO of Scripted, “we were done messing around with Wordpress.” Due to a combination of SEO considerations and technical
limitations of their existing CMS, Breaker and his team maintained their blog in a subfolder, all programmed in the Rails App.

This existing setup presented a few serious limitations:

• Static content, limiting the ability to tie content into data, apps, and other important content marketing channels
• Difficulty matching themes between WordPress and the Scripted web app
• Heavy customization that cost the developers time, money, and the stress that comes with constantly worrying if you’re going to break something
• Slow time to publish which impacted the team’s ability to bring valuable content to market

We needed to give our developers and tech staff an easy way to integrate blog content and get it up. This wasn’t possible with our existing wordpress setup, or another out-of-the-box CMS.

Doug Breaker | CEO

The decision to go with ButterCMS was no coincidence. “We have a tech- and dev-focused leadership group, and our VP of Technology had worked with Butter when we launched SQLBot.co at a prior company,” says Breaker. “When we identified the need for a new, purely headless blog engine, Butters checked all the boxes.”

With just a few developers, Scripted was able to move its entire blog including approximately 1,000 articles and more than 100 users—to ButterCMS in less than a week, including content migration, branding, and search optimization. “It was super simple to get our third-party theme working correctly with the Butter API. I can now get high-value blogs up and running, including adding images and doing on-page SEO, all without having to manage eight thousand plugins in WordPress.”

Today, ButterCMS serves as the blog engine not only for the Scripted.com marketing website, as well as the CMS engine for a handful of other companies under the parent company, Xenon Partner’s umbrella. It’s a user-friendly interface for content authoring and management on the backend, and a modern, clean look and feel on the front end.

Putting a more flexible blog and CMS engine in place was essential to the future of content marketing operations at Scripted.com.

It’s really nice and clean and makes the website easy to do work on. We can make updates, add pages, and publish new content with the confidence that nothing is going to break or go haywire. For us, that’s huge.

Doug Breaker | CEO

Content is so important for any website to get traffic because you need traffic to get leads, to attract prospects and customers. How you create and publish that content is very, very important.

Since relaunching its blog with Butter, the Scripted team has seen a marked increase in organic website traffic, including number and ranked keywords and clicks per month. The Scripted team now has the ability to quickly published clean, engaging, search-optimized blog content. In a competitive marketplace, this gives Scripted a distinct competitive advantage. For example, Scripted recently published a study of the most popular investor relations websites, and it now ranks #2 in Google for both “best IR sites” and “best investor relations websites”.

Looking forward, the Xenon Partners team looks to leverage Butter to launch new pages, data- and conversion-driven strategies on the blog, and to build out full sites for the other companies and solutions within the Xenon Partners portfolio, including Scout and Xplenty, both who moved to Butter in the past year.

“Content works,” says Breaker in summary. “It works when you do the research to figure out what you should write, how you should write it, and how it should look and feel. Then execute how it needs to look on the site. Content works when you have the right system to execute it on the backend.” Indeed, the Scripted team can now devote more time to creating content that drives real results for their business.