Enterprise Drupal migration for Cvent
Cvent, a market-leading meeting, event, and hospitality SaaS company that serves more than 25,000 customers, needed a complete digital transformation. The first step was a full Drupal 8 migration from a static website to a global-ready enterprise marketing platform built on Drupal.
And we only had a hundred days (or so) to do it.
Cvent solutions optimize the entire event management value chain and have enabled clients around the world to manage hundreds of thousands of meetings and events. But much of their time was spent on the product itself, and too many valuable developer resources were being used for painfully slow content updates.
As a global technology company, Cvent sought to modernize its website structure to support ongoing acquisitions, enable marketing technology integrations, and to streamline its content management process for the future. Seeking experienced Drupal 8 migration services, it was important for Cvent to choose an agency with world-class Drupal developers, of course, but also one with the content strategy expertise to execute a Drupal migration successfully.
Component-Based Design System
Cvent wanted to keep its current design system and information architecture intact on the new CMS, so the team (consisting of experts Drupal consultants, content strategists and UX designers) audited what existed and strategized how it would best transition to Drupal 8.
Our approach to content administration centers around the concept of components—structured content “building blocks” in Drupal that allow for a wide range of variation in page layout. We worked closely with the Cvent design team to finalize their “library” of content components for building pages before moving into the Drupal 8 web development phase.
Our goal was to enable the Cvent marketing team to have more flexibility and control over website activities, without as much reliance on IT resources.
Drupal 8 Marketing Automation Integrations
The next “audit and adapt” focus was around Cvent’s Marketo implementation. As a B2B SaaS company, lead capture is paramount, and any interruption in the conversion flow would disrupt their business.
Our team of Drupal developers expertly navigated Cvent’s three existing Marketo form configurations and implemented a custom Elevated Third “Marketo Forms 2.0 + Drupal module.” Our Drupal module allows site admins to choose from a variety of custom and pre-configured forms to meet their ever-changing marketing needs. Its as simple as adding the “form component” in Drupal, selecting the specific Marketo form they want to use, and that form is ready to start collecting leads on the site.
Additionally, the incorporation of Marketo’s RTP (Real Time Personalization) scripts into the new site sets Cvent up to serve users personalized content down the road.
Death to Static! Long Live Drupal
Large-scale programmatic Drupal 8 migration is tricky from a static site to a CMS. Unlike a Drupal 7 to 8 migration, where content is in a database to export, with Cvent the larger effort was manual—that means humans—who helped move content one page at a time.
Drupal migration is not just a technology problem. Our account and content strategy specialists helped the Cvent team strategize how to manually migrate 1500+ pages into the new Drupal site and not lose search equity. We worked together to evaluate which pages were worthy of the trip (by # of visits, date of last update, etc.) and what structure they would take.
Recording training videos, in-person training workshops, and lots of communication between our team and Cvent ensured the Drupal migration was a success.
A 300-Pound Gorilla of Manual Migration
Our team took the lead and migrated 300+ pages and then trained a group of 30 Cvent content admins on their new Drupal-based content management experience. A few of their new tools included:
- A rich library of content components to build pages from (taking the design pressure off the marketing team).
- A new content relationship architecture that leverages tagging to automatically relate products and solutions to resource content, buyer stages, and industries.
- A slick new case study template for showcasing the best parts of their client success stories.
Enterprise Extendibility
The Drupal migration completed, Cvent is now equipped with a future-forward, enterprise-level site that anchors its marketing technology ecosystem and accommodates its global website team. A workflow framework, flexible content templates, repeatable form execution, and efficiencies like SSO allow marketers to focus on brand awareness and leads, not cumbersome site management.
