Clarivate Grows Digital Marketing and Unifies Company Acquisitions Under Single Brand

Challenge: Enable Digital Marketing 

The Clarivate web team faced three major challenges in enabling digital marketing testing and growth: improving the development pipeline, integrating acquired sites into a global brand and providing extensive multilingual features.

Clarivate’s global expansion plans for its website included growing its presence in the Americas, Europe and Asia. The intensive project needed an enterprise-level CMS to support extensive development and sophisticated digital marketing. However, the legacy CMS could not support the strategy. 

The Clarivate team needed an agile environment that would enable the marketing team to easily conduct A/B testing to optimize conversion for marketing campaigns. It lacked the necessary workflow tools to personalize its customer experience and enhance its overall productivity. Plus, there was no formal development or testing pipeline nor separate instances for consistent testing and workflows. On top of all these challenges, working with the widely distributed Web DevOps team was exceptionally difficult. 

Jeremy Williams, Web Development Manager at Clarivate, remembered, “The development pipeline was not working effectively, and it was causing delays and inefficiency. As an example, I would need to send a team member files so he could update code. But I was in the U.S., and he was in Belgium. Our time zones didn't line up, so I had to wait until the next day to update anything. ” 

The second challenge, transforming multiple portfolios and websites into a single global brand, required a redesign and a highly reliable and automated platform to support the new websites. Govind Kudva, Director of Digital and Content Marketing at Clarivate added, “Our content was not with one hosting provider. Some of our sites were hosted by the product teams. Some of the sites were hosted by agencies. We needed to bring everything onto a single roof.” 

Finally, the new CMS needed multilingual capabilities. They initially used the WordPress plugin WPML to translate pages for global customers. But as customer visits grew, WPML did not scale, and site performance suffered.  

Why Pantheon: Agility, Efficiency, Integration 

The website is heavily focused on lead generation, and Pantheon’s ease of use and automation enables the team to focus on the site as the company’s lead demand engine. Williams said, “Now we spend most of our time enhancing the site to increase demand generation, such as A/B testing and sophisticated personalization. Pantheon allows us to spend our time on our highest business priorities.”

Clarivate appreciates Pantheon’s responsive support included at the Diamond tier. Pantheon engineers quickly answer the team’s questions and deliver the results they need. In fact, between simplified management and Pantheon support, the team felt confident replacing external support with in-house management and running multiple sites themselves. 

Pantheon’s deep extensibility easily enabled dozens of WordPress plugins and allowed Clarivate to run different marketing automations on the platform. The New Relic integration enabled the team to optimize and fine-tune site-wide performance. 

Efficient development workflows also improved collaboration and communication between Web DevOps team members and company executives. 

Collaboration used to be complex on the far-flung Web DevOps team.

Our team members work all over the world. It was hard to line up work schedules, and we used to spend hours  going back and forth. Pantheon’s efficient dev environment saved us a lot of time.

- Jeremy Williams, Web Development Manager at Clarivate

In addition, Pantheon’s agility improved communications with the executive suite by allowing the team to easily create live demonstrations for stakeholders. For example, one developer created a new instance that looked exactly like the production environment. The developer’s manager easily manipulated the pages to demonstrate interactive features in real time to a group of executives, enabling a fast review and approval process. 

Results: Productivity Drives Global Expansion

Productivity was a key goal, and Pantheon delivered. Before moving to WordPress and Pantheon, team members spent hours identifying development and management issues and implementing solutions. With Pantheon, the worldwide Web DevOps teams made major productivity gains. “Without Pantheon’s efficient development environment, we would need to grow our development team by 50% to accomplish the same amount of work,” Kudva noted. 

Pantheon’s flexibility also accelerated digital marketing decisions. It’s simple for the developers to spin up a sample menu, design or branching workflow in WordPress. By demonstrating the dynamic changes to executives, the team gains faster and more confident management buy-in. 

Pantheon’s high stability and reliability also served Clarivate’s executive global expansion strategy, including seamlessly managing regional sites for multilingual capabilities. Instead of using a WordPress plugin that slowed site performance, Clarivate enabled regional employees and customers to log in to a specific site in their language. Content contributors create and edit in WordPress using their own language, and Pantheon efficiently clones and translates the revised pages across other regional sites. 

The whole process with Pantheon has been seamless. If I could think of one word to describe our experience, it would be confidence. Pantheon gave us the confidence to explore our greatest potential and the confidence to execute.

- Jeremy Williams, Web Development Manager at Clarivate