Explore Salesforce CMS and Page Designer

Vijay Lahiri is a developer who works for Cloud Kicks, a company that specializes in high-end custom sneakers. He’s happy to help his marketing and merchandising colleagues customize their company’s fabulous online storefront.

One of his tasks is to build Page Designer pages and components so that merchandisers like Brandon Wilson can create amazing storefront experiences. Brandon uses Page Designer, a visual editor, to create and manage personalized landing pages for Salesforce B2C Commerce storefronts.

Like many merchants, Cloud Kicks uses the B2C Commerce built-in content management capabilities. But the company has grown so big that content development has become a bottleneck, requiring lots of manual work. For example, Brandon recently created a new blog post on Rocket sneakers in an external system.

Brandon asked Vijay to write the HTML code and publish the content to a storefront page. Vijay uploaded the content in Business Manager, but the content can only be used on the B2C Commerce storefront. It’s locked to that front-end and can’t be shared across other channels. That’s a serious challenge as Cloud Kicks navigates today’s omni-channel world.

The new content isn’t connected to the rest of the Salesforce platform. The content source of truth is isolated and provides no tracking across the business of how, when, and where it is used. Vijay has to reproduce the blog post on each channel. And that’s true for every single blog post that Brandon or other Cloud Kicks employees create.

That’s a lot of work.

Multiply that by Cloud Kick’s growing business requirements. Though Brandon’s team owns content creation, every team across commerce, marketing, sales, and service builds content to support their business objectives. This means that Brandon and his team can’t always respond quickly to market demands. Flash sales, news, or late-breaking promotions can be difficult to implement.

Speaking of difficult… content not connected to data is difficult to personalize, making it hard to target the right piece of content to the right person at the right time.

Here are Brandon’s pain points.

• He can only use content in one place.
• He can’t get new content out fast enough.
• His CMS isn’t connected to data, so he can’t personalize it.
• People keep asking him to create content, which impacts his work production.

This is where Salesforce Content Management System (CMS) can help.

Salesforce CMS enables users to create, manage, and deliver fabulous and focused content. Merchandisers like Brandon can select a content type or create custom types, and quickly draft the content in the app, no technical skills required. Multi-language and translation support help him scale; and permissions help him collaborate while maintaining brand standards. He and other content creators can develop content collections, which are like playlists of content that can be added to different experiences.

Salesforce CMS is an API-first headless content service that provides centralized out-of-the-box functionality native to the Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) platform. With Salesforce CMS, Brandon can author, orchestrate, and deliver content across every channel—including B2C Commerce.

Salesforce CMS makes everyone’s job a lot easier.

• Each team can gain experience with easy-to-use tools.
• Each team can deliver content to any experience, whether built with Salesforce CRM or not.
• Content is connected and personalized from any source.

With Salesforce CMS and B2C Commerce, Cloud Kicks merchandisers like Brandon can create and embed experiences everywhere his customers are, across every touchpoint. They start by creating content in Salesforce CMS, built on the Salesforce core platform. Then they use Page Designer for B2C Commerce to deploy that content as shopping experiences. Within the Salesforce ecosystem, Cloud Kicks can also use Experience Builder to push the same content to their B2B clients, a growing list of retailers whose shoppers love the Cloud Kicks products.

Here are the steps Brandon and Vijay take to implement Salesforce CMS with B2C Commerce.

1. Vijay installs and connects Salesforce CMS to Page Designer.
2. In Salesforce CMS, Brandon creates and manages different options for a new headline banner content.
3. In the Page Designer development environment, Vijay creates a new component type that displays the headline banner.
4. In Page Designer, Brandon adds the new headline banner component type to a page and selects which content to use for the banner from within the Salesforce CMS repository.

In this unit, you learned how you can use Salesforce CMS to develop rich content-driven shopping experiences for B2C Commerce storefronts. You learned how important it is to create and manage content from a single source of truth and deploy that content across multiple channels. You also learned the basic steps to take to implement Salesforce CMS with Page Designer.

Next, you learn how to connect Salesforce CMS to Page Designer.

• Trailhead: Salesforce B2C Commerce Page Designer for Developers