A custom Experience Cloud marketing portal for content

Sequoia Financial Group is a leading US-based financial services firm, offering both wealth management and wealth planning services to clients of different income/asset wealth and backgrounds. Their mission is to enrich lives by helping individuals and families advance their chosen future.

Sequoia wanted to expand its marketing content infrastructure. The current content process was ad-hoc, and all content created or awaiting approval from stakeholders was stored on a Quip document. It didn’t enable Executives to visualise the context nor easily find the content they needed.

Being in the financial services industry, Sequoia must ensure its content is approved by multiple stakeholders and remains compliant from a regulatory standpoint. But with ambitious expansion goals meaning they had to scale content output, the current process was not fit for purpose.

Not only this, Sequoia also needed to offer their advisors accessible guidance around certain pieces of content, as well as a support system. 

From the outset, it was clear to MarCloud that a one-stop shop Experience Cloud website that catered to advisors and other internal teams was the right solution. The goals were:

• Deliver a fully customised CMS website using Experience Cloud.

• Ensure seamless integration with Sequoia’s current Salesforce support processes.

• Make the above scalable, to manage all their content for the next couple of years.

Through a process of discovery, workshops, and collaboration with the Sequoia team, MarCloud decided to implement several key solutions to meet the project requirements:

Creation of new Content Types in Salesforce CMS

Salesforce CMS comes with three default content types, including News, Documents, and Images. However, these were not comprehensive enough to meet the requirements for Sequoia. MarCloud took the information gained from discovery and created four customised content types.

Building of the CMS website

Salesforce CMS integrates seamlessly with Experience Cloud, so all MarCloud had to do was choose the framework with which to build the site on, and get to work. The options were Visualforce, Aura, and LWR. While Visualforce and Aura have handy preset features for Experience Cloud sites, Salesforce investment and future enhancements will be focused on LWR (Lightning Web Framework).

Furthermore, with MarCloud’s strong proficiency in web development, Javascript, and Apex, the customisation options available on LWR sites are unparalleled. For these reasons, and to future-proof the site, MarCloud built a customised LWR site.

Integration with current support processes

Sequoia already had an established case support system, and MarCloud needed to ensure that any support system for the CMS had to integrate seamlessly with this.

There are two types of case support systems we needed:

1. General marketing cases - this will integrate with the current process.

2. Content approval cases - content approval needed to be formalised into a robust, multi-step process that involves a variety of stakeholders.

To cover these, MarCloud added a support case page to the website that linked to their current marketing support case flow.

For all content approvals, MarCloud built a custom screenflow which takes various content inputs as variables and adds them to a marketing case, as well as linking to the piece of content that needs approving.

MarCloud built 17 custom LWR components to piece together a successful and custom website. These components were extremely flexible, and able to cover all content types. Some examples of components include:

• Customisable calendar to show when content will be published on the website and when specific marketing events are taking place, for all internal teams to see.

• Search pages that enable advisors to search through up to 5000 pieces of content for each content type. The component can be scaled to include more in future if needed.

• Search and filtering component that enables the marketing team to add their filters when needed in a very simple, no-code process.

• Carousel component to show the latest pieces of content published for each content type.

Sequoia also received a sophisticated Lightning Messaging Channel built for their needs, setting them up for decades of sophisticated content management.