It’s no secret that most people will be more than thrilled to see the end of 2020. The pandemic has made it a year like no other, both personally and professionally. But there is a positive about this year that’s worth mentioning: It has made many take a step back and think about what they are doing.

From a B2B business perspective, we’ve had to rethink our marketing and sales strategies, adapting to a customer experience that is digital-first, and in many cases, digital-only. We’ve had to improve on the digital workplace to support employees as they work from home. And we’ve had to rethink our technology stacks to support it all.

No one would ever wish for a pandemic, but good things can sometimes happen out of bad situations. In the case of B2B, we’ve renewed our focus on what is important - our customers and our employees.

With that in mind, here are some of the topics we shared this past year that aim to help companies create better customer and employee experiences.

The Shift: When the Levee Breaks: The Paradigm Shift from Web Experience to Agile Content

Ingeniux VP of Business Development, David Hillis, spends a lot of time with customers, listening to business challenges and opportunities today. He shared his perspective in The Shift, a five-part series that takes an in-depth look at how digital experience technology and strategy must evolve to support customers' needs today.

“While the shift from traditional web experience to agile content is disrupting the content management industry, what is more, important is how it's changing how your organization will manage and deliver digital content, websites, and other experiences. The agile content shift is all about you. It changes how you craft your websites and digital experiences, manage and produce your content, and how you will work with your team to support digital across your entire organization for the next decade.”

Start with the first blog, then read the full series.

Redefining How We Create, Manage, and Publish Content

This is not the first year we’ve heard the terms “headless CMS” or “hybrid CMS.” But it does feel like it’s the first year, we finally settled on what is important about each of these CMS technologies. They are not the same thing, but there are similarities. Both enable companies to create great customer experiences, but one requires much more effort than the other.

If you are still working through the difference between the two and why a hybrid CMS is the best solution if you need to manage experiences across multiple channels, then here are a few things to read that will help.

• Managing Content in a Hybrid CMS
• Migrating From Legacy to Modern CMS Platforms
• Multiple Sites, One CMS

Improving Customer Support with Tech Docs

Self-service tools for customer support are some of the most critical technologies you can have in place these days, and one of the most demanded is a searchable knowledge base. The problem is, most companies haven’t web-enabled their technical documentation and don’t have the right tools to do it.

That’s why we spent some time digging into what the tech stack should look like for technical documentation publishing. If you want to empower your customers to solve their own problems, this is a blog you should read.

Technical Documentation Publishing: What's Your Tech Stack?

Building the Best Internal Content Team

Content is the lifeblood of great digital experiences. But there’s more to publishing content than setting up a website and writing content. The information you provide your customers and prospects must be accurate and consistent across all your digital and physical channels. And that requires the right team and the best content people – what we like to call superheroes. Here are two blogs that speak to building your content operations and the superheroes you need to be successful.

• 4 Content Superheroes Every Company Needs
• How to Build a Rocking Content Operations Team

A Better Employee Experience

Is it time to kill the Intranet? It’s been around a long time, but how many of your employees are more productive because of it? Traditional Intranets had their time. But these days, employees need more, especially as not everyone is returning to the physical office. We understood things were changing even before the pandemic changed the workplace, and we shared our perspective in the blog, Re-imagining the Intranet in the Digital Workplace.

Higher Education is Evolving

Last year, Dan McArthur joined Ingeniux as the new Director of Higher Education Solutions. Dan had his work cut out for him as colleges and universities were hit hard by COVID.

Many things had to change, and Dan shared his suggestions for getting through this challenging period.

18 Things Every Higher Education Web Experience Needs

“Prior to joining the Ingeniux team, I spent years managing higher education web experiences. In that time, I found there were eighteen things every .EDU website needs to be successful. Eighteen. Yes, it’s a big number, but then again, there’s a lot of work involved in creating a winning higher education web experience.”

How Higher Ed Can Manage Content in the Best of Times to the Worst of Times

“Above all else, the communications department of a college or university must be nimble, and the flexibility of your staff and your partner vendors has certainly been tested in the last two weeks thanks to the COVID-19 (novel coronavirus) pandemic. Flexibility is only half of the equation, though; the other half is being prepared.

Preparation on the web side of things involves having the necessary mechanisms in place to communicate easily and effectively, and the processes to do so. And it’s easier to create and test functionality when the heat is turned down than in the middle of a crisis.

So, the question is: Is your website prepared for a crisis?”

Making Admitted Students Stick in a Pandemic

“If you have the next school year all figured out, congratulations. But if you’re in the other 99 percent of the market, I feel your pain, and I’m here to help think through how to keep the class you’ve fought so hard to land. You know, the class that could help determine whether your institution keeps its’ lights on.  So, let’s focus on the thing you can control: The website. Particularly the section of your website for admitted students.”

Extra: We’re throwing this blog in because it’s one of the most popular blogs on our site. With students studying from home, the student portal is critical now more than ever.

• Why Every College and University Needs a Modern Student Portal

Here’s to a New Year, and a Better Time for All

If there’s one thing you do this holiday, take the time to be thankful for the people around you. Your family, friends, your work family. We’ve all faced our ups and downs this year, and one thing is for sure, we will get through this together.

Continue to focus on what’s most important – people. Figure out how everything you do will impact people for the better. And know that we will get through this together and be better people, and companies, for it.