Megaworld keeps over 3,000 brands up-to-date in real time across web and mobile

Megaworld is a real estate developer and operator in The Philippines, building and managing both residential and commercial properties. 

In 2020, certain commercial spaces such as malls were hit particularly hard by stringent restrictions on their use. In order to retain brands as tenants in these properties, Megaworld made the strategic decision to revisit and revitalize its online touchpoints, building a new website and mobile app from scratch, and updating its legacy technology to provide an optimized customer experience for brands, while simultaneously improving the end-user experience for shoppers. 

“Our digital touchpoints are crucial for customers as they provide the answers to specific questions such as opening hours, product inquiries, customer service concerns and more”, Nico Sanchez, Head of Customer Experience, Megaworld, said. “We already had a website and a mobile app but they weren’t in a good state, they relied on legacy technology with different CMSes for mobile and website, making it hard to keep them accurate and up-to-date. We wanted to upgrade digital as a marketing tool to support the customer journey, and for cultivating customer loyalty through lead generation and personalization.” 

In 2021, Megaworld started looking at its options for Content Management Systems, at a time where headless technology was still a relatively new concept. After speaking with a few different vendors, Contentstack was chosen due to its strong pre-sales support, as engineers were able to showcase the system and its benefits in a truly comprehensive way. 

Choosing Contentstack also reduced the resource investment needed to rebuild the website and mobile app from scratch compared with other solutions. “I remember speaking with our partner developer and they were delighted to find a lot of the back-end work which is usually part of building a new site was taken care of by Contentstack,” Sanchez said. “Our partner vendor was originally going to use Wordpress, but once they were exposed to Contentstack they realized they could save a lot of effort and that the development would be a lot easier for them. This meant they could cut the cost of their initial proposal, and ongoing resource costs were reduced as well.”

Today, Contentstack powers the Megaworld lifestyle malls website, and the mobile app, Megan, is available in the Apple and Google Play stores. 

Adopting headless technology has made it incredibly simple to keep content up-to-date, allowing Marketing and PR teams to post content at an increased cadence, and strategically choose which content is automatically updated across channels, and which should be specific to web or mobile app. For updating directories, each brand is a content entry, and any update is automatically reflected across web and app without the need to log into two disparate CMS environments. 

“The use of one CMS for both channels is a key improvement to our workflow that’s made a real difference”, Sanchez said. “We manage over 3,000 brands, so before Contentstack when we had two different CMSes, it was hard to keep track of whether information was up-to-date. We had a member of staff who was focused on updating directories in the mobile app — it wasn’t an efficient use of his time. Now, directories are synchronized, and if you have to remove a brand, you can’t really make a mistake.”

Content management has become much easier for Megaworld, including improvements across Marketing, PR and Development teams. All content is stored in a library, making it easy to pull visual assets on demand using intuitive search capabilities, and developers can quickly spin up customized landing pages to meet the needs of specific campaigns. Where their previous CMS, Wordpress, was daunting, with a lot of different options and modules which are not relevant for editors, Contentstack has a much neater UI, so Marketing and PR teams can update content directly, and only see what they need to see. 

“Without a heavy learning curve, I’ve found it easy to keep track of content and keep it up-to-date using Contentstack,” Aly Racelis, Customer Experience Associate, Megaworld, said. “For example, when I need to update the cinema page of the website to share what movies are showing and the properties, it’s easy to make the changes. I can update each tenant and see the changes happen in real-time, which gives us all a lot more transparency.”

The improvement to the digital experience allowed Megaworld to innovate to support its tenants, despite changes in economies. As well as an improved website and mobile app journey, Megaworld launched projects such as a personal shopping experience, and an al fresco dining offering where customers could safely dine out using a QR code to order their food. 

Due to its efforts, Megaworld was able to finish the pandemic with a relatively high occupancy rate compared with other mall operators. And due to a combination of the new CMS, publishing a greater amount of content, and a more SEO-sound experience, Megaworld has also seen a 4.5x increase in traffic.

Next on the roadmap for Megaworld is improving the way that the company builds microsites, which currently take a few weeks to build. The team is planning to reduce this time investment down to just a few hours per microsite. The team is also planning to move to Next JS to optimize SEO and gain further performance improvements.  

Megaworld’s key wins with Contentstack include:

• Simplified content management: With over 3,000 brands to keep up-to-date, a single CMS that updates content across both mobile app and website has saved up to 20 hours each week. 
• A developer-friendly interface: Robust documentation and back end processes made it easier for developers to build both the website and the mobile app with fewer development resources needed than for a traditional CMS. 
• Reduced ongoing resource load: Instead of hiring two back end developers for the mobile app, and a full-time back end resource for the website, Megaworld can rely on a single web developer. Additionally, where it would previously take approximately 20 hours per week for a dedicated content editor to update entries one-by-one, it’s now easy and quick to make changes to Megaworld’s tenant directory at scale.