MYOB eliminates tech debt and unifies content operations with Contentful

For more than 35 years, MYOB has provided cloud-based business management solutions that help businesses across Australia and New Zealand manage everything from finance and payroll to tax, people, and operations. The organization serves several distinct business audiences, each with its own tone of voice, visual identity, and journey. 

Each product change or compliance update, from payroll guidance to tax updates, has to reach customers quickly and consistently across dozens of digital touchpoints, and as MYOB’s product portfolio expanded, so did the volume of digital content, including blog posts, in-product guidance, feature announcements, and educational resources. This content lived in multiple, siloed systems, making it difficult to manage, much less maintain the level of consistency customers expected. 

Recognizing that its fragmented content ecosystem was limiting marketing agility, slowing digital initiatives, and increasing operational complexity, MYOB set out to build a single, scalable content platform. By centralizing content on Contentful, the company reduced technical debt, gave marketing and content teams greater autonomy, and created a structured content foundation ready for personalization and AI.

Adding up the expenses of a sprawling architecture

Before adopting Contentful, MYOB’s content lived across four separate legacy systems, each with its own workflows, templates, and front-end. A good deal of MYOB’s content wasn't stored in a CMS at all, and updating these assets required developer intervention. Because these platforms were self-hosted, maintaining them also came with significant overhead.

These challenges ultimately came to a head as MYOB approached a brand refresh. Updating content across separate platforms meant that even seemingly small changes to imagery or typography could require months of work, which should have been a straightforward process but became drawn out, requiring cross-functional coordination.

“While each platform served a dedicated purpose, it became very complicated to manage content across all of these different systems,” shared Morgan Plumley, Senior Product Manager and Platform Lead at MYOB. “We were trying to create a modern, on-brand experience, but we ended up spending more time maintaining existing content and systems rather than producing net-new resources.”

The limitations of MYOB’s existing infrastructure were also affecting search visibility. Declining SEO performance became another key driver for change. Improving the underlying digital experience was no longer just about making content easier to manage; it was increasingly important to how customers discovered and experienced MYOB online.

Budgeting for a better, leaner content stack

With their challenges identified, MYOB began to explore platforms with the capabilities to solve them. They needed a solution that was highly flexible and that could deliver content across multiple channels and platforms. They also needed something that was editor-friendly and that would integrate well with other tools. After considering various composable options, they landed on Contentful.

MYOB started with a pilot, migrating a sampling of blog content to Contentful to test the platform and validate a headless approach before rolling it out more broadly. Starting with a contained use case allowed the team to validate its content model, editorial workflows, and technical architecture before committing to a broader transformation.

“Starting small gave us a really good understanding of how the APIs work and how to structure our content models for maximum reuse,” said Plumley. “We also had routine sessions with Contentful Professional Services to track the project and double-check our approach to things.”

Once the pilot proved successful, the company committed to migrating its core digital experiences (which included more than 800 pages of content) to the new platform in six months.

“We had renewals coming up for our existing platforms and staying on them would be more expensive, which also drove our timeline,” said Plumley. Switching to a cloud-native platform like Contentful would save the company roughly $60k AUD a year in hosting fees alone.  

To hit this deadline, they adopted a flexible assembly model, transforming page-specific content into reusable building blocks that accelerated migration while creating a more scalable content foundation. Developers focused on creating reusable building blocks while content authors assembled pages themselves inside Contentful. 

Giving developers and content teams more freedom

After the migration, MYOB saw an immediate shift in how the workload was distributed among developers and marketers. Content authors became responsible for publishing experiences, while developers shifted their focus from routine updates to building reusable capabilities that moved the business forward.

“Today, a majority of content on the core website is actually owned by content teams themselves,” said Luke Deylen, Engineering Manager at MYOB, “We’ve created a setup where they have autonomy to edit content or take pre-built components and build entirely new pages in a matter of minutes, rather than seeing something is hard-coded, having to file a support ticket, and then asking developers to address it.”

That shift fundamentally changed MYOB's delivery cadence. Before Contentful, the company averaged a single website deployment each month. Today, teams deploy roughly 50 deployments per month, allowing MYOB to respond faster to market opportunities, customer needs, and product changes.

Cashing in on better visibility and web performance

Beyond improving internal workflows, Contentful has strengthened the digital experience for MYOB customers. Faster publishing keeps content fresher, while a modern headless architecture improves site performance and makes it easier for customers to find the information they need. 

These improvements are positively impacting MYOB’s Core Web Vitals. Before introducing Contentful, 2 out of three Google Core Web Vitals were rated as ‘Poor’ or ‘Needs Improvement.’ Now, all three ratings are ‘Good,’ which is helping MYOB attract more organic traffic and rank higher. Before Contentful, the average search ranking for core keywords was 12; three months after migrations, it’s 8.2.

Personalization that pays dividends 

Another place MYOB is seeing this editorial autonomy show up is in their approach to personalization. Before Contentful, MYOB experimented with a few other tools, which promised to be ‘marketer-friendly’ but fell short, requiring developer input and management.

Today, MYOB is leveraging Contentful Personalization to run experiments. This time around, the program is totally run by marketing and content teams, allowing MYOB to refine content and improve conversion rates at a pace that wasn’t possible before. In the last 12 months, the team has run 18 experiments, testing headlines, imagery, messaging hierarchy, pricing presentation, and calls to action. With the tool’s insights and analytics feature, marketers are able to see performance and insights to inform experiments, reducing the load on MYOB’s analytics and insights specialist.  

Those experiments have produced impressive results, including:

• 12-24% uplift in conversion to signup when testing evergreen content against campaign-specific content.

• 8.5- 37% uplift in pricing card impressions with richer above-the-fold experiences.

• 25% uplift in conversion to sign up with clearer CTAs for small business products.

What's next: Investing in AI for a competitive advantage 

With its migration complete, MYOB is now focused on getting even more value from the foundation it has built. The team is expanding personalization across the customer journey while investing in richer metadata and structured content to support the next generation of AI-powered experiences.

"Contentful is becoming a source of truth for chatbots and AI agents within the business," added Plumley. 

The team is expanding its use of personalization and continuing to improve how structured content is managed across the business. Because content is now structured, centralized, and reusable, MYOB can confidently extend it beyond websites into AI-powered search, conversational assistants, and emerging digital experiences, ensuring customers receive accurate, consistent information wherever they engage with the brand.