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7 Reasons it Might be Time to Upgrade Your Content Management System

7 Reasons it Might be Time to Upgrade Your Content Management System

Is your workflow becoming too much for you to handle?  Do you struggle to find content or other assets quickly and easily? Are you dealing with too many systems to count? Are your systems scaleable? Are you struggling to provide an effective online customer experience? If any of those questions rings true it might be time to invest in a new Content Management System (CMS).

A Content Management System (CMS) is a software application that allows you to create and manage all your digital content, whether for internal or external use. Odds are you already have some form of CMS in your business (or several unrelated systems that act as a loosely assembled CMS). CMSs range in complexity and cost; ranging from the simple, straightforward solutions that can be acquired for free to robust proprietary systems developed in-house, to a scalable solution somewhere in the middle.

A CMS can be helpful in a number of different situations, whether your company is building an intranet (a platform for internal use by personnel), an extranet (a platform for internal use by partners and other business-critical parties) or a webpage (hosted externally on the web) a CMS can help manage all of your content.

CMSs range in scale and complexity, whether it’s a folder on some computer’s desktop with a few old logos in it to a highly technical, top of the line enterprise management system. The type of CMS needed depends entirely on the organization’s needs and can range greatly in cost but in one form or another, every business has one.

So, without further delay, here are 7 reasons why it might be time to upgrade your CMS:

1. Website Personalization

Building an engaging, beautiful and personalized website isn’t easy. It takes a lot of skill to be able to design a website that engages your target market no matter what device they are on. A CMS helps you accomplish that, allowing you to personalize content on your sites to attract multiple target markets, providing content that is appropriate for each persona. Personalization involves plenty of pre-emptive research, planning and mapping to ensure that you fully and truly understand your customers. This is required so they can be grouped together by common factors, such as demographics, needs, challenges, interests; really anything can be used to place customers into segments depending on the business objective. When the customers are split up into common groups it makes it possible for your marketing department to craft messages that will speak to that type of customer directly.

A CMS will help personalize your website is by providing tools to  create, manage and analyze your content. These tools make it easy to A/B test different strategies and content in order to deliver an excellent experience to the end users.

2. Inconsistent Customer Experience (CX)

According to the Walker Study, by 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. CX has been proven to be one of the most important influences on a company’s success and that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon. The Aberdeen Group has conducted surveys that suggest that the top fifth of firms in terms of omni-channel engagement have a customer retention rate around 89%, while the other 80% of firms have an average retention rate of 33%. A CMS can help achieve consistency in the experience and message, regardless of the device the content is accessed with. From desktop to the tiniest phone on the market, your content and the general experience should be consistent across every platform. You want to be able to deliver the right content at the right time and an enterprise-grade CMS allows you to deliver the content in an engaging way to increase your chances at marketing success.

Omni-channel marketing is very important to consider because of the typical path the customer journey takes; moving through departments at various stages of the purchase decision. Customers need (and expect) cross-department consistency and consistency between experiences. This is something that a CMS, through integrating disparate systems, can achieve.

3. Control of Content

A CMS is an excellent tool to ensure the organization is fully in control of their content. If you have a liability to convey accurate advice/information or meet any compliance requirements, a CMS can put processes in place to send any potential content for approval. Some CMS solutions can provide you with relevant, approved content, letting the user pick and choose which content they want to display on their website. They can choose which features are available to partners on the company extranet or what permissions various departments have for altering different content. The CMS allows workflows to be secure and efficient, putting necessary checks and balances in place to ensure all content meets branding and quality standards.

4. Growth

Does your company website have more than one page? If it doesn’t, it should. Do you engage in online sales or ecommerce? How much daily traffic do you get? What would happen if that traffic doubled? What would happen if it increased a hundredfold? Any CMS worth its weight will be able to easily scale, add or remove pages and handle high levels of traffic without overloading the servers, missing any interactions, or losing any data.  You will need to be able to manage a large number of pages, microsites, different domains and URLs without losing performance or responsiveness. An enterprise-grade CMS is able to handle those needs as online and digital experience continues to explode.

5. Organization Purposes

Have you ever had an issue finding a particular document, brochure, photo, or video that you know you have and could use to wow a prospective client? A CMS will help you manage internal documents, so everything you need is centralized, organized and easy to find. An effective CMS will have plenty of tools available for organizing content, allowing your organization to ensure all your assets are in one place and easy to find, saving you time and money. A CMS might cost more upfront than paying a developer to make a website, but you will see the savings over time. You will see cost savings in terms of reduced costs of managing your own content rather than having to go externally for every small change, or not having to pay someone to fix your website after your content gets disorganized. You will also see efficiency in that you can get your messaging, and website changes live in minutes, rather than hours.  These tools can be as simple as a WordPress plug-in to a complex system with processes, checks and balances in place to ensure branding, regulations and content standards are complied with.

Without a CMS (or with a CMS that is too thin for the organization’s needs) you may have wings of the organization using outdated assets, distributing old content (and not having proper access to new content). This can lead to a disjointed customer experience; confusing and potentially upsetting those customers. This reduces your chance of reaching that customer with your message. It is easy to upgrade your CMS and avoid these problems, you shouldn’t be suffering from a disorganized digital deck.

6. System Cohesion

With the multitude of solutions available to businesses today, many companies subscribe to multiple services or purchase multiple different tools to help solve different business needs. Most of the time these tools are unrelated, acquired from different vendors and do not work together very well. This introduces a variety of problems for your business including information silos;where information is trapped in one system and can’t be exported to another. Another problem from lack of cohesion is time wasted logging in and out of various screens with different credentials. Without system cohesion you will waste time and money due to digital inefficiencies. A CMS solves these problems by integrating your systems into one cohesive application, with one login allowing you to manage content, data and other digitally stored assets easily and effectively with very little effort or stress.

7. Not Properly Utilizing Tools

There are many tools that even the more bare bones CMS will provide you with that can help ensure your website gets appropriate traffic. These tools allow the average person to keep track and add content, leaving the logistics of the website’s look and feel to more experienced designers. When content and information are spread across disparate systems, the tools available may not be properly used. This can occur because the tool is inconvenient to use given a particular system, because it is impossible. By combining all of your systems in one place with the tools you need to access, edit and manage all your data and content you will reduce “system overload’ you will save time and money.

Final Thoughts

Chances are you already have a CMS in place at your business. There are many reasons why it has become a necessity for every business; from efficient workflows to customer satisfaction, a CMS can be a game changer when used effectively. If any of these points hit close to home (or your business), it’s probably time to invest in an enterprise grade CMS! What was the moment that made you decide it was time to upgrade your CMS? Let us know over on Twitter @VeridayHQ