- April 12, 2019
48% of websites globally use a known Content Management System (CMS). Among the top, 1 million websites, 86% use an Enterprise CMS. The variety of content created and shared in this era makes the CMS a necessity to stay competitive. The role of the developer has become negligible in terms of content handling and its hard to imagine how tedious it must have been to manage assets, publishing and sharing manually. Imagine having to upload all the text, images, videos and other forms of content 1 by 1. Marketers would have to find and place files, edit them and then make each asset ready for uploading separately. A robust and efficient CMS system does not only allow you to organize different content from various sources and formats in one place but also provides options such as custom editing, bulk editing, smart-personalization and automated scheduling/uploading of content.
However, there are so many Content Management Systems out there which have different features and functionalities that it is hard to choose which CMS best suits your organisation’s needs. To help guide your decision, here are some key considerations one must keep in mind when choosing the right CMS system in 2019:
The complexity and time required for integration with other systems must be minimal. As CMS is managed more by the authors’ of the content, rather than technical resources, ease of integration is a key element to consider.
The CMS should support multiple add-ons and extensions to allow customisation according to business requirements.
Business requirements vary in different industries and organizations. In an era of hyper-personalisation, a comprehensive CMS system is needed which will allow a marketer to cater to a diversified target audience and various market segments.
As marketers are in charge of the content, they will need access to the live websites and systems being used to publish and edit content. This adds a security risk to the content and data. This means the CMS must have an access control list where one can clearly define the level of rights a user or user group has towards certain content. This mitigates the risk of loss of content control, content modification or loss by error.
Although some functionality, for example, those provided by the Order Management System (OMS), can be very effectively fully automated. The specific case of queries or troubleshooting a multi-channel approach allowing human interaction is necessary. Frequently asked questions (FAQs) can be handled directly by the portal with strong search functionality and chatbots specifically configured to address issues. However sometimes for quick problem solving or answering an unusual query, human intervention is necessary. This means your portal should allow for multi-channel communication.
The CMS should give a complete omnichannel experience providing the same user experience across all digital platforms. All customer touchpoints including point of sales display should provide a seamless experience.
This feature is highly important to modern enterprises and varies across different Content Management Systems. It includes the type of formats supported by the CMS. Not every CMS allows rich text format or other formats so marketers need to see the different data, content sources and formats their corporation is using. The modern CMS should have support for dynamic/evolving assets. Simply put it saves time editing the entire piece of content in order to incorporate a minor change. Bulk asset editing is also a feature that immensely saves time as you don’t have to open and edit each content piece separately.
Content Management Systems have evolved and are becoming more comprehensive with time but there is no one complete solution that can meet the dynamic personalised business needs. Ease of customisation through integrations and add-ons/extensions is a defining factor when choosing the CMS.
The future of CMS success lies in how scalable they become. Allowing the easy growth and shrinking of resources as per need basis is a key consideration. The move to cloud from on-premise just like other enterprise systems such as SAP is inevitable in the near future. The ability of CMS to provide CaaS (Content as a Service) giving access to content via API-calls, decoupling presentation from storage. This Headless approach will likely become a popular industry trend facilitating fragmented use of CMS for different purposes with API-first design, serving multiple channels.
