Content Management Systems (CMS) have been the solid engines behind the website experiences we have come to know and love. Although these systems have been functional and stable for a quite a while now, they will need to go through a significant transformation to adapt to the digital evolution we are experiencing.
From the ever-growing network of physical objects with an IP address for Internet connectivity (IoT) to the AI-powered innovations like personal assistants and driverless cars, this current digital transformation is changing how we experience and interact with the digital world and is impacting the way we do business. CMS platforms will need to evolve quickly to boost customer engagement and deliver on new expectations from users.
This year we will see a surge in businesses making major changes to their digital operations in an effort to keep up with new trends that require consideration.
Let’s start with the bigger picture and see how technology advances are pushing for Smarter Content Management. Here are four key technology advances and how they affect CMS.
Four key smart content management technologies
1) Search Optimization—A smart CMS harnessing AI to improve search capabilities
A CMS with a search engine powered by machine learning will leverage the information users inherently provide each time they submit a search query or click on a search result. These actions help measure content relevance and Smart Content Management captures this data to continuously self-learn, improve search relevance, and enhance the service experience. Customers will find what they’re looking for easier overall engagement, and positively affecting the company’s bottom line.
Machine learning and usage analytics data transform manual fine-tuning of search rankings to intelligent, self-learning and self-tuning search. And, because relevance constantly evolves, it’s impossible for content administrators to keep up with the manual process of boosting rules, adding synonyms, promoting documents, etc. A CMS with a machine learning based search engine will easily keep up with the rate of change.
2) Personalization—A smart CMS using contextual targeting to understand and enhance the customer experience
The digital evolution has expanded the methods businesses use to harness data to target customers. While analytics used to only recognize customer demographics; now they can also recognize the specific context in which those same customers browse and purchase. Access to such data helps businesses identify where exactly customers are within their buyer’s journey to increase engagement in both pre- and post-purchase activities. Since the customer relationship does not end with the purchase for most businesses, smarter content management can now facilitate the customers’ transition into post-purchase touchpoints, like customer portals and self-service systems.
Contextual targeting provides personalization beyond using personal information. In fact, it’s a less intrusive method of understanding customers that steers clear of privacy issues. As upcoming rules and regulations around individual privacy become more stringent, contextual targeting enables marketers to make data-informed decisions that allow for more personal choices without infringing on personal privacy.
3) Recommendation Engines—A Smart CMS assisting content administrators with the selection of content and media already available in the CMS
So far CMS platforms provide the ability to label images, transcribe audio and video, and gather related content to simplify the authoring process. Smart CMS platforms will enhance these tools and will make use of new ones to create smart authoring interfaces. The digital transformation in this area is lead by NLP, natural language processing.
Not only can NLP enhance a CMS to analyze content as it is being typed, search a media library or APIs of the author’s choice for related media, and insert such content with a single click— it can help detect emotional, social, and language tones in written content. It can help marketers understand the actual performance of content. With today’s technology, content creators can analyze how content has come across to readers, which tone resonates with which audience, and more. Some use cases are:
- Audience monitoring
- Personalized marketing
- Social listening
- Chatbots
- Customer engagement monitoring
- Quality assurance
4) Voice Controlled—A Smart CMS automating the delivery of information to increase convenience, productivity, and scalability
A hugely successful area of the digital evolution is the area of conversational systems, such as:
- Apple Siri
- Microsoft Cortana
- Facebook’s M
- Alexa-powered Amazon Echo
- Google Home
The widespread adoption of these systems will inevitably also change the way retailers market and sell their products. They will have to act quickly to prepare for e-commerce via digital assistant and to provide an intuitive and valuable voice-controlled shopping experience for customers.
Smarter content management will assist marketers in laying a foundation for voice-controlled commerce by:
- Re-considering how sites will structure product catalogs and descriptions and provide access to key information quickly, including price, size, customer reviews, and their own past purchases.
- Centralizing content to ensure accuracy and consistency across channels.
- Providing highly personalized product recommendations by integrating purchase history into the new shopping experience and anticipating shoppers’ next actions.
Four CMS features to deliver smart content
Now let’s get much more specific and see how the digital evolution is transforming CMS into smarter content management so you—the marketer—can deliver content smartly to maximize marketing efficiency. Here are four ways you can use technology to make your content marketing smarter and more strategic.
1. Use a CMS that automatically audits your content library to identify content gaps and real-time opportunities.
- Keep track of your content and identify top-performing content to repurpose as well as content that converts well and could be promoted again.
- Be aware of new trends, upcoming events, changes in customer needs, etc.
- Connect with additional systems within your company to see what content resonates at what stages of the sales funnel.
2. Use a CMS to maximize your keyword research to identify your content sweet spot.
- Go beyond popularity and cross-check your keyword data with actual performance metrics.
- See what content (yours and your competitors) has been effective in engaging searchers.
- Identify opportunities (new angles, curated content, fresh formats) and build on those proven engaging topics.
3. Use a CMS with an editorial calendar to improve collaboration and project management
- Be smarter in your planning with automated reminders and notifications.
- Be more systematic in your processes and give team members the ability to know and see what is happening in real time.
- Elevate your content marketing to the enterprise level where the sales team, the C-suite, etc. can log in and see all your content metrics.
4. Use a CMS with tools to automate social distribution based on audience profile.
- Publish multiple times and vary the message to the audience and platform
- Change the verbiage of your message to minimize audience burnout
- Distribute at the right time for your target audience
Are you ready to keep up with the digital evolution? Take a strategic approach.
First, see how you can use technology to make your content strategy smarter. Then research and figure out which specific tools will help you get there.
Achieve more with the right CMS platform
As a company who uses smarter content management platforms to deliver effective marketing strategies around our clients’ websites, we’d like to share with you the two platforms we use and why.
A) Kentico EMS
Kentico EMS is an Enterprise Content Management System structured to support the entire customer experience (CXM) through the buyer’s journey and the customer life cycle—across all channels. Such a complete system helps you:
- Grow brand loyalty and customer advocacy
- Increase revenue and repeat business
- Nurture and develop leads into successful deals
- Update customer data analytics continuously to understand customer behavior better
- Optimize the customer experience of your brand
- Create automated and responsive customer personalization for interactions
- Automate processes to evaluate web traffic and lead quality
- Increase marketing team effectiveness greatly
- Continue relevant customer communications after each purchase
- Integrate CXM processes with other systems (CRM, sales force management, customer service applications)
B) Episerver CMS
A leader in both Forrester and Gartner analyst reports, Optimizely is a smarter web content management system and digital marketing suite all in one. It provides an end-to-end platform with content authoring, landing page and promotion management, enterprise-level search, email marketing, and personalization all in one screen so you can:
- Increase efficiency by focusing on your content instead of the interface. With on-page and in-context content editing, drag-and-drop authoring, and digital asset management you can take advantage of smart authoring tools without losing track of your messaging.
- Personalize and target content to multiple audiences based on visitors locations, pages they visited, profile properties, referral sources, search terms, and additional criteria.
- Enable external and internal users to search content across multiple Episerver sites including free text and Boolean searches, supporting multiple languages with auto-translate capabilities.
- Get analytics insights when creating content to optimize it based on specific keywords, get on-page recommendations, and increase your search engine rankings and overall traffic.
- Set up A/B Tests on multiple variations of a web page to identify which one converts better as visitors are routed to the different variations while the test is running.
- Manage campaigns and promotions easily, including landing pages, forms, CTAs, and offers while you collaborate within your team with in-app chat, workflows, and projects.
Select the right platform and agency to support your goals
Identifying the right tools for your business, mainly the smarter content management system that will be the behind the scenes engine to your marketing strategy is the first and most critical step in your keeping up with the digital transformation we’re experiencing. We will be happy to assess where you are now, where you would like to be, and how to fill in the gap. Let’s discuss the benefits of an Enterprise Content Management Solution
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