How can a CMS deliver business value?

It might be tempting to think that a content management system is primarily a tool for web editors and marketers to publish and maintain content for websites and apps. However, that view is myopic at best. Organisations that regard CMS as more than a simple marketing tool, acknowledge the potential for generating business value.

Then the real question is: how exactly does a CMS provide value? We will see that a CMS supports the customer journey, enables content and inbound marketing, saves time, and protects your organization’s brand.

Supports the customer journey

The digital customer journey consists of every touchpoint your potential and actual customers meet along their interaction with your brand—from being unfamiliar with and perhaps even skeptical to your offerings to being happy ambassadors.

The way to attract, convert, close, engage, delight, and retain your customers is to remove friction from the tasks they are trying to fulfil with your digital experiences. The way to do this is to map, assess, and rework all the touchpoints on your customer journey—be it SEO, ad, website, app, service, email, info screen, digital signage, IoT messaging, in-store beacon, eCommerce experience, or self-service. And powering these digital touchpoints with editorial content and dynamics is the CMS.

The CMS is the repository for your content, which you should use together with APIs to populate every relevant touchpoint when managing and building the customer journey. Thus, gaining and keeping more happy customers through an exquisite customer journey leads to an increased revenue.

Learn more: Let Enonic drive your customer journey »

Enables inbound marketing

Old-fashioned advertising and cold-calling do not yield the results it did back in the day. More and more organisations are ditching the archaic methods of yore in favour of more modern marketing principles like growth hacking, content marketing, content operations, and inbound marketing.

What all these new strategies have in common is the ability to generate a fairly large amount of warm and relevant leads organically. Lead generation is achieved chiefly through delivering the right content to the right person at the right time, and in regard to content the CMS comes into play.

Lead generation and its logical sibling lead nurturing are also powered by a CRM and a marketing automation tool, but there is no escape from the fact that a CMS is at the content heart of it all. Using marketing automation, content from the CMS is used to generate said organic and highly relevant traffic, thus growing the sales team’s pipeline and business opportunities.

See also: Rocketpower your content operations with Enonic »

Saves your team time

A CMS is not only a potential tool for growing the number of leads and happy customers, it can also be a cost-cutting asset to various departments in your organisation.

This is mainly achieved through the reuse of content. Many modern digital platforms and content management systems are increasingly utilising structured content and headless delivery. This means that an editorial team can author a piece of content once, before it can act as the central source delivered by a development team to any channel—be it web, apps, smartwatches, or as an atomic part of another site.

Another time-saving feature of a CMS is templates. Needless to say, templating makes it easy for e.g. your communication or design team to achieve the same brand compliant look and feel across—not only different pages on a site—but even different channels.

Also make sure that the CMS of your choice is user-friendly, i.e. that it is logical to navigate, sports a responsive design, has familiar keyboard shortcuts, and makes it easy to collaborate. Such small improvements save time little by little each day for both your digital projects and teams, thus cutting unnecessary costs.

As a final time-saving feature we can mention that a CMS often is a high-level platform. This allows for the developers to get started fast and deliver custom services for your digital experiences.

Learn more: 15 ways Enonic can help you save time on daily tasks »

Offers brand protection

We have already mentioned templates as a means to achieve a universal look and feel for your brand across digital channels, but a CMS can also go one step further in the quest to protect the brand of your organization.

By incorporating a design system you can integrate not only finished design and functionality, but also a general tone of voice, building blocks, and even usable code that is ready to be deployed wherever needed.

Together with a CMS and digital marketing, a design system can both save time and assure consistency and quality across all of your touchpoints along the customer journey, and thus protect your brand and consumer confidence.

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A CMS is the digital engine powering several aspects that can influence the bottom line of your organisation. Whether you are preparing a new agreement with your current CMS vendor or are considering something new, make sure that the CMS of your choice fulfils the ability to support your customer journey and inbound marketing, as well as having features that save time and protect your brand.