Why your CMS is the most valuable tool for your customer journey

Your CMS is one of the central tools for your digital experiences. A content management system is the engine behind your organization’s website, templates, and structured content, and even APIs and apps in some instances.

As a result, it’s presence may be ubiquitous in regard to the digital touchpoints facing your customers in all stages of their interactions and knowledge of your brand. Let’s take a closer look on how a CMS can impact, improve, and add value to the customer journey.

See how you can create business value with the customer journey:

Editorial control

A digital customer journey may encompass several touchpoints—from advertisements and eCommerce to emails, landing pages, and user generated content. With so many different channels and platforms, it’s crucial to maintain quality and brand control of the content that is featured in each, separate instance.

A CMS can act as the central hub for editorial control across all your digital interfaces. There is no longer just one website to control—but maybe dozens of touchpoints, from social media and online shops to wearables and digital signage.

Facing the looming danger of fragmentation, a CMS can function as the main integrator of all your digital touchpoints. If your CMS includes headless capabilities, it can deliver structured content to any channel through APIs. This leaves you and your team of editors in charge of the content, while the technology and your developers deliver whatever you need to say to wherever you need to say it.

See also: Let Enonic drive your customer journey »

Central asset repository

A customer journey delivers value to leads and clients in the form of both content and services, but the former need to be retrieved from somewhere. Just like managing content quality from one central source in the guise of a CMS, you can do exactly the same thing with your assets.

During a customer journey, your leads and clients will face a variety of texts, images, videos, whitepapers, infographics, sound bites, forms, and tools. A great CMS should be able to manage them all as structured content—thus eliminating the need to have separate asset repositories for your different touchpoints.

In this way, you can search, find, and insert any type of asset you need, where you need it in the customer journey.

Boosting your applications

Even though applications can be a vital part of your customer journey, their maintenance in terms of content may be a hassle, due to them being separated from your main product—which usually is your website.

A headless or hybrid CMS can rectify this oversight. In a collaboration with your developers, your organization can give the developers an API where they can extract your content. This enables them to retrieve content required for their particular app, while relieving you of the task to update two or more touchpoints twice.

From their end, developers can also give control to your editors, enabling them to manage parts of an application or service—like changing the ordering of elements or editing help texts. A CMS can thus help boost your applications, and not allow them to be built once and then become forgotten.

Don’t miss: Why go headless with a hybrid CMS?

Marketing automation integration

Any CMS with a shroud of self respect is able to integrate with marketing tools in general, and in our case with marketing automation. A CMS by itself is roughly a database with content, and in a classic or hybrid sense also sporting a presentation layer. By itself, this is not enough to follow up people currently engaged in your customer journey.

For a continuous follow-up of prospects, leads, customers, and brand ambassadors, you need a marketing automation tool. This tool treats your visitors systematically, tracking their behavior and actions, giving them scores, and sending relevant assets through workflows based on what they do and like.

You essentially can’t have a great customer journey without marketing automation, so make sure your CMS offers such services, or can be integrated with a best of breed solution.

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Your content management system permeates almost every touchpoint of your customer journey—contributing to creating value for both your leads and clients, as well as for your stakeholders. The CMS unites marketing and sales, by providing content and services that attracts and converts, as well as delights your customers.

Make sure your CMS is up to the task.