The correct CMS will make it easy for your business to provide fantastic customer experiences across all platforms. Discover the perfect one with these steps.
Key CMS selection factors
If you want to keep up with the competition, you need to become a digital-first firm. Your firm needs content management software to react to evolving technologies, stay flexible, and provide outstanding client experiences today and in the future.
Before you choose a CMS, make sure you think about these five things:
Customers want customized services
Digital technology has given individuals convenience, choice, and instant, personalized service. Consumers today want more than just products. They want to feel that your company knows them, their history, and their needs.
You need a content management system (CMS) that can bring together all the ways customers engage with your business—online, through mobile apps, through the contact center, or even in person—so you can foresee their wants and requirements and provide them with an easy way to receive what they desire.
You need multilingual and international content for globalization
Because of globalization, people can now buy anything from almost anywhere in the world, effectively shrinking the world to its size. However, marketing to worldwide audiences requires organizations to manage localized material in multiple languages.
Streamlining translator workflows and offering content in your client’s language and tone will be much easier with a powerful CMS.
Technology evolves and complicates
Automation, customization, AI, and machine learning are transforming marketing. Alongside this, more and more individuals are integrating technology into their daily lives through the use of voice assistants, wearables, and the IoT.
Technology is changing rapidly; therefore, you need a CMS that can adapt. This lets you capture, analyze, and learn from their practically limitless data.
Data is essential for consumer engagement
In today’s world, every marketer has access to massive amounts of data. Successful campaigns need understanding and exploiting data to improve digital content and marketing.
A CMS with excellent analytics can help you manage and understand your data. It will be easy to understand how your audience interacts with your content, what motivates them, their customer journey, and, most crucially, how to send the correct message at the appropriate moment.
E-commerce needs context-matched content
The days of impersonal online shopping and static websites are over. Great content has become integral to how organizations sell goods and services.
Your CMS must account for how users consume information at each stage of their customer journey to give the correct offers in the right context, up to and through the transaction.
In the digital future, content rules. Any effective CMS must support more ambitious digital experiences.
6 main CMS platform selection steps
As a marketer, you know your company needs a solid CMS. With so many providers, specialist offers, internal stakeholders, and a fast-changing digital world picking a CMS can be overwhelming. Decision-making should be deliberate and systematic.
- Ask for internal input.
Any new CMS is a substantial investment that affects numerous sections of your organization; thus, important stakeholders must be involved. Create a broad CMS selection committee and expect opposing views. Marketing wants to start content development, while IT wants to mitigate risk. Get as many top leaders as possible to support the idea. Explain why a new CMS is essential to the company’s future.
- Assess your existing and future company demands
Discuss your new CMS use as a group. Some useful queries:
- Is your goal to increase website traffic?
- With a new CMS, will your technological dependencies change?
- How many channels and languages do you want for your content?
- Will your company’s tech stack support the CMS?
- What features may you require later?
- Will CMS relevance last five years?
Your responses to these questions will help you create a list of requirements to compare options.
- Partner for implementation
A digital strategy agency or implementation partner should be hired if your organization lacks a significant development team. They’ll help you pick a CMS that meets your digital strategy. Many partners provide post-implementation support.
- Shortlist and research
Use your requirements list to seek options with your implementation partner. However, you should also talk to CMS users. Talking to a similar-sized and needs-based company about its CMS can help you understand how it works.
- Request Proposal
Understanding a CMS’s features and how it will operate for your firm might be difficult. This is where an RFP comes in. With an RFP, vendors may show they understand your goals and have the experience to deliver.
Write down your needs so the seller can explain why they’re suited for you and how they’ll help you achieve your goals. Gather a few linked needs into a use-case narrative to convey a difficulty you need to solve, then ask the vendor for their response.
- Evaluate vendor responses
Before choosing, evaluate your top providers’ technical, functional, and business CMS needs. Check each vendor’s support, training, and development community to make sure the solution is practical and versatile.
Ask suppliers on your shortlist for demos and challenging questions to illustrate each solution’s capabilities. Find out if the CMS is scalable and integrates with other tools. The solution should evolve with your company and stay relevant.
Some final counsel
This process takes time, so say it often. Avoid thinking in weeks and instead strategize over months. Take your time, and choose carefully. Choosing the correct CMS will be quite beneficial.