Content plays a pivotal role in attracting new customers, retaining existing customers and influencing in-the-moment purchase decisions. Unfortunately, the CMS that you used to build your website 10 years ago is no longer suited to meet the needs of omnichannel customers. Now, customers expect constantly updated and relevant content across a variety of channels (website, mobile app, chat bots, social, partner sites, etc).
Furthermore, many legacy CMSes don’t adapt well to multiple channels, meaning that each separate channel requires a separate CMS. This results in duplicated efforts, endless copy and pasting, inconsistent messaging and slow lead times. Workarounds are difficult for the siloed content approach, as CMSes managing different channels don’t integrate with one another or share information.
The solution is flexible content infrastructure that organizes content into a single hub where content can easily be adapted and published to different channels from one place.
Think big, start small
Unifying content gives organizations a significant competitive advantage. Content is deployed on all relevant channels as soon as it’s created, keeping up with the speed of the business. Resources can then be reallocated to create new products and content-driven experiences, rather than being bogged down in the minutiae of managing and operating different CMSes.
So, what’s stopping many digital leaders and their teams from modernizing their content management system? Many believe that it is an all or nothing commitment, requiring the right time or the right project to get going. This simply isn’t the case.
Since content infrastructure is an a API-first, cloud-based platform, it easily integrates with the in-house tools developers love. It eliminates the need to spin up a separate CMS for every front end. With one unified content hub that is platform agnostic, digital teams are empowered to work in parallel with one another. They can move forward with ongoing projects while taking the first step towards modernizing their business on the backend.
Comparing content goals by system
Unlike a traditional monolithic CMS, which is a one-size-fits-all solution, content
infrastructure models content in building blocks that digital teams can customize to meet their unique needs. Businesses are able to strategize and accomplish content goals in phases while sticking to budgets and operational deadlines. And every accomplished goal can be immediately deployed to support the business.
Here are four examples of common content related organizational goals and how a legacy CMS compares to content infrastructure.
Goal: Deliver omnichannel ecommerce
Siloed CMS challenges:
- Inconsistent experiences: Multiple CMSes make it difficult to provide a consistent omnichannel ecommerce experience because content is siloed. Often, each CMS must be separately integrated with products, personalization tools, etc.
- Manual processes lead to mistakes: A legacy CMS approach is often exhausting to maintain, since content needs to be copied, pasted and edited to multiple CMSes. This resource-intensive process inevitably results in mistakes and redundancies across channels.
- Stifles innovation: Each CMS is managed by a separate team and resources are focused on the publishing process rather than creativity and innovation.
Unified content infrastructure solution:
- Integrated, organized content: Managing content from a single, API-based CMS empowers teams to integrate content with product management, personalization tools, etc.
- Unified content combined with omnichannel delivery makes it easy to maintain a large product inventory: Content is easily and automatically formatted for each channel, ensuring that messaging and information is consistent on every device.
- Engineers and publishers rejoice: Resources can be focused on other things like ensuring new products and information are displayed on the appropriate properties to meet customer demand and deploying new digital products.
See how Bang and Olufsen increased their ecommerce conversion rate by 60% with content infrastructure.
Goal: Use knowledge base content to power self-service portals, learning hubs, customer care sites and more
Siloed CMS challenges:
- Creating a unified service portal is difficult: Content is siloed in product documents, FAQs, call scripts and training materials, making it difficult to pull together and deliver consistent customer service.
- Updates are cumbersome: When knowledge base content is not organized in one place, team members have to manually make updates as new information becomes available. Individual resources can easily be overlooked and become out of date.
- Siloed support channels result in misinformation and customer frustration: Customers do not receive the same experience or information on different channels, resulting in frustrations.
Unified content infrastructure solution:
- Knowledge content is unified into one hub and made available for use in any digital format: Whether it be a chatbot, FAQ portal, or resource center, all knowledge content is managed from one central location. What’s more, new support portals can be quickly launched without worrying about reformatting content for every new platform or use case.
- Updates are fast and deployed across channels at one time: Service teams can reap the benefits of a unified content hub without the delays caused by cutting, pasting and cleaning up content from their existing knowledge bases. When one topic is updated in content infrastructure, that update is made automatically everywhere it’s displayed.
- All information is sourced from the same place, ensuring its accuracy: When information is sourced from the same place, it’s accurate and consistent across every support channel. Unifying content in a structured way makes it easier to provide support for different audiences like customers and partners, people at different points in the customer lifecycle, or audiences in different locales that require translation and localized content variations.
Read the TELUS Digital case study to learn more about deploying a unified knowledge base content strategy.
Goal: Launch or expand a global marketing and localization strategy
Siloed CMS challenges:
- Every new digital property is owned and operated by a different team: Using multiple CMSes to manage local sites under a global brand results in inconsistent branding, synchronization issues when making updates and challenges in governing content and levels of access to edit and change different elements.
- Content has to be manually recreated and reformatted for each new global property: Resources are quickly exhausted when content has to be recreated and manually translated for every new overseas property. It’s a cost-draining operation.
Unified content infrastructure solution:
- All international digital properties can be managed in unison: Empowers international digital teams to work efficiently in parallel from one unified system. Local editors have access to just those elements that need to be translated or edited for a more local look and feel while other backend components are managed by company developers. Global elements remain brand consistent as a result.
- Exponentially faster and tremendously more cost-effective: Integrates with translation tools and supports multiple locales. Teams can spin up new local sites faster even with demanding requirements like correct currency and country-specific compliance copy.
Learn more about launching a global content strategy using content infrastructure in this Xoom (a PayPal company) case study.
Goal: Develop a new digital product like a mobile app
Siloed CMS challenges:
- Websites and app development are treated like projects, each created on its’ own separate CMS: Once a project is completed, resources are allocated elsewhere and it can quickly grow stale.
- Content is developed and deployed sequentially, creating bottlenecks: Developers and editors cannot work in unison, slowing down the development of the new property.
- Content and display are tied together for each channel: When display is coded into content, it must be updated for each new digital product.
Unified content infrastructure solution:
- Digital products are developed and launched at the speed of business: Products and content are continuously updated and improved from one central command hub that lives in the cloud.
- Content for the new property is written and developed at the same time: The display and contents of each piece of content are developed separately, enabling them both to be worked on at the same time.
- Individual components of content are organized as chunks and then deployed as needed on new digital channels. They do not have to be recreated for new channels, speeding up the entire development process.
Read about how ASICS used content infrastructure to launch a companion app for marathon runners.