Content management system or CMS has gained importance over the years as digital marketing has become central to almost all the aspects of successful business strategies. Good enterprise CMSs are now more efficient and useful, and therefore, people have started to expect more from them.
One of the reasons why choosing the right enterprise CMS is so important for businesses today is its multipurpose nature. It is vital for ERP, CRM, marketing and many other areas where it helps analyze data and consequently optimize plans.
In this article, we will explore 5 key benefits of CMS for business. Then, we will run you through 11 must-have CMS features for enterprise success.
5 Benefits of CMS for Enterprises
1. Digital Asset Management
This is the core purpose of an enterprise CMS. It can help you manage your digital assets. Be it textual or visual, a CMS platform will help you manage data efficiently. It should help you with every stage – from editing to publishing.
You should be able to resize, edit and preview data. Also, you can publish on different platforms like websites or social media. A good web content management system lets you customize the digital experience for your website and your clients.
Content really has been a game changer in the digital marketing world as the competition gets stiffer. Quality content marketing is the ultimate weapon for marketers and requires proper management. An enterprise CMS should allow you to maintain the quality of your content and keep everything under your thumb.
2. Everything in One Place
There was a time when organizations had separate marketing teams for each channel. It seemed to be the most efficient way, especially where there were a variety of products to market and the audience was global. However, times have changed, and this approach is a bit stale now. It’s also redundant and expensive because separate teams were sending out the same content, which only made the whole thing dull.
On the other hand, they were following different themes that were incoherent and inconsistent with the image of the brand. And, of course, separate teams meant more resources and more maintenance expenses.
The best CMS for small business websites as well as for extensive projects will automate the publishing of your content and bring all the channels to one place. This makes it easier to manage the flow of content to websites, internal networks, social media and any other emerging channels, for that matter. The process becomes smoother, cheaper and faster, and the brand image remains consistent.
3. User Experience
A good enterprise CMS should not only allow you to publish your content, but also give you control over how to improve user experience. The best enterprise CMS will feature testing tools like the ever effective A/B testing or the useful customer engagement analyzer.
It should help you set goals and eventually achieve them, and track your progress all the way. The system should track the customer’s journey, analyze the content and its outreach among the customers, and then produce feedback.
The CMS has intuitive algorithms integrated within it, giving it the ability to produce feedback in real time and help improve the quality and relevance of the content while enhancing the whole experience.
4. Integration
A CMS enables you to update your website quickly and easily, without the need to know how to code. Therefore, your web pages are dynamic, meaning they can easily be updated with fresh content as needed. This is in contrast to a static website, where the content is coded into the web pages and can only be changed by someone with coding skills.
Also, a good enterprise CMS allows you to repurpose your content, so it can be used in multiple ways across your website or other channels. For example, you could take an article you’ve written for your blog and turn it into a video, an infographic, or a podcast. This way, it is easy for authorized users to maintain your website, so you can focus on creating great content.
5. Personalization
With CMS, you can control multiple brands or products. The key is to effectively deliver results to each client with personalized content. The content management platform should ideally make the customization process easy and also allow reusability.
It is important to keep in mind the channel where you are going to publish the content, as it may require some tweaking or customizing the design.
Personalization of content is important as it can help increase the engagement of the customer. As said before, CMS should not just be managing your digital assets, it should also help with improving it and getting you the results you want.
11 Must-have Enterprise CMS Features
An enterprise content management system (ECM) is a platform that helps organizations manage their unstructured data more effectively. It enables businesses to store, index, and retrieve information quickly and easily, while also providing workflow capabilities and security controls.
There are a number of different enterprise CMS platforms on the market, each with its own set of features and capabilities. When choosing a platform for your organization, it’s important to consider your specific needs and requirements.
To help you in your decision-making process, we’ve put together a list of 11 must-have enterprise CMS features:
1. Ease of use
The CRM of your choice should be easy to use, with a user-friendly interface that requires little to no training. A good admin dashboard makes all the difference for a good marketing platform. It needs to be easy to use and allow for a streamlined content production process. That includes being able to monitor and keep track of scheduled content, assets, site activity, and administrator activity.
Additionally, it’s important that your enterprise CRM is able to add functionality through modules and plugins as well as manage notifications for tasks. For those administering multiple sites and platforms, it’s essential to do so from within a single piece of software. This reduces complexity and makes it easier to handle the content workflow. Overall, a good admin dashboard is essential for a content management system that is truly effective.
2. Flexibility
The platform should be flexible enough to accommodate your organization’s changing needs. Your CMS is a long-term investment. Make sure your CMS is scalable enough to grow with your business. Some CMSs offer more flexibility than others, supporting an extensible range of APIs so you can do more with your content across different channels and devices.
Generally, you can either run your CMS from your own servers or on the cloud. A cloud-hosted CMS can speed up your time to market and also give you the agility you wouldn’t otherwise have to handle traffic spikes and changing demand. However, it’s important to make sure that your cloud provider offers the security and compliance that you need for your industry. If you’re handling sensitive data, then you may want to keep your data on-premises so you have full control over who has access to it.
No matter where you host your CMS, make sure it’s able to scale so you can continue to provide a great experience for your users as your business grows.
3. Scalability
It should be able to scale up or down as your organization grows or changes and ensure your multichannel brand presence is on point. Delivering content to many different channels, devices, and interfaces can be a lot of work — unless you have a headless enterprise CMS that helps you do that efficiently. A headless CMS separates content from its presentation. Content is created once, then rendered on any device or channel.
Certain CMSs let you create your content once and deliver it anywhere. Others make it easy to add new channels and simply load your existing content onto them. If your organization is looking to reach customers across many digital channels, prioritizing multichannel scalability features is a smart move.
By using a good CMS, you can efficiently manage your content and ensure that it is consistent across all channels. This will save you time and resources in the long run, and allow you to focus on other aspects of your business.
4. Security
A good enterprise CRM should provide robust security controls to protect your data. In today’s digital age, data security is more important than ever. A security breach can not only jeopardize the safety of your data but also erode customer trust in your products and services.
That’s why it’s critical to choose an enterprise CMS that integrates well with strong authentication mechanisms. This will help to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information and keep your data safe. By taking these steps, you can protect your customers’ trust and ensure that your business continues to thrive.
5. Workflow
The platform should include workflow capabilities to help you manage and automate your business processes. Creating content is a team effort, and it’s important to have a CMS that can accommodate different roles and responsibilities.
From authoring to editing to publication, your CMS should be able to track the progress of your content from start to finish. With CMS features like intelligent reporting tools and dashboards, you’ll be able to keep tabs on different categories of content, like content that’s awaiting approval and content per topic.
If you often make urgent updates to your content, look for a CMS with strong organizational functionality, like link management, so that your content is automatically accessible even as it moves around or changes on your site.
With the right CMS in place, you’ll be able to manage your content more efficiently and effectively, ensuring that your team can work together smoothly and stay on track with deadlines.
6. Content management
It should offer powerful content management features, such as versioning and check-in/check-out. A powerful content editor is essential for any website that relies on high-quality copy to drive traffic and engagement.
A good content editor should allow you to easily create and publish different types of content, from blog posts to landing pages. It should also enable you to add images, videos, CTAs, forms, and other elements to your pages, and rearrange them within the publishing interface.
Additionally, it should provide a way to preview the page before publishing it. Many CMS platforms offer a WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) editor that allows users to make changes to a page without writing HTML code and to see those changes as they’re made. This type of editor is an ideal solution for website owners who want to be able to easily create and publish high-quality content without having to learn HTML or other coding languages.
7. Search
The CRM should include robust search capabilities, so you can easily find the information you need. Search engine optimization is vital for anyone who wants their website to be visible in search engine results pages. While the algorithms that Google and other search engines use to rank websites are constantly changing, there are some basic on-page SEO techniques that will always be important.
A good enterprise CRM will make it easy to do things like add page titles, descriptions, and alt tags, as well as structured data and microdata. This will help your website stand out in the search results and attract more clicks.
In addition, a good CMS will help you avoid duplicate content, which can penalize your website in search results. By using a CMS that supports SEO best practices, you can help ensure that your website has a fighting chance of ranking well in the search engines.
8. Reporting
The platform should provide comprehensive reporting capabilities, so you can track and measure your content management performance. If you’re serious about your content strategy, then you need to be tracking the right key performance indicators. Insights like where your target personas are based, what device they’re using, how they’re interacting with content on different devices, and which pieces of content are most popular are crucial to refining your content strategy.
Ideally, your enterprise CMS will have built-in analytics for measuring these performance indicators right in your dashboard. If it doesn’t, then it should offer integration with Google Analytics or another popular analytics tool. Without this data, you’re flying blind and it’s only a matter of time before your content strategy starts to underperform. So make sure you’re tracking the right KPIs and making data-driven decisions – it’s the only way to ensure long-term success.
9. Integration
Make sure your CRM is easy to integrate with your existing systems and applications. No single CMS will handle everything your business website needs in-house. Instead, the platform of your choice should rely on its integration capabilities to bring third-party software into your workflow. This way, your CMS data can flow freely between applications to help you distribute and analyze your site’s content.
Here are some integrations you’ll want to check for when CMS shopping:
- Social media: To drive referral traffic to your site, a CMS should have integrated social capabilities. Does it let you publish posts on social media? Can you add social media sharing buttons to your posts? Are social media analytics included in your dashboard?
- Marketing automation: Some content management systems might have some built-in marketing automation features, but you might prefer to integrate with a third-party tool. Look for tight integrations that will let you trigger workflows and automate repetitive tasks.
- Content personalization: If you want to show different content to different users, make sure your CMS has an integration with a tool to create custom content experiences.
- Analytics: Your CMS should play nice with Google Analytics or whichever analytics platform you use so that you can get insights
10. Support
The CRM should offer quality support and maintenance services. When it comes to IT support, there are really two options: in-house website maintenance professionals or a robust support system. For most organizations, the latter is going to be the better choice. unless you happen to have exemplary in-house IT professionals with spare time.
Most open-source software doesn’t offer any support, but popular systems like WordPress or Drupal have engaged community users who run large-scale wikis and forums. So if you’ve got some extra time on your hands and don’t mind waiting for responses, then you can usually ask or find the answers. And some proprietary software has live help, but those are a little bit of a dying breed. In short, if you want reliable IT support, it’s best to invest in a robust support system.
11. Cost
The platform should be cost-effective and offer a good return on investment. Website maintenance can be a major expense if you have a static website. Calling a web designer or developer to make frequent changes can add up. Not only is cost a factor, but you will most likely have to wait a few days to see the updates live on your site.
Investing in an enterprise CMS can save you both time and money. With a content management system in place, you no longer have to rely on a web developer to make common site changes. You can instantly make these changes yourself exactly when you need them done. Most content management systems are very user-friendly and easy to learn, so you won’t need any special technical skills to get started.
In addition, many content management systems offer additional features such as blogging and eCommerce capabilities, so you can easily expand your website as your business grows. So if you’re looking for ways to streamline your website maintenance process, investing in a content management system is definitely worth considering.
These are just some key features you should look for when choosing an enterprise CMS platform. Be sure to evaluate your specific needs and requirements to ensure that the platform you choose is the best fit for your organization.
Conclusion
A few years back, CMS would not have been as important to a marketer as it is today. A CMS that allows smooth management, intuitive analysis and reliable results can do wonders for any business and its online marketing. With the right technology, any business can rocket into the realms of success – a multipurpose CMS is one such platform.
It should allow you to manage the publication of content on different channels and customize content. Additionally, it should be integration friendly so that other resources like your digital assets can be synced with the content management system. The importance of quality cannot be stressed enough and quality is the direct product of effective management.