Achieve Digital Marketing Goals with a Successful CMS Deployment

Your customers and prospects expect a lot from your website. Is the content relevant? Is the presentation fresh? Is the experience personalized?

Very few companies could answer "yes" to all three of those questions. That's because online marketing has become more challenging than anyone would've imagined just 10 years ago. And while many companies understand the need to maximize their online presence, they're frequently overwhelmed by any attempt to do so.

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In order to hold users' attention in today's environment, your website should be able to:
• Deliver content in real time

• Engage customers and prospects in a smart, dynamic, relevant conversation

• Avoid dependence on any one platform or device

• Give marketers the tools necessary to understand users' online behavior

A high-quality web CMS should do just that. Why, then, do these systems fail?

The short answer is that when many companies choose a CMS solution, they often fail to plan correctly. An effective CMS plan becomes your practical framework for anticipating or even avoiding the most common challenges of deploying a successful web CMS to manage your company's online presence.

Of course, your success will only be as great as the strength of your plan. That's why we've written this white paper. Here you will find

IT-specific tips on how to create an effective CMS plan. We've organized those tips into five broad success factors to use when drafting your own roadmap, and it's all considered from an IT perspective.

Success Factor #1: Native Integration with Your Enterprise Ecosystem

We don't need to tell you that integration is your number-one consideration for any new project. You already know that the integration of enterprise systems is terribly complex—so complex that even a seasoned veteran

is often unable to foresee the full impact of placing a new element in an ecosystem.

Adding to the complexity: the fact that web content management systems play an increasingly central role in enterprise ecosystems. Over the past decade, online channels have taken the lead over more traditional channels like sales and distribution. Your CMS must therefore integrate with more parts of the business than ever before. And if the integration is unsuccessful in any way, your customers will often notice the problem before you do. Too often, existing systems and channels are siloed, prohibiting the dissemination and sharing of information that characterizes a healthy, functioning ecosystem.

In this section, we'll help you identify the key areas of focus for integrating your web CMS into your current environment.

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Keep your line-of-business in line. Let's say a man buys a spy novel at the brick-and-mortar location of a national bookseller. When he visits the bookseller's website later that night, his user experience should already be adjusted to reflect his latest purchase. Consumers increasingly expect that level of personalization. They will only come to expect it more with the passage of time. You must therefore ensure the deep integration of line-of-business applications—applications like customer databases, CRMs, and ERPs—with your web CMS.

• You don't have to build it all yourself. Some of the work has already been done for you. Look for a solution that includes pre-built integration with leading enterprise software. Your web CMS should also allow you to connect to databases and web services without resorting to complex programming. And if your company has already invested in Microsoft technologies, looking for a solution based on .NET can help you protect your investment and ease integration.

• Take a look at what you've got. Sometimes connecting a legacy system to a new application can create far more trouble than the legacy system could possibly justify. So don't be sentimental. Evaluate your existing systems and see if anything can be replaced. You might even want to consider a digital marketing implementation. That solution would easily connect you to e-commerce, analytics, CRM, and more— causing far less transitional pain both now and in the long run.

• Go simple and seamless. Two simple features can make any web CMS system much easier to navigate for your colleagues. With single sign-on, a user can gain access to the entire system without logging on multiple times. And with data reuse, you can give users the option to reuse their personal data across the system as well. Once implemented, these features will help users think of the web CMS as a unified entity— an entity that just happens to demonstrate your IT department's commitment to simplicity.

 

Success Factor #2: Web CMS Requirements Require Flexibility

Your company's online marketing efforts go far beyond the marketing department. Everyone—from business users to executives—ought to have a stake in making your company's online presence as effective as it can be.

That's why it's especially important for you to gather information from cross-functional stakeholders. Here are some examples of what you'll need to understand:

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Business objective: Do we need to support affiliates around the globe? Are we dealing with multiple languages? Do we need to implement e-commerce?

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Content strategy: What types of information need to be disseminated? How often? To whom? On what device, and with what level of interactivity?

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Usability requirements: It all comes down to audience. What type of person will visit your website? And how can you make the experience as intuitive as possible?

Keep in mind, of course, that it's nearly impossible to identify all requirements up front, especially for a project of this magnitude. Many unforeseen requirements will emerge during the implementation. Many more will surface when developers and business users begin using the web CMS.

In other words, unknowns are unavoidable. Flexibility is a constant demand. So in order for your project to be successful, you'll need to choose a web CMS solution that gives you maximum adjustability so that you can adapt to new and changing requirements. Look for a CMS that is "developer-friendly," with the ability to handle updates in a systematic manner using a package model. Also, make sure the CMS is highly customizable.

By insisting on that level of post-implementation agility, you're sure to land a bonus prize as well: you won't need to keep reinventing your CMS solution every year.

Success Factor #3: Make Design Easy

Everybody talks about the importance of making your web CMS easy for marketers and business users to navigate. And everyone seems pleased when marketers can change content on the fly without IT intervention.
But what about IT and developers? Yes, a tech-savvy software engineer can build just about anything. But how long will that process take?

Our recommended solution is to make your company's website a developer-friendly environment. Let developers work with the tools they're familiar with (such as Microsoft Visual Studio) and create new
applications and designs with relatively minimal coding.
A well-chosen web CMS will be built around best practices for development deployment, with easy-to-use APIs. It will support standard languages like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and application frameworks like ASP.NET and ASP .NET MVC.
The best part? Developers aren't the only ones who will be happy. Customers will be happy, too: a developer-friendly website makes it easier for your company to keep up with the pace of technology. That means more opportunities to address and satisfy customers' ever-changing needs.

 Success Factor #4: Don't Just Go Multilingual—Go Global Less than a

quarter of the world's web users are native English speakers.4 Eighty-five percent of e-consumers say that they won't make important purchases online if product details aren't available in their preferred language.5 The upshot? Your company is responsible for delivering a consistent message not only across various channels, mediums, and geographies, but across cultures and languages as well.
This goes far beyond supporting a multilingual site. A true digital platform speaks to customers and prospects in their native tongue, and also provides a user experience that reflects the tastes and sensibility of each locale.
Not so long ago, localization meant populating and managing global websites manually—one site at a time. But that kind of manual approach is inconsistent, will never scale, and is minimally responsive to changing needs.
An enterprise-quality web CMS offers a very different approach:

• Simplified, centralized management of multilingual and multicultural content
• Native-language workflow for content editors
• Consistent global messaging across all international sites
• Deployment options for consistent site uptime across the globe
• Efficient translation, either though authenticated access by translators or through integration with translation automation software such as Rosetta Gateway (from Clay Tablet) or Freeway (from Lionbridge Technology)

The global business landscape has transformed radically in just one generation. That transformation shows no signs of stopping, or even slowing down. You simply cannot afford to manage globalization through outmoded processes; the success of your web CMS depends on a more centralized, automated model.

Success Factor #5: The Long View (or, What's the Next iPad?)

Roughly half of Facebook users access the site from their mobile devices. Those users are twice as active as users who access Facebook entirely via PC. 6
That's just one illustration of the meteoric rise of mobile, and one more reason to believe industry experts' predictions that mobile web users will outnumber PC web users in the very near future.
In other words, mobile devices are here to stay, and then some. Your company needs to be there to greet them.
Some companies seem to think that creating a mobile-friendly website is the beginning and the end of making way for mobile. But if your company is only shrinking and re-displaying content for easier reading on iPhones, you might be missing an opportunity.
When someone accesses a website on their smartphone, they often have very different objectives than someone sitting in front of their home PC. The mobile user will sometimes be looking for services near their present location, or doing research before making a purchase. Companies must carefully consider customers' goals when accessing the website via mobile device—and adjust their content accordingly.
Possible adjustments include: • Delivering location-specific offers
• Building apps for more devices
• Simplifying the shopping process But it doesn't end there. Mobile is now a force to be reckoned with, but what about the next big thing? What trend in consumer technology will we be talking about in five years? And when that trend hits, will your web CMS be able to support it?
That's why it's critical for you to choose a flexible CMS that will adapt to technology as it changes. A key component of this flexibility is separating content from presentation. With a CMS that offers separation of content and presentation, you can always present the content in multiple formats, on multiple devices. Not only does this make content authoring easier regardless of output, it also allows for easier presentation redesign using existing content—meaning greater ability to change the look of a page without starting from scratch.
One thing is certain: the landscape will change. All you can do is prepare your infrastructure for maximum adaptation.

Summing it Up: Your Steps to CMS Project Success

It all comes back to planning.
You understand the importance of building a website suited to the needs of today's ultra-connected consumer. You know the functions that a web CMS would need to perform. And you're certainly aware that your competition is trying to capitalize on the same trends that you've observed. So how do you differentiate yourself?
Plan. It's a more unusual activity than you may think.
When you're planning, think back on the five success factors we've outlined here.
1. Integrate it.
2. Make it
flexible.
3. Make it
global.
4. Make it
mobile.
5. And finally, make it
developer-friendly.
With those goals in mind, you'll be in an excellent position to design a web CMS plan that addresses your immediate concerns while positioning you to make rapid changes as necessary.
To learn more about web content management and finding the right fit for your organization's needs, contact Sitecore.