• by John Fairley , September 14, 2012

Content is a competitive resource in the digital marketplace, and companies that nurture the ability to rapidly upload and manage brand content have a distinct advantage over organizations that are held captive by lengthy and cumbersome content publishing cycles. 

The creation of optimized content management environments requires effort, starting with the way the company selects its CMS technology. In fact, the CMS selection process is a root cause of the inefficiency that plagues many organizations.

The CMS selection challenge

Ideally, content management should be a function of marketing.

Previous generations of CMS solutions required IT to act as a content intermediary, and although marketing was responsible for creating product information, company news and other forms of content, team members required the assistance of a webmaster to publish and update the content online. However, advances in technology have created a Web environment in which rapid and real-time content distribution is the norm, and marketers are now in the driver’s seat of Webvsite management routines.

Marketing’s ability to directly manage content via user-friendly CMS technology should represent a competitive win for the organization. Yet many businesses continue to rely on CMS technology that is difficult for marketers to use, severely handicapping the company’s ability to leverage content as a highly responsive competitive resource.

The result is a CMS solution that integrates nicely with the corporate intranet and technology architecture, but fails to deliver ease-of-use and other benefits to marketing.

Robust CMS technologies enable marketers to track landing page analytics, monitor email open rates, measure main site and microsite conversions, analyze on-site behaviors and perform countless other digital marketing activities. A good CMS can even produce sortable prospect lists for sales teams based on individuals who have visited the site without taking any additional actions.

To truly leverage content as a competitive resource, companies need to deliberately expand the role of marketing in CMS selection, and prioritize CMS features that allow non-IT stakeholders to easily and directly manage brand content.

Marketing and CMS selection

The expansion of marketing’s role in the CMS selection process doesn’t happen organically -- marketing teams need to aggressively advocate for their interests in the CMS decision-making process. In fact, it is counterproductive to exclude any department or stakeholder that will have a hand in managing Web site content from the CMS selection process.

By proactively considering the concerns of an organization’s various CMS stakeholders, including marketers, a company can ultimately employ a CMS solution that is flexible, robust and tailored to the organization's unique content management requirements.

 While this process can be difficult, there are best practices for achieving it efficiently.

• Define usage scenarios. CMS selection should begin with each organizational function defining how they will use the CMS and which features are most important to the effectiveness of their job. Once defined, these usage scenarios will guide the CMS selection process, clearly articulating and prioritizing desired CMS functions across teams.

• Clarify the selection process. Marketing has a vested interest in making sure the CMS selection process is clearly identified and communicated across the organization. It’s important to make sure that marketing has a major role in final decision-making, while taking into account the needs of other potential users.

• Consider external CMS partners. Externally hosted CMS solutions like WordPress can sometimes suffice, depending on the project at hand. The advantage for marketing is that these solutions are more nimble and more affordable than internally hosted CMS platforms -- and they can be selected with minimal interference from IT.

At the end of the day, marketing and IT are working toward the same goal: a content management environment that enables the company to leverage timely content as a competitive advantage.