Authored by: Elizabeth Sheehan, Sales Enablement Analyst
In a world where digital transformation is no longer a buzzword but a necessity, organizations must embrace adaptability to stay ahead. WayPath and Brightspot CMS are diving into the essence of content management systems (CMS), dissecting the challenges of the digital landscape, harnessing the power of adaptability, and crafting strategies for future-proofing your digital endeavors. Jeff Hansen, Lead CMS Architect at WayPath, and Johnathan Rojas, Principal Product Manager at Brightspot, teamed up for a recent webinar, illuminating the evolving realm of CMS and its crucial role in shaping digital strategies. Here are some key takeaways from the webinar and insights on choosing the right CMS for your organization.
Choosing the Right CMS
The digital landscape is fraught with challenges, from technological advancements to shifting consumer behaviors and market disruptions. Content teams face hurdles in content distribution and amplification — even with high-quality content, teams face the challenge of effectively distributing and amplifying it to reach the target audience. This includes leveraging various channels such as social media, email marketing, and content syndication to ensure that the content reaches and resonates with the intended audience.
The contemporary CMS landscape reflects the movement towards highly complex, personalized omnichannel experiences. Content creation teams need to focus on personalization by segmenting their audience, creating targeted content based on buyer personas, and utilizing marketing automation tools to deliver customized content experiences at scale. Jeff Hansen observes, “People often think that the right tool is going to solve this problem for them, but we have found that the most difficult aspect of personalization is the lack of resources. Most organizations have plenty of data; they struggle to make sense of it.”
Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of content marketing efforts can be complex. It’s essential to define clear KPIs aligned with business objectives, track them using analytics tools, and attribute specific outcomes to the content efforts. This may involve tracking metrics such as lead quality, customer acquisition cost, and customer lifetime value. Brightspot’s tools help your business measure things right and determine the right things to measure.
With the right tools from Brightspot and strategies from WayPath’s experts, these challenges can be transformed into opportunities for growth and innovation.
The Power of Adaptability
Adaptability emerges as the cornerstone of success in the digital age. By embracing hybrid CMS and digital experience platforms (DXPs), organizations can unlock unparalleled flexibility and agility. Today, 55% of organizations deploy either a hybrid CMS or digital experience platform.
Although decoupled and headless CMS platforms have garnered high praise in the industry for their fast and fluid content delivery, these two approaches to CMS architecture come with their own sets of pros and cons. This has paved the way for a hybrid CMS, allowing for the combination of multiple content or e-commerce systems—enabling organizations to get the best of both solutions and achieve the greatest flexibility for content management and distribution. With a hybrid CMS architecture, organizations and publishers can mix presentation or front-end choices. The hybrid approach offers an environment that allows users to deliver different experiences to a browser window or a device, where both decoupled and headless CMS architectures can be combined. This allows businesses to deliver personalized experiences at scale while staying ahead of the curve.
Brightspot is built different. With access to OpenAI as an integration in the Brightspot platform, content creators can quickly personalize their content for specific audiences and boost efficiency by taking advantage of AI-assisted suggestions for headlines, subheads and full body text. One of the biggest advantages of a hybrid-headless CMS architecture is its ability to reuse content in multiple places. It gives you, the publisher, the ability to mix presentation or front-end choices. You can deliver a different user experience based on the consumer’s device or browser, which means they have the same experience no matter where or how they’re consuming the information.
Asking the right questions of your tech is critical in assessing your needs:
- Can my CMS execute on personalized content types?
- Will my tech deliver content through advanced APIs?
- Do we have adaptable content modules?
- What are my workflow tools like? Are they intuitive?
- How collaborative are my platform tools?
- What type of CMS does my organization need? Hybrid, headless or multiple?
Hansen understands the importance of finding the right platform to execute personalization strategies; there is no one-size-fits-all platform. “This is one of the primary reasons that we take a composable approach between the CMS and the marketing automation and personalization. The tools that often ship with a CMS don’t necessarily meet the organization’s needs. Brightspot’s strategy of focusing on content, and integrating with the best-of-breed platforms, really helps an organization find the best tools for them.”
Strategies for Future-proofing
In a rapidly evolving landscape, future-proofing your digital strategy is paramount. From leveraging AI for content creation to anticipating trends in digital content, the CMS consulting team at WayPath will outline actionable strategies for your organization to stay ahead of the curve. AI will be at the forefront of content marketing for 2024, with generative AI becoming ubiquitous. However, challenges in determining its best use and managing the influx of machine-written content are expected. AI offers immense potential as a starting point or creating a framework, but Hansen cautions users that AI “can help to fill a gap but not close a gap.” It’s crucial to understand its limitations in providing unique, memorable experiences and complement it with human creativity and insight.
Enhanced security and data privacy allows Brightspot users to sign in one time and gain access to multiple applications or sites that would typically require additional sign-on procedures. Brightspot comes off-the-shelf with over 70 pre-built integrations to popular software solutions from third-party providers, such as Apple News, Google Analytics, Hubspot, YouTube, Google Translate and Shutterstock.
CMS Consulting: Crafting Success Together
Collaborative excellence is crucial for mastering adaptability. Whether it’s through AI integration or collaborative delivery models, the synergy between expertise and technology is essential. It’s not just about navigating the digital terrain— it’s about thriving in it.
By embracing the evolving landscape of content management systems, organizations can chart a course towards long-term success in the digital realm. With the right blend of technology, expertise, and innovation, the possibilities are limitless. Are you ready to embark on this transformative journey? Contact WayPath today.
