3 Key CMS Features to Make Your Content Strategy Easier

Content marketing has steadily been on the rise since brands realized that informative and entertaining content made a great first (or twentieth) impression.

Studies concluded that content marketing actually produces three times the amount of leads per dollar than paid search with the added bonus of engaging more prospects and building a solid identity.

The Problem: There's Too Much Content

The switch from traditional marketing to an inbound approach has, however, meant that there's a lot more content out there.

A lot more content to manage, review and publish. Not to mention the processes and the people that go into producing a stellar piece of content.

A CMS is Designed to Simplify Content Marketing

Which brings us swiftly to the topic of a CMS, or a Content Management System, whose popularity simultaneously continues to grow.

And according to The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management Systems, Q4 2018 report, "The web CMS market is growing because more digital professionals see web CMS as a way to address their top challenges."¹

A CMS is designed to tackle a whole range of challenges digital professionals face, including simplifying and consolidating the great volumes of content which they are responsible for.

In this article, we'll take a look at the top 3 features available in a CMS that make the lives of content marketers and editors a little bit easier and definitely more effective, including:

• WYSIWYG Editing

• Multi-Channel Management

• Audience Targeting

WYSIWYG Editing

WYSIWYG. I promise you this term is not actually made up but, as with many industry terms, it's acronym city.

WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get and basically means you can edit content and see a preview of how it will look when published. It allows you to make copy, format and image changes without having to beg a developer for help.

Sounds like a pretty standard feature? Maybe you've pressed Preview a few times on your WordPress blog, been happy with the result, and - bam -  moved straight onto Publish.

But content marketing is no longer just confined to a standard, static web page. WYSIWYG editing comes in very handy when you want to preview a SPA (sorry, Single Page Application), or even for channels in the Internet of Things (IoT) realm and mobile.

A modern CMS will also allow you to preview your page from the perspective of different visitor segments and personas, so you can ensure your personalization efforts look sharp before you go live.

Multi-Channel Management

This increase in channels and touchpoints has led to a complicated web of content outlets.

You've got your main site, maybe a few microsites for events and campaigns, an app or two, your experimentation with voice technology and your Point of Sale kiosks hooked up?

Whatever the combination of digital channels it takes to power your business, it would be a lot easier if they could live in one place.

Managing and paying for different systems to store different types of content makes a marketer's job harder than it needs to be.

A CMS lets you view, edit and publish (depending on your admin rights) to all your digital channels without having to access various systems and accounts for each touchpoint.

Sound too good to be true? In our whitepaper A Marketer's Guide to CMS, we explain how this works and also how you can even reuse the same piece or group of content across multiple channels with no copy-paste required.

Audience Targeting

The mass of content marketing hasn't only been noticed by marketing professionals, but also by the consumers themselves. It's contributed to people becoming overwhelmed by content and looking into the possibilities of digital detoxes.

Brands are breaking through the noise by ensuring the content they produce is of higher quality.

This push for quality also translates into a heightened level of relevance for the type of person you're trying to sell to and - ta da - we've arrived at audience targeting.

Many CMSs offer out-of-the-box personalization capabilities to help you target to your visitors and make the content you're producing more relevant to them.

It's a simple way to ensure the person reading your content is actually interested in it and comes away with a positive feeling towards your brand.

Audience targeting is generally split between rules-based and machine learning targeting.

Different CMSs offer varying levels of native testing, and modern systems can also integrate with your other business solutions, like you marketing automation platform, and use the data to further drive personalization.

But There's More

WYSIWYG editing, multi-channel management and audience targeting are just a few, handpicked CMS features that make the lives of marketers easier.

If you're raring to learn more about CMS capabilities and filled with wonder at its possibilities, read more in our whitepaper, A Marketer's Guide to CMS.  

You'll see how features like Multi-Language Support, Editorial Workflows, Digital Asset Management, and more can help your content marketing efforts jump forward.

¹ Mark Grannan, Allen Bonde, Madeline King, Forrester Research. The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management Systems, Q4 2018. 15 November 2018.