Why It’s Not Enough to Just Manage Your Content Anymore

Over the years, content management systems have evolved in a number of different ways. Depending on your needs, you can find a CMS that works just about any way you can imagine–push versus pull architecture, open source versus proprietary, hosted versus installed, out of the box versus fully customizable, unlimited pricing models versus those based on pages or users or sites, and any variety of coding languages supported by a CMS. As long as you do the research to figure out what your organizational needs are, there is a Content Management System out there for you.

The problem now is that there’s a whole lot more to having an effective web presence than just being able to create and publish content. There’s social media, there’s search engine optimization, there are analytics, there are visitor journeys and customer personas, there’s paid search, and there’s email marketing. There are a heckuva lot of other things that you need to do with your content other than just getting it on the web.

That’s where content marketing software comes in. There are a ton of fragmented applications out there than can help you optimize your content, promote it and see how well it’s performing. The key is to find one platform that pulls everything into one place and works with your CMS.

Whether you work at a large or small organization, there is no reason to piece together content marketing solutions when there are a number of platforms that bring them all together under one roof. The benefits of this go well beyond not having to remember a dozen passwords. Having social media, email marketing, landing pages and forms, pageviews, campaigns and visitor identification all in one single platform means that all these things can work together, sharing information with each other.

For example, when someone fills out a form on your site, you can automatically enter them into a campaign to receive your monthly newsletter without having to import their email address into your email marketing application. Additionally, when a lead comes to your site via a tweet you sent out that was retweeted by a member of your community, you can trace the exact source of this traffic back to that original tweet because your social analytics, visitor identification and forms are all talking to each other.

When you have a blog post that is generating a ton of leads for you, the only way you’ll be able to tell is if your pageview data is linked to individual visitors and leads, as opposed to just viewing the data in aggregate, like in Google Analytics. And when a page is under-performing, one way to assess the reason is to use a tool that integrates your page analytics with SEO metrics and keyword densities. Having everything is one place is the only way to get a comprehensive understanding of how your marketing efforts are working.

One of the biggest reasons that companies invest in content management systems is to allow their less technical users to manage content. The CMS alone is a big investment, a much bigger investment if you also factor in the human resources costs of hiring and training content contributors. It only makes sense, then, to equip these contributors with complementary tools to help them promote this content, optimize it, measure it, and perfect it. The best way to have an effective content strategy is to be thoughtful about it and provide the necessary tools to support your authors and editors.

So, the next time you seek out a new content management system for your organization, be sure to consider your content marketing needs as well. Cascade Server (2013 Best Enterprise CMS Nominee) is the only content management system that comes with a full content marketing platform, which not only integrates with the CMS but also integrates with SalesForce, the leading CRM on the market.

For more information about how Cascade Server’s content management and content marketing solutions can help you go beyond just managing your content, get in touch with us, and one of our solutions consultants will be happy to discuss the full content lifecycle at your organization and how we can help.