The Future of the Content Management System
When the Content Management System (CMS) first arrived on the scene in the 1990s, it was groundbreaking, automating the previously manual task of building web pages and thus opening up web editing to non-coders. For years, CMSs served as the backbones of most web businesses.
That was then. Today, online shoppers determine the ground rules. Their engagement with each brand is dependent on whether or not they become returning customers, which is synonymous with revenue. Due to emerging digital trends and an increased focus on the customer experience, it is becoming more difficult for ecommerce sites to draw customers’ attention to websites– nevertheless get them to take the next step and actually click on a product. Although CMSs may have once increased engagement and conversion online, the creation and display of web pages has become commoditized and the requirements of the website owner have shifted.
The Rise of the Marketers
When companies first built their websites, the responsibility, logically, fell to the know-how of the IT department. The focus was on reliability, security and back-end integration with other systems, such as order management, ecommerce and fulfillment.
However, today, we’re seeing a power shift from IT to marketing. As competition grows, the business focus is less on having a reliable website and more on one that drives customer conversions. Back when web traffic was cheap and competition weak, it was enough to simply be there in order to close the sale. Now that traffic translates to revenue and shoppers can be selective about where they shop, every click counts. That is why marketers, rather than IT, are faced with creating a positive customer experience.
Thanks to IT, marketers have the understanding and insight through analytics and testing tools to deliver site changes that can tremendously impact sales. However, to date, they haven’t had the framework that will allow them to make these changes without relying on IT at every turn.
CMS Growing Pains
The shift of power from IT to marketing didn’t just occur overnight, it was driven by requirements and, most importantly, by the rise of a new series of technologies. A range of new personalization tools (known collectively as Digital Experience Management) bring all of these capabilities into a single platform. By combining insight with the ability to act, they can let marketers identify, create and test personalizations on their sites without IT support, letting them move quickly to capitalize on their understanding of the audience. The most prominent CMS growing pains included: analytics, testing and tag management.
The first of these was analytics in the early 2000s. Meaningful analytics weren’t a focus for IT departments focused on uptime and so the platforms of the era didn’t focus on this. However, as marketers gained more influence over websites they began to demand real insight into customer behavior and so the web analytics industry was born.
The second technology that brought marketers to the fore was testing. In the days of the IT-led site testing different site iterations was a painful process. It’s vital to understand the impact of site changes through testing but, if the process requires lengthy negotiations with IT about fixed development cycles, then testing will inevitably suffer. To overcome this, marketers demanded standalone testing solutions and these have now become a reality, taking more power into marketer’s hands.
One of the latest technologies that puts web power in marketer’s hands has been tag management. Previously, the implementation of new site technologies such as analytics, remarketing or web applications would require recourse to the IT department and their lengthy development queues. In today’s cut-throat web market agility is the key and so this process needed to change. Tag management enabled this speed of movement by giving marketers the power to ad, edit or delete third party technologies on their site without the need to bother IT and without the risk of compromising stability.
The Bottom Line
For years, content management system vendors have been pushing the importance of the customer experience – but now the demand is greater than ever. Companies are using big data to help ecommerce sites deliver more relevant information and better appeal to today’s online shoppers; the lexicon to understanding now rests with web marketers. By giving them the insight to understand their customers, and the know-how to alter the digital shopping experience accordingly, web marketers have prime position in the battle for online ownership – and a greater opportunity to enhance the customer experience.