Building for the Future on Your Next WCM
Your next choice of web content management (WCM) is a decision that will need input from the entire C-Suite to ensure that the next WCM has the capabilities required to deliver the company's strategy for growth. Whether the primary goal is to build out marketing capabilities to engage and convert new customers, for example, financial, travel, and legal websites, or build a platform for eCommerce, giving customers the option to locate and customize products specific to their needs, the choice of web content management (WCM) is a decision that will shape an enterprise's future for years to come.
Because functional requirements for the WCM will need to be defined by a customer-driven, enterprise-wide vision for delivering information, products, and services, the decision for WCM will require a deeper dive into capabilities design, necessary technologies, and integration of various data sources. Looking to the future, the lessons of the past are clear. Customer requirements are always evolving, and static enterprise-wide deployments are costly ventures that begin to lose value the moment they go live. Today the marketing, information, and eCommerce architecture need the flexibility to evolve as broader sets of data drive personalization, analytics, and customization.
Even as the WCM capabilities continuously expand, it still makes sense to define the critical contributors to your future business. Let's run down a list of capabilities that will help better determine your requirements.
Delivering and Measuring Customer Experiences
With the potential for millions of interactions across all channels, understanding, guiding, and measuring customer interactions is a complicated task. WCM vendors provide the functionality to manage and store the data about customers and their interactions. Defining the minimum viable capabilities needed as a start, then understanding the potential opportunities for additional capabilities, will ensure that your WCM will deliver what you need.
Multiple Sites and Languages
Is your enterprise serving markets across the globe, each with a different language and eCommerce requirements? The logic for individual sites can quickly run up against the logistics and economics of making that possible. Enterprise WCM provides the flexibility to deliver websites for multiple locations and languages within a single infrastructure.
Integrations
Determine if a robust integration layer will be a crucial component of WCM. Will the customer experience be driven by the ability to combine data into useful information and create opportunities to do more business? Much of the time, this means connections to internal CRM, marketing automation, and ERM, but increasingly 3rd party data is also playing a role.
Apps, IoT, and Websites
How will your enterprise interact across the rapidly growing list of devices and services? For instance, checking your bank balance on your watch. Multi-channel delivery is driving many organizations to look for the ability to quickly deliver content and experiences across all channels a potential customer could want.
Using strategic goals to drive the acquisition of your next WCM will ensure that you fully realize the opportunities afforded by targeted requirements without over-investing in non-critical capabilities.
How can M6 help? Email us at hello@m6marketing.io to see how you can build for the future on your next WCM.