The content management systems opportunity – new strategic marketing capabilities

Citation

Grossberg, K.A. (2013), "The content management systems opportunity – new strategic marketing capabilities", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 41 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2013.26141caa.002

The content management systems opportunity – new strategic marketing capabilities

Article Type: Conference report From: Strategy & Leadership, Volume 41, Issue 3

Content management systems (CMS) are the tools used to manage the company presence on the World Wide Web, mobile devices and social networking sites and multiple multilingual home pages offered by an ever greater number of global competitors. Because CMS determine how customers perceive a company and interact with it, it is understandable that their proper care and maintenance have become a subject of increasing concern to strategists and operating officers of every kind of organization. The recent Gilbane Conference in Boston in November was designed to help participants learn “how to engage customers and enhance collaboration with both customers and colleagues more successfully with content, social technologies and digital marketing practices.” A handout distributed by Digital Clarity Group identified the opportunity: “Content remains the key to multi-device customer experience and web content management (WCM) solutions are at the heart of the supporting software ecosystem. Organizations must build very solid and scalable content platforms that are still flexible enough to respond to rapid changes in engagement strategies, device requirements, and market opportunities.”[1]

In keeping with that focus, one of conference’s main themes was: now that we have access to so much data about our publics and consumers, how can we put that data to work most effectively and efficiently in the way we communicate with those target audiences? The answer requires an assessment of social media in order to fine tune the way we market our products and services, and that involves looking first of all at the content of our communications – messaging, frequency, quality, redundancy, voice and tone – then the channel components we use to communicate, and lastly the degree of our engagement.[2] Marketing consultant Robert Rose emphasized that in creating content that matters to our audience we need to tell a different story not just the same story in a different way. Plot tells us what happens, but a story tells us why we should care what happens.[3] This forces marketers to push the envelope on content and its transmission to the target customer. This is easier said than done.

As is the case with many things involving business strategy, there is often a large gap between the vision of the marketing team’s scenario and the actual execution possible by the webmaster and the communication professionals. And technology alone does not close the vision/execution gap. That is why marketing operations are so essential to the whole process, centering on what Seth Gottlieb called “the content lifecycle.” This includes the four steps of planning, creation, publishing and promoting, and analyzing. Planning involves optimizing the work mix between, for example, events (a new product launch or marketing campaign), periodicals (newsletters, blogs), and maintenance of the organization’s entire content management system. This is the point in the content cycle where you must answer the core questions: whom do you want to reach, how do you want to reach them, and what do you intend to say? Planning is about prioritizing for your strategy.

The second step is creation, which involves governance, among other matters, because it concerns itself with budget, regulatory compliance, and style guidelines that the organization will adhere to. So if – for example – you know that you will be localizing your content by country or region, then incorporate that in the creative stage so you can optimize for localization. The content lifecycle’s third stage is publishing and promoting, which follows three rules: 1) Make the information findable, which means navigable and key word-optimized for search engine compatibility. 2) Make it usable. This means optimized for the target platforms with low barriers to use, so that it is as easily accessible and usable for mobile applications as for a PC, and compatible with personal tools (printer-friendly). 3) Make it actionable by: using calls to action (ask for a quote, provide a newsletter registration form), by making the content sharable via a link, and by making the action measurable.[4]

Tony Byrne, founder of Real Story Group, a vendor-neutral technology evaluation firm and the author of The CMS Report, spoke about the increasing technical intensity of marketing, sales, CRM and the web, and the overlapping nature of two relevant marketplaces – one for marketing automation, and the other for social media monitoring and intelligence. Vendors of these two types of products are beginning to converge, with certain technologies better adapted to B-to-C applications due to their ability to manipulate and handle large volumes of data, while others work best in the B-to-B channel. Among the tasks which marketing automation technology can accomplish today are: 1) creating email campaigns, including segmentation, testing and landing pages, 2) generating different versions of a mailing, 3) access control (for lists) between marketing units in one organization, 4) template control and 5) multi-device delivery configuration.

As for the social media monitoring and intelligence function, monitoring means finding “key words” in the stream of comments made about one’s brand while intelligence involves finding out what people actually think about one’s brand, for which text analytics tools are useful. Divining customer sentiment is very hard. With engagement you talk to your target market. You can route a comment about your product to a product specialist, but this is very expensive, though the industry is headed in this direction technologically. Web content management (WCM) vendors do well when someone arrives at your website, while experience management vendors (WCXM) engage when someone is not at your website, although WCXM vendors have trouble scaling, that is, managing large volumes of data.

Personalization’s role

Along with talk of engagement comes the subject of improving the customer’s experiences with personalization, and here Tim Walters, Partner and Principal Analyst at the Digital Clarity Group pointed out that the dark side of personalization becomes stalking, so it is essential to keep to a discreet ideal when personalizing communication with the target market.[5] During the same panel discussion, Ron Person, Director of Analytics at Sitecore, a company that offers an integrated customer engagement platform to its clients, pointed out that shoppers prefer personalization over privacy if it is relevant to them. Person advised on how to achieve successful personalization. First, one must choose a strategic theme, such as, increase revenue or increase retention. Then, you must choose strategic objectives which support that theme, such as increasing the conversion of prospects to customers. Third, you must choose marketing objectives, such as defining what you want from your existing customers. Only then can you perform step four, which is defining what goals you want to achieve with your website.

The identification of website goals includes such things as: 1) defining the persona(s) and how to break them down into stages in the “funnel” created by your appeal; 2) deciding what part of your page to personalize; and 3) whether you want to use the homepage to personalize for you by means of a rules-based keyword or location algorithm, or instead via predictive personalization which entails watching the user’s behavior (purchases, pages visited). While predictive personalization is very adaptive, it takes more time with this method to define the persona and the content profile of the customer.[6] Sean Rusinko, SVP Digital Strategy at Verndale, added that rules-based ad hoc personalization constitutes low-hanging fruit where selection is made based on keywords, geographical location by city, or particular marketing campaigns. But with predictive personalization you are identifying persona groups and free Google Analytics Content Experiments can be used to test the effectiveness of that personalization. Rusinko emphasized the need for cross-channel marketing integration in this process, which includes digital marketing channels.[7]

Globalization’s role

When one considers the content management system in a global context, the shortcomings of much work in this area becomes painfully obvious. Mary Laplante of Outsell, Inc. ascribes part of this problem to the fact that localization (for language and specifically relevant information/content) has become a strategy rather than a project. By this she means that an operational perspective on content globalization is often missing.[8] Bruno Herrmann of the Nielsen Company addressed this as a challenge of moving from a chain of multiple redundant, dispersed tasks such as website, product, and service to a global content management framework. In other words, what is needed is a content supply chain, which can be obtained by constructing a unified organization to process both solutions and content. It goes without saying that this, too, is easier said than done, but to achieve it one must choose an appropriate governance model. The choices are for a decentralized, distributed, or centralized model, and each has its own characteristics, as shown in Exhibit I.

Exhibit I

With a distributed CMS model, you can build globalization management blocks of a) internationalization, b) translation and localization, and c) international customer experience. In other words, you can combine the organization’s efforts in all three areas.[9]

This leads us to a discussion of the challenges that remain for creating good content and managing it effectively no matter where in the world. Andrew Bredenkamp, founder of Acrolinx, listed six of these hurdles: 1) the need for agility as content requirements keep changing; 2) the need to stay connected as before-and-after sales content boundaries are continuing to drop; 3) the competitive nature of content. 60-70% of a purchase decision is now made before a prospect even contacts a vendor, and much of that decision is based on the content provided by that vendor (is the content relevant and findable?); 4) the global nature of content. Content is now being read by people in their own language whom you never originally targeted; 5) the social nature of content. You must understand what your content needs to look like, since sites like Facebook and Twitter are just “plumbing” – a channel for your content; and 6) the value of content. Content is your organization’s most valuable asset, and will be the future battleground for your company’s success.[10]

Alex O’Connor, Researcher at CNGL/TCD then offered a research agenda for content. CNGL is developing a new paradigm it calls Global Intelligent Content, which focuses on six main areas: curation, translation, search, personalization, interaction and analytics. O’Connor stressed that content is a living thing, and that the word “publish” no longer applies, because global intelligent content is being delivered and altered in real time. He offered the “3 Vs of data content” to break it down into its component parts, and they are Volume, Variety, and Velocity. Supporting these three pillars of content are the 3 As of Affinity, Analytics, and Agility.[11]

The gauntlet has been thrown down, and it remains to be seen where all of this content management activity will lead. What will happen to CMS over the next decade? In one sentence, everything will become more complicated and require increasingly large doses of artificial intelligence to process and manage. Stay tuned.

Notes

1. 1.

   Tim Walters, “Understanding the ‘mobile shift’: obsession with the mobile channel obscures the shift to ubiquitous computing,” Digital Clarity Group 2012, p. 11

2. 2.

   Georgy Cohen, Principal, Crosstown Digital Communications, Where Strategy Meets Serendipity: A Framework for the Thoughtful Creation and Maintenance of Social Media Content (Nov. 28, 2012).

3. 3.

   Robert Rose, Founder & Chief Troublemaker, Big Blue Moose, Contributing Senior Consultant, Digital Clarity Group, Marketing as Story Telling (Nov. 28, 2012).

4. 4.

   Seth Gottlieb, Solutions Manager for Global Marketing Operations, Lionbridge, Executing a Content Strategy with Marketing Operations (Nov. 29, 2012).

5. 5.

   Tim Walters, How to Improve Customer’s Experiences with Personalization, (Nov. 29, 2012)

6. 6.

   Ron Person, “Using profiling and predictive personalization for customer engagement,” How to Improve Customer’s Experiences with Personalization (Nov. 29, 2012).

7. 7.

   Sean Rusinko, “Interactive experience, obtaining engagement data, executing personalization,” Ibid.

8. 8.

   Mary Laplante, VP & Solutions Architect, Outsell, Inc., Blueprint for World-class Content Globalization Practices (Nov. 29, 2012).

9. 9.

   Bruno Herrmann, Director of Globalization and Localization, The Nielsen Company, “Addressing the world in the WWW: reaching out to local audiences within global corporate environments,” Blueprint for World-class Content Globalization Practices (Nov. 29, 2012).

10. 10.

    Andrew Bredenkamp, Global Intelligent Content – How Do We Make Content Reactive, Reflective and Personal? (Nov. 29, 2012)

11. 11.

    Alex O’Connor, Ibid.

Kenneth Alan GrossbergProfessor of Marketing & Strategy and Director of the Waseda Marketing Forum, Waseda University, Tokyo (kengross@waseda.jp).