Ever hear this from your CEO:
"We need to launch a new website in Italian by Friday!"
"Bring forward the product website launch forward two months!"
"Alexa must be able to find all our press releases!"
While you may find these requests challenging, often your CEO is just responding to the very real pressure of a complex and rapidly changing business environment. Markets, consumer habits, technologies, sectors, economies and even politics are always subject to change, but the state of flux seems to be accelerating.
The term VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) has been used to describe this ever-changing environment where organizations need to respond quickly through mergers, restructuring, innovation, new product launches, rapid communications and more.
What Do You Need from a CMS?
Those sorts of rapid changes put pressure on a Content Management System (CMS) to be flexible and agile to meet new and emergent needs. Your CMS needs to be quick, efficient and reliable, but all too often is unable to cope.
Either it doesn't deliver, or it requires accelerating costs. When you select a CMS for your organization, it’s worth considering its ability to meet the demands of a volatile environment.
Here are five qualities to look for.
Stable and Reliable
Is your CMS stable and reliable? Delivering new custom sites quickly can stretch your CMS, so make sure you have a bug-free, high-performing platform that won’t let you down at the wrong moment.
A mature product will have less associated risks than a product fresh out of beta, particularly if you are trying out new content formats.
Less mature products will have more bugs and may have less of a proven track record around data security.
Other factors include the provider of your software. Working with a start-up is exciting and can be rewarding, but they may be less financially stable than other providers.
Intuitive
When you need to produce a new website or microsite rapidly, you shouldn’t have to hire external expertise because your CMS is complicated to use.
That adds cost and complexity, and hampers your ability to be agile, self-sufficient and responsive to business needs.
Don't underestimate the importance of a CMS that has an intuitive user interface to maximize users' productivity.
It gives you more power and allows other teams to be self-sufficient. In larger organisations, where a complex web environment may operate on a decentralised model, an intuitive CMS allows your content editors to make urgent changes without relying on central help.
An overstretched central web team can hold things up and delay change.
Flexible and Scalable
To be flexible and scalable, a CMS should support multiple websites from a single instance, ideally sharing content and templates across those sites.
It should publish rich media content, including images and video in different ways, covering everything from large homepage hero videos to highly visual product catalogs.
The CMS should deliver perfect experiences to a range of mobile devices and handle complex workflow. It should support multilingual content and handle significant spikes in visitors and page views without compromising performance.
Data Rich
It can be challenging to co-ordinate your content production in a highly fluid, multi-channel world. You’ll be in a better position if your CMS can deliver the analytics across all your digital and social activity, providing insights that allow you to make improvements and achieve your marketing goals.
Future-Ready
Consumer habits around content consumption are changing all the time. A few years ago, who would have predicted that so much content would be consumed through mobile devices or delivered via social media?
Product innovation and the Internet of Things (IoT) mean we must constantly rethink content consumption.
Does your CMS deliver content well to smart watches or to digital assistants like the Amazon Echo?
New content channels are emerging all the time. Having a future-ready CMS that can handle an ever-expanding and complex multi-channel environment puts you at a real advantage.
For example, can your CMS easily republish existing content across multiple channels? Having an API is also important, so you can open your content to other applications, publishers and third parties.
Surviving VUCA with Your CMS
It can be an unpredictable world out there! If you have the right CMS, you'll be better equipped to meet the needs of your CEO and the challenges of producing great web experiences at short notice.
You'll also be future-ready for emerging channels and formats.
That not only gives you some peace of mind and makes life less stressful for marketers, but also gives your organization a competitive edge.
Related White Paper
Title:
How the Right CMS Makes Content Available When and Where Customers Need It
Description:
To have your content reach customers when and where they need it, you need a CMS that takes a structured content approach. By storing content outside of an interface, you make it available for today's technologies, along with the technologies that will come tomorrow.
Download the white paper now.