Find the best enterprise CMS solutions for growing teams

Highlights

You'll learn to:

• Identify your needs: Understand what you require from the best enterprise CMS. Consider automation, mobile readiness, advanced content management settings and ease of use
• Prioritize and schedule implementation: Once you've selected a CMS, outline objectives, create a to-do list based on these goals, prioritize tasks and develop an implementation schedule
• Conduct thorough training: Ensure that your team can use the chosen CMS through comprehensive training

There are many angles to consider for marketing managers in enterprise firms when evaluating a content management system: How does your current CMS compare to what’s on the market? How much longer can your company live with the functionality you’re locked into? And if you choose to invest in something different, how can you be sure it will be worth it?

There’s a lot at stake in today’s fast-paced and competition-rich business environment when choosing a content management system (CMS) for your enterprise. This is especially true for large organizations with a growing number of employees, customers, leads and pieces of content to manage.

In this guide, we’ll help marketing managers learn everything they need to know about enterprise CMS, including:

• Why is an enterprise CMS important
• Why it’s essential to take your time to choose a good fit for your organization
• Important factors to consider when you’re shopping for a CMS
• How to implement the CMS of your choice
• A few resources to learn more about these enterprise CMS platforms

What are enterprise CMS solutions?

An enterprise content management system is a software application that enables businesses to create, manage and publish content for their websites, applications and other digital experiences. As a central hub and a publishing engine for marketing content, the CMS is central to the success of any business’s marketing team. This is why marketing leaders at enterprise organizations must choose an enterprise CMS specifically.

Top enterprise CMS platforms are content management systems equipped with the features and capabilities enterprise marketing departments need to engage prospects and drive revenue.

Your marketing department can execute a successful enterprise content management (ECM) strategy with a user-friendly interface and the right enterprise CMS platform. ECM is the process of managing and applying content throughout its lifecycle to support employees and further business goals. With that in mind, let’s explore why choosing the right enterprise CMS for your business is important.

Why choosing a great enterprise CMS matters

Over 60% of websites use a content management system. The following benefits show you why choosing the right CMS matters to most businesses with an internet presence and why it should matter to you.

Enterprise CMS can increase your website traffic

Any worthwhile modern CMS, especially an enterprise CMS, comes with features and ready-made integrations to increase your search engine presence, such as:

• Page titles
• Meta descriptions
• Optimized URL structures
• Alt text for images
• Breadcrumb navigation
• XML sitemaps
• Redirect capabilities

Simply publishing your content from an enterprise CMS with these features can give you a leg up in the race to the top of Google’s search results.

Streamline collaboration to power productivity

Most marketing organizations don’t struggle to produce enough content; they struggle to manage it productively. A successful enterprise CMS keeps content organized and permissions flexible so that contractors and staff from across departments and even worldwide can access, optimize and publish the content they need to, whenever and wherever they need to. Now that’s productive.

Implement much-needed information governance

Data breaches, privacy regulations and industry compliance measures are becoming more common as more business occurs online. Enterprise CMS platforms offer information governance and highly customizable permission settings that help enterprises keep up while remaining secure.

Enterprise CMS shines a light on dark data

Enterprises must integrate their content marketing efforts with business intelligence applications to help make informed business decisions. Unfortunately, research shows that more than half of the data collected by companies is “dark” data — that is, information that never sees the analytical light of day and never contributes to business intelligence.

Why do enterprise content marketers face these hurdles? Because they’re still working with outdated monolithic CMS platforms designed before 24/7, omnichannel, personalized experiences were table stakes — a time when content was primarily static and almost always only published once to a single webpage. These traditional CMSs were often “store-bought,” but some were custom-made. In any case, recent developments in content trends have quickly made many of these solutions nearly obsolete. Today, traditional CMS platforms lack the functionality and flexibility they need to keep up with large-scale business shifts and growth.

Outgrowing a CMS doesn’t necessarily happen all at once. But if the following scenario sounds familiar, it’s probably happening to you:

Maybe your current CMS is falling due to wear and tear, and your IT department is now devoting increasing amounts of time to security patches and bug fixes. Meanwhile, your content creators/ editors complain more regularly that it takes too long to load, the processes are clunky and the plug-ins are malfunctioning. Perhaps, you have observed that it has become more costly and time-consuming to locate the add-ons and workarounds you require to respond to the expanding requirements of a multichannel marketing landscape.

If this sounds like you, start shopping for your modern enterprise CMS solution today.

6 features to look for when choosing an enterprise CMS platform

Next up: Your enterprise CMS should have these features to meet your modern needs.

Omnichannel content distribution

Probably, your company wants to manage multiple websites, online stores and advertising campaigns simultaneously. Apart from sending content to a single, static website, look for a CMS that distributes content to your social media, mobile apps, IoT devices, chatbots and other emerging platforms. A headless enterprise CMS provides enterprises with a modular architecture, eases content reuse, ensures optimization and offers omnichannel content distribution.

Multi-language capabilities

Personalization becomes increasingly important for brands operating in multiple countries. Why? It engages your customers. Enterprise CMS can process customer data and multi-language content, including translation and localization. This ensures you can present the right content in the right place.

Automation through integration

As your enterprise grows, so does your content workload, which is a great reason to implement automation to do more heavy lifting. Through integrations with artificial intelligence-enabled tools, an enterprise CMS can empower content teams to take advantage of technology to automate routine tasks that generally take humans a lot of time.

For example, automation can process massive images in the blink of an eye. It can manage your content lifecycle by flagging content that needs refreshing and even predicting which leads have the best chance of closing, giving your sales team a significant head start.

Mobile readiness

Today, mobile devices account for 59.7% of website traffic. Google reports that mobile visitors are 5X more likely to leave a website if it isn’t optimized for mobile use. And according to Google, “Mobile-friendly sites show up higher in search results.” An enterprise CMS that can readily deliver content to your mobile apps and experiences is a requirement.

Advanced content management settings

Even in a collaborative enterprise environment, you don’t want all the people to have all the editing power all the time. Instead, you likely have a mix of people with varying responsibilities throughout the content development process. Prioritize an enterprise CMS that can help you keep all of them productive with features like access controls, approval workflows, versioning and more to keep your workflow humming along.

Ease of use

A successful CMS empowers users at every level of technical ability to accomplish their work. Choose a CMS platform that enables your marketing pros to create, optimize, publish and otherwise work with content without constantly turning to IT for permission or help.

Customer support

Your marketing efforts and your business success depend on your enterprise CMS. So, we think choosing one with reliable and helpful customer support is essential.

Implementing your enterprise CMS solution

Once you’ve chosen an enterprise CMS that fits your marketing needs, follow this quick guide to go from business alignment to lasting adoption.

1. Outline the objectives for your enterprise CMS solution

Since your content solution is a tool to help your firm achieve its business objectives, it makes sense to start your decision-making process by taking stock of those objectives.

Ideally, your company has a content strategy that makes this easy for you. If your company doesn’t have a documented content strategy, check out this post on how to nail your enterprise content strategy. In addition to or in place of your content strategy, we recommend spending time with colleagues to discuss objectives from each department and how you can utilize the leading enterprise CMS platforms to meet those goals. At the same time, you should also use these conversations to uncover how many people will need to interact with the CMS, which features are a “must-have” that you need to spin up right away and which add-ons are a “nice-to-have” that you can plan to implement further down the road.

2. Build out your to-do list

With an outline of objectives and a coordinating list of key features to go with them, it’s time to define all the work that needs to be done to meet each objective: The development itself, the meetings, the testing, improving and so on. To ensure you are accounting for all the work required, collaborate with your team to see who will “own” each objective as it moves toward implementation. These owners can help you accurately estimate the total effort required to achieve each objective.

Finally, prioritize your to-do list to prepare it for scheduling, which we’ll cover in the next step. If you aren’t sure where to start, you can prioritize based on the level of effort each task will require and how big a positive impact the completed task may have.

3. Develop an implementation schedule

It’s time to organize all the work outlined above into a schedule that will guide workers and reassure stakeholders as your enterprise CMS moves toward implementation.

4. Conduct training

Employees don’t always create expensive workarounds because the software doesn’t work; they do it because they don’t know how to get the software to work for them. After integrating your headless CMS, follow up with a detailed training program to ensure it’s embedded everywhere it’s needed and that every employee can use it to its fullest potential.

Headless: The modern solution for enterprise CMS

Until recently, building a custom enterprise content management system was the only way for an enterprise to achieve the functionality it needed. But, even then, flexibility remained a concern. Today, marketing managers have a more affordable and more adaptable option. A headless enterprise CMS is today’s alternative to the monolithic CMS.

A traditional, monolithic CMS combines the presentation and the content layer. This requires content to be recreated and reformatted manually and then distributed for each audience and channel. In contrast, a headless enterprise CMS stores content separately from the presentation layer. Thanks to application programming interface (API) technology, the two can still work together flawlessly.  The separation that a headless CMS offers is critical for enabling marketing teams to create and optimize content assets. Simultaneously, designers and developers build out the distribution for those assets, whether delivering them to a new website, a mobile app, an email campaign, an internal knowledge base or anywhere else.

The APIs that enable this modular architecture also facilitate seamless integration with other technologies that you rely on to collect and manage the content and data on which your business operates, such as CRMs, digital asset management (DAM), DMPs, e-commerce platforms, translation and localization tools and more. Enterprise CMS platforms are designed for growing users in a collaborative and changing environment. Whether you have a small team that handles all of your corporate content or a complex responsibility matrix that includes editorial, marketing, sales and technical staff, an enterprise CMS can handle the varied workflows, assets and data necessary for everyone to get their job done.

FAQs

What is an enterprise CMS?

An enterprise CMS is a content management system designed to meet the complex, large-scale content requirements of a business. It's multi-team, multi-language and multi-channel, ensuring content is secure and consistent.

What is a content management system?

A CMS solution is a tool that helps you create, manage and publish digital content, usually without needing to code. It makes updating websites and digital platforms much easier.

What do CMS solutions help with?

CMS enables content creation and collaboration, digital assets management, publishing to websites and applications and, most importantly, keeping everything organized in a single location.

What are some of the best enterprise CMS platforms?

The best enterprise CMS platform is Contentstack. Contentful, Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore and Acquia are other CMSes available in the market.

Learn more

If it’s time for a CMS that can help automate the many manual tasks associated with content management, enable efficient team-wide collaboration, facilitate content delivery that improves customer experience and make the most of all your content assets and data. It’s time for a headless enterprise CMS. Are you curious about what a headless enterprise CMS looks like in action? Talk to us to know more.