Many publishing and digital advertising companies rely heavily on content to drive their business. The ability to create compelling, easy to use sites with effective SEO, SEM, personalization and analytics is critical to engaging customers and driving loyalty revenue.  These sites, as per best practices, should be managed by content management systems (such as Adobe, HP, Drupal, and other vendors).

According to our experience at Amdocs, most companies have implemented content management solutions to try to address these challenges. However, we have seen some common concerns with these solutions:

• Multiple content management solutions are often in place. This can be either several versions of the same content management vendor, or different systems altogether.
• Limited usage of content auditing, versioning and archiving capabilities.
• The content management system is used as a document or content repository, without necessarily taking advantage of more advanced capabilities such as easy to use site building tools, multi lingual sites, mobile site development, workflows, analytics etc.
• Unstable content management server (server crashes, deployment issues, lost content, etc.)
• No or limited content approval/review processes (workflows).
• Site search challenges – difficult to find relevant content in the site.
• Content (on occasion duplicate content) located in multiple silos, no single ‘source of truth’ for content.
• Older implementations, developed on older versions of the content management system, may not take into account latest content management capabilities, such as
  • Target/personalization
  • Multi Variate Testing
  • Campaign management
  • Mobile site development
  • Closed loop analytics

These challenges are real, and we have seen them multiple times with some of our customers.

Here are some best practices that you may want to consider to achieve your digital marketing goals and address the challenges above.

1. Standardize on a single content management solution. Based on your budget and needs, select a short list of vendors and ask to see a demo based on your specific needs. This will help ensure you select the right CMS for you. Remember: market leaders have very capable products, however they often come with a matching price tag. Smaller CMS vendors may be able to provide a more cost effective solution to your needs, however their products may not provide as much functionality.
2. Create a single content source of truth. If there are multiple content silos – consolidate them while removing duplicates and outdated content.
3. Utilize the out of the box content versioning and archiving capabilities of the CMS. This will pay dividends if/when you need to recover lost or deleted content.
4. Consider using a cloud based CMS solution. This will help reduce CMS operational costs so you can focus on your core business while allowing the managed services vendor to maintain and enhance your CMS solution.
5. Think about your digital marketing strategy. What will your goals be in the next year? Next 3 years? Will you be branching out to new devices? Are you looking to better segment and understand your customers? Which KPIs will you use? This strategy will help you understand how to get from where you are now to where you want to go. Engaging a CMS services partner with broad market overview and experience will help.
6. Perform a health check / analysis on your CMS implementation. Identify challenges – what does not work, what works but could work better, what new functionality may be needed (understanding the longer term strategy will help here). Once you find the gaps, come up with a plan to see if there are any ‘low hanging fruit’ – quick wins that can make significant improvement. Then, prioritize to address issues in the short, medium and long term.
7. Do you have a process to approve content before it is being published to your site? If not, CMS workflows can help. Workflows can be configured to any business process. Good tip to remember on workflows is to keep them simple, so that they do not turn into ‘work-slows’.

Amdocs Digital Professional Services consists of expert content management and digital experience consultants who have significant experience implementing complex user experience and content management solutions using the industry’s leading platforms (Adobe, HP, Drupal, etc.). Offerings include a digital strategy workshop, user-experience design across devices, content management health check analysis, and full digital experience and content management implementation.

To learn more about Amdocs Professional Services, please email Ilan.Gendellman@amdocs.com.