3 essential content experience functions your CMS needs

By now, you probably have a good understanding as to why you should be focusing on providing a remarkable content experience, as well as the building blocks that you need to acquire to build it. You know it’s in your best interest to build a content experience, but what tools and technologies are actually required to build one?

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but if you want to build a truly remarkable content experience — one that allows for you to properly manage content, build an engagement path, generate leads, and leverage content across your entire organization — your current content management system (CMS) probably won’t cut it.

A traditional CMS is designed for building static web pages. Despite the number of plugins that are available to encourage engagement and lead generation, it can be difficult to fudge together and manage your content experience when you’ve built it from the same blueprint as Frankenstein’s monster.

In addition to aggregating and managing large quantities of content, as well as allowing your content to be leveraged from all corners of your organization, the solution you choose to build your content experience needs to be able to:

Provide a responsive experience

If your content experience isn’t accommodating different screen sizes, you’re in trouble. Thanks to Google’s Mobilegeddon update and the fact that the majority of content is consumed on mobile, you risk creating more leaks in your content experience if your technology does not facilitate responsive design.

Integrate with your technology stack

Modern B2B organizations understand the value of having the right technology, and more importantly, the value of having technology that seamlessly integrates with the rest of their technology stack. The results of having a disjointed martech stack can be dire — after all, if your content leads aren’t properly feeding into your marketing automation platform, you’ll not only miss opportunities, but will also lack accurate insight into your content marketing and lead gen performance.

Eliminate IT barriers

It’s difficult to separate IT from your organization’s technology; however, IT barriers are all too often the cause of massive productivity issues. Technology that inhibits a marketer or salesperson’s ability to perform nimbly and to the best of their ability is almost contradictory. It’s important to seek software solutions that empower your employees (especially for non-tech departments such as Sales and Marketing).

Conclusion

The concept of a content experience isn’t new, but B2B organizations — particularly, marketers — haven’t necessarily been putting forward the amount of resources required to properly optimize their content experiences. Perhaps it’s because the focus of much of our recent content marketing lexicon has been on creation, distribution, and insights. Or, maybe it’s because we have been limited by the technology that’s available to manage content.

Whether you’re leveraging content for marketing, sales, or success, your goal should always be to provide value to your desired end-user. Your content’s value shouldn’t be limited by the experience in which it lives — the experience is an integral part of the content marketing process, and, like any environment, can have a profound impact on your end-user’s behavior and, ultimately, your content’s performance. Allow your content to reach its full potential by building a remarkable content experience and hiring a B2B copywriter.