It’s a rainy day and you’re traveling to a town you’ve never been to before. You check the local tourism website to see what there is to do in the area. The website shows you museums, restaurants, and other indoor related activities.
Fast forward to a year from now: it’s a sunny day and you decide to visit the same city, but need a refresher on what to do. You visit the same website and you’re shown parks, beaches, and other outside activities. From there, you go about your day wearing a fitness band, and receive push notifications from an app on your phone showing you other items you should check out in the area, or coupons for new activities in your location.
These sorts of data-driven, optimized experiences is the new norm for consumers, and one that many have come to expect: they’re personable and seamless across devices, as well as being relevant to a consumer’s location, interests, and preferences.
To provide exceptional customer experience, businesses around the globe are doing away with their clunky traditional marketing suites and are instead utilizing open standard content management systems (CMS). At the center of every CMS is greatt digital experience – an experience that’s captivating and brings personalized content across several devices. By doing away with the traditional marketing suite, businesses are saving time and energy in the development of a compelling digital experience, and taking advantage of a CMS platform that puts no limitations on their integration capabilities. This enables businesses to focus on creating worthwhile, compelling content and delivering the personalized experiences that consumers have come to expect. Here are a few reasons organizations should consider using an open standard CMS solution.
1. Customization and Agility
Marketing suites claim to be an all-in-one and easy-to-use solutions, but don’t be deceived; in reality, they are oftentimes a restrictive out-of-the-box solution that leaves a business with little support and even less flexibility. One significant challenge businesses face by using closed-source marketing suites is that they cannot change the software to fit their unique needs and to optimize performance. This makes the traditional marketing suite very limiting, not only in the way that it creates vendor lock-in but its inability to grow with and adapt to the evolving digital needs of an organization.
In contrast, open standard CMS technologies provide a tailored approach, enabling businesses to focus on digital initiatives that are most important to the growth and development of their organization. With open source, you have the freedom and agility to adapt, customize, and scale your digital properties. As we push the limits of the customer experience, the delivery of relevant, personable content plays an increasingly important role. This makes deploying the right CMS vital to growth. Businesses should look to open standard CMS technologies to provide the agility and customized approach necessary to support the evolving customer experience across multiple channels.
2. Seamless Integration
An open standard CMS creates a holistic and personalized experience. It allows you to work with best-of-breed technology solutions in the market. This approach gives organizations the control and agility to incorporate existing and new solutions into their digital strategy over time, and allows them to select each solution—whether it is CRM, eCommerce, marketing automation, etc.—based on their specific needs. With marketing suites, you are beholden to whichever solution the marketing suite has acquired and again face vendor lock-in or the inability to quickly integrate and roll out changes or new functionality.
3. Innovation
In business, the more agile you are, the quicker you can take your product or solution to market. CMS technology based on open standards delivers on a key element necessary to building an agile business: collaboration driven by the ability to innovate. Through an open standards solution, individuals and teams across the business are empowered to work together to share knowledge,to innovate, and to evolve the customer experience. This leads to shorter development cycles which, in turn, provides the customer with the best possible digital experience. For example, an open standard CMS brings together marketing and IT departments – marketing has the ability to focus on creative ideas and content that increases the bottom line while the technology enables IT to be more nimble and deliver quickly on business-driving marketing needs. With open standards, the opportunities are endless.
4. Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
A CMS solution based on open standards benefits from the wisdom of the crowd – a constantly improving, constantly innovating community contributing shared technical knowledge. When a web content management system is built upon an agreed set of standards, space is created to “raise the bar” in terms of the features developed. Open standards “collectively push” for further innovation.
Content management is more than just software. It’s a strategy, and the software you choose should be flexible enough to support that ever evolving strategy – not hold it back. Consumers have come to expect a tailored experience across any device regardless of where they are or what they’re doing. It’s up to businesses to make agile choices and deliver on those expectations or risk being lost among competitors. A CMS solution based on open standards will ensure the agility to deliver an innovative customer experience, and provides the freedom to continue to do so as business needs evolve.