In today’s world, data is the fuel that powers our lives. Data is collected, aggregated, processed and utilized to inform your decisions; ranging from which ad you should select for display, to the next new product to be developed. If you are a marketer, then you are familiar with data. You use it on a daily basis to measure, report and inform decisions on your marketing campaigns, sales tactics, and website updates.
If you are like many enterprise organizations, your Content Management System (CMS) is one place where data is not being utilized in an effective way. Sure, you may be reviewing your analytics every month and measuring success of new features, split tests, or campaigns, but this is all being done manually. As you are planning your roadmap for 2019, we cannot stress enough the importance of using data to drive decisions in your Enterprise Content Management System. Let's take a look at a few ways to use data to power your enterprise CMS:
Enhancing User Experience with Personalization Tools
Personalization tools allow you to utilize what you know about a specific user to customize their experience. This type of personalization is regularly used in advertising, and is becoming increasingly popular on the web. The premise for personalization is simple: Provide the right content to the right user at the right time.
Sounds simple, right?! Of course, this isn't as easy as it sounds. There is a significant amount of work that goes into implementing a successful personalization strategy. Good personalization is built off of and powered by a strong content strategy. We will dig into this in more detail in another blog post (coming soon!).
There are many tools which embrace the power of data to allow you to provide personalized experiences to your users. These personalization tools are extremely powerful if used correctly. Here are a couple tools that we recommend:
- Acquia Lift - Acquia Lift is a personalization tool developed specifically for Drupal. Whether you are just getting started or have years of experience, Acquia provides several product offerings around Lift to meet the needs of your organization.
- Optimizely - Optimizely is a strong contender in the web personalization space. They have a solid product and are platform agnostic.
Enhancing Content Management with Integrated Analytical Data
Another way to utilize data in the Enterprise Content Management System is to integrate your analytics into your website. There are several ways to do this, but we recommend integrating analytical data at a page level. Similar to the way personalization tools enhance the end-user experience, analytical data can be used to help enhance your content author experience. This is an area that is often overlooked by organizations, but one which could save you non-trivial amounts of time and money.
Let's take a look at some benefits and see how data could be driving the administration of your Enterprise Content Management System.
Trending Content
Having access to analytical data about your pages inside of your CMS allows you to have a better understand of how your pages are performing. You can identify pages which are popular or trending and make sure you capitalize on that success. These metrics could also be utilized for search weighting and sort ordering when displaying content to your users.
Tidying Up your CMS
One task that often gets overlooked by organizations is archiving/retiring old content. This is often forgotten about until it's time to upgrade/migrate your CMS and you are stuck with months of audits and content reviews to identify which of your thousands of pages still hold relevance.
The ability to identify pages which are not performing well is critical to keeping your site clean and healthy. One way to do this is by identifying pages that have dropped below an acceptable threshold and flagging it for review. For example, you could create a stale pages report that flags any page where the page views drop below 100 views for a 6 month period.
Better Insight into Site Health & Page Performance
Last but not least, large organizations often have strict access rules to tools, such as google analytics. It is likely that a majority of your content authors don't have insight into analytical data about their pages. Exposure of this data to your authors allows them the opportunity to make optimally informed decisions about their content.
As you plan for your 2019-2020 roadmap, consider utilizing data to power your CMS, not just your marketing. Your organization will benefit from utilizing data internally as much as it does externally.
Looking for more information on using data to drive your CMS or need help understanding how to integrate data to power your CMS? Contact us today!