The Need for Content Management Optimization
Many business owners, when first starting up their marketing efforts, struggle to either create or organize their content. Many have only documents created in Microsoft Word, which are not typically prepared for ideal marketing outcomes using search engine optimization techniques.
Learn 12 SAP CRM Content marketing requirements and get insight into what you need beyond the CRM based marketing system to succeed.
Enterprise Website Builder Requirements are Complex
First, what is a Content Management System?
When it comes to thinking about a content management system, it is a good idea to start with thinking about how your website and content will be consumed. You will need to begin by making a list of the business problems you are trying to solve as well as any specific requirements you may have. This will help you choose the right content management system – the one that supports your business requirements – rather than the most popular or well-liked. CMSs come in all shapes and sizes, each with its own set of features and benefits.
A CMS is typically used for enterprise content management (ECM) and web content management (WCM). ECM typically supports multiple users in a collaborative environment by integrating document management, digital asset management, and record retention.
Alternatively, WCM is the collaborative authoring environment for websites and may include text and embedded graphics, photos, video, audio, maps, and program code that display content and interact with the user.
A CMS, such as the Hubspot CMS Hub or Salesforce CRM, can often also provide Web Hosting services. Ideally, everything you wish to accomplish on your website's CMS, both from a marketing, sales, service and operations perspective, can run off the web hosting service provided by a system like Hubspot's. While domain registration is still typically provided by a registrar, like Godaddy, many sites, such as this one, run entirely on Hubspot.
Other CMS Features
With a CMS, scheduling content is as easy as clicking a button. Most platforms allow you to schedule more than just blog posts, too. With Hubspot CMS Hub for example, you can schedule blog posts as well as website pages, landing pages, and emails. You also have Easy Access with a CMS platform; you can access and edit your site on virtually any device with an internet connection.
Digital Asset Management Content Management Systems like Hubspot's offer powerful capabilities to manage all your digital assets for use in different marketing channels, including websites, marketing materials, email campaigns, online stores , paid search, and blogs. They provides a centralized content hub for all your assets, where you can organize them into repositories and collections and create rules and workflow to define how the content can be used and where.
Why Use a CMS?
We've already touched upon some of the benefits of using a CMS, but let's look at some specific ways it can impact your set-up process, team's productivity, and visibility online:
- No coding knowledge required. By enabling non-developers and other users to build websites, without coding, CMS systems have helped revolutionize web design. Gone are the days of relying on web developers and designers to establish an online presence for your business.
- Themes and Templates. Build a website from scratch using themes and templates that are unique to your business, yet perform radically better than other approaches.
- Up-to-Date Information. Everyone you share content with will have access to the latest information—wherever they are, whenever they need it. Sharing and recording content collaboration will enable the user to monitor how and when each shared item was accessed. The information needed goes well beyond what one would typically think of as strictly marketing information. For instance, shipping status and special handling instructions are critical to both your customer's and your warehouse team as well as your sales team.
- Optimized and Personalized Websites. With Hubspot CMS Hub , you can build websites that are secure, powerful, and optimized for search engines. Using this all-on-one connected platform, you can create personalized contextually relevant content for visitors based on data from your HubSpot CRM, create custom templates and styles, run A/B tests on multi-language content, safely redesign and relaunch websites in order to drive rapid growth.
- Enterprise Class Features. Larger companies typically have more strict requirements for content management applications and may even require features only found in enterprise content management systems. Small business however, should focus on picking an CMS with a easy user interface and maintenance as the teams who manage the software application are typically smaller. How will you measure success? Depending on the goal of your CMS, like a blog or a commerce site, you should strongly consider using a web analytics platform like Google Analytics or Mixpanel to measure conversions.
- Acts as a Web Content Management System. A web content system is similar to an ECM system, but the differentiating factor is the WCMS is for web content -- such as product pages on e-commerce websites. It contains a publishing tool and facilitates collaborative authoring.
- Integration with Wordpress. Wordpress, upon which about one third of the world's websites are built, often provides functionality that no other platform can match. That's why many if not most CMS's offer integration with Wordpress.
Large Businesses Have Unique Content Management System Requirements
For many large businesses, they have other content management requirements and they typically are looking for customer relationship management systems that perform the following content management functions:
Collateral & Content Management Functional Requirements
All large enterprise and small business class content management systems must provide the following capabilities.
- Define, categorize and centrally access marketing content in multiple media formats (like collateral, certifications, price-lists, product information, specifications, templates, competitive information, sales strategies, sales methodology, video and audio files etc,) from all modules. All of these media types should be readily available within your CRM Platform.
You can use a CRM platform like Hubspot CRM to create a single up-to-date point of truth that everyone can access. If customers regularly interact with multiple people from your company, it's easy to keep track of previous interactions with a CRM system.
When the CRM Platform also manages your content, you can make sure you are not sending the same information over and over again. You can even keep track of which content you sent to which social media channel. This is one of the key CRM requirements for effective lead management.
E-commerce websites can be especially challenging due to the ever changing product descriptions, price changes, knowledge base articles and other vital pieces of content required to make the sale. Search engines do not want to spend their crawl budget on website content that is not up-to-date and thus, if they detect out-of-date content, will often push down your search results to the bottom of the page or completely off the page. This is a key CRM Solution requirement, and not all CRM Solutions meet this standard. - Define and track inventoried collateral (like brochures, CDs, Gifts) as kits, track the stock (in terms of quantity and value) and allocate them to one or more campaigns.
When your CRM system is helping you by keeping track of all customer interactions, you can greatly improve customer loyalty by aligning your marketing and sales materials with your customer's lifecycle.
The CMS must help manage content with clearly defined author or ownership tracking of documents, movies, pictures, phone numbers, and scientific data. Companies also use CMSs to store, control, revise, and publish documentation. In addition, they must usually be able to fully support DRM or Digital Rights Management requirements, which can be extensive. - Define and use templates (defined in MS office or other programs such as GSuite) for offers, promotions, invitations, service requests etc.
Easy population of the templates using online references to multi-media content and collateral stored in the online repository, along with a mail merge of contact information from the customer database.
While this capability is key to improving your marketing and sales team's productivity, it is also a key ingredient improving customer satisfaction.
How so? Whether your sales cycle is long or short, there is almost a compelling offer your sales teams could be making, and an integrated CRM system that knows where each prospect is at, and, using artificial intelligence and machine learning, is able to offer up accurate, contextually relevant offers, can greatly improve your sales outcomes. Customer always appreciate a deal. But they don't want to be confused by inconsistent or nonsensical or irrelevant offers. - A designated person followed by an electronic approval process when content needs to be approved for publishing receives a notification.
In short, a Customer Relationship Management Content Management System based workflow system is required.
Managing this process as part of an enterprise sales force automation supported business process is a key requirement. This is as much true within a services organization as it is within the walls of a Big-Box retailer. - Sort content by multiple parameters and similarly search using multiple parameters, including full text search on content/collateral.
Marketing automation platforms, like Hubspot Marketing, come with robust, yet ever evolving content classification, search and retrieval capabilities.
Large enterprise CRM systems, like SAP CRM, come with even more capabilities. They often, by necessity, use their data warehouse capabilities and advanced indexing engines, as well as numerous third party content management system add-on system capabilities, to support what are often global content management and optimization system requirements. - Assign and manage different rights to create, modify, delete, annotate and access content and collateral.
Ensure content remains editable even upon departure of the original creator.
Analytical CRM systems allow companies to use data like customers' interaction history, preferences, and contact information to better understand their behavior and modify business processes to drive desired outcomes.
This analytical system capability, when coupled with a robust Segregation of Duties of SOD definition capability, allows a company to fully define who can do what with what and when and how.
Geographic marketing campaigns are often carried out by diverse teams and having the ability to segregate content by geographic regions is critical to making them work.
CRM tools like Hubspot Marketing and Hubspot Sales allow you to create 'teams', both virtual and physical, with defined rights and privileges, that businesses require - Centrally published updates to all desktops of marketing team members.
A content repository is required in this case that is centrally accessible by marketing team members.
Did you know that according to Hubspot, the average Salesman overlooks over 270 pieces of available content! Usually because he can't find it.
You can maintain better customer relationships when you can provide more accurate, up-to-date information, faster. Managing customer relationships is already hard enough, given that ever one is pressed for time and overwhelmed with email and other distractions. Your sales team doesn't need to be handicapped by not having the most relevant, best content available, when they need it. - Automatic delivery of content via various communication channels, i.e., SMS, Web, Mobile and Printed which are available to users based on subscriptions driven by their interests and choices.
Social media platform content management is also a key functional requirement of enterprise class content management systems (CMS). For many businesses, especially those who are in the YMYL (Your Money or Your Life), i.e., insurance, there is an on-going need to support legal compliance requirements. Social media platforms like Facebook are extremely finicky about such content.
The lawyers need to sign-off of the social media content in other words. Your CMS also needs to be able to keep track of these sign-offs.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, such as SAP, often have dedicated modules that handle this. For instance, there is a content repository located within the SAP CRM technical stack that has such capabilities built in. - Delivery of content to marketing communication channels whenever the content matches criteria set for those channels.
For businesses who make phone calls, which covers a wide array of businesses, having the ability to push out content, such as SMS messages or even emails, based on customer behavior and other parameters, can drastically increase sales productivity.
Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, can all be connected up Hubspot to allow you to execute advertising campaigns that send out targeted advertising at just the right time, and to let your sales team know it's time to call a particular contact. - Import content from external sources like content databases, MS word files, delimited text files etc. and export into similar formats. Write it for your buyer personas.
- Store English and other language content/collateral and select the appropriate language during fulfillment based on customer information (language preference).
Proper management of your entire sales process means being able to respond to your customers in their own language and on their own terms. - Maintain user profiles, which tailors content, advertisement delivery and layout based on the customer preferences.
This is key part of improving customer retention - keeping track of customer preferences and using tools like data mining of your contact management database to deliver tailored content, at scale, to each and every customer.
High-Level Content Management Requirements
Though these sound like 'heavy footprint' CRM (Customer Relationship Management or CRM Software) system type content management requirements, they are, in fact, fairly high-level requirements for marketing management systems that most CRM systems can or should deliver today.
Creating a CRM Requirements Checklist
To turn the above list into a comprehensive requirements document, it is important to consider various aspects of CRM functionality. This can be achieved by using a CRM requirements template, which outlines the specific requirements for a CRM system. The template can include sections such as CRM checklist sample, CRM functional requirements template, and CRM requirements questionnaire. These sections help to define the desired features and functionalities of the CRM system. The requirements document should also include a CRM requirements checklist, which serves as a guide to ensure that all necessary features and functionalities are included. By incorporating these elements into the requirements document, businesses can effectively outline their CRM needs and ensure that the chosen CRM system meets their specific requirements.
Small Business Content Management Optimization Requirements
Many small businesses have similar if not more complex content management and optimization requirements that must be met in order for them to manage customer relationships effectively and profitably.
Content Management System Requirements Checklist
Marketing Strategy Support Requirements
What should jump out from this list of content management marketing system functional requirements is that it is all about the technical aspects of the system only, and nothing at all about the marketing strategy, the content creation process nor the analytics required to explore different aspects of your marketing efforts.
Digging a little deeper into these content management requirements, some additional system capability requirements should be added, such as:
- Customer Segmentation Data Validation.
In this case, studies indicate that a typical airline (and many other industries) captures as many as 57 pieces of customer data for which they have no immediate or subsequent use for.
This adds friction to the entire customer engagement process. Therefore, a key requirement would be to have the ability to conduct A/B test on various data collection forms to determine what the customer truly wants and which channel they prefer to consume it from. - Keyword Research and Analysis.
More specifically, long tail keyword research. Nothing in the above list of capabilities will provide the ability to target specific keywords. As it happens, this author was in the demo's of this system, and this issue came up but the strategy was yet to be developed as to how to select and target these keywords. - Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing Support.
These requirements do not actually fit the requirements of both of these channels. Though there is some overlap, there should be a level of requirements one level above these. - Sales Process Support
Integration of your content management system with rest of your sales tools pays off as well. 61% of overperforming leaders report using a CRM to automate at least part of their sales process compared to 46% of underperforming leaders. - Customer Service Automation
CRM tools like sentiment analysis, automated ticketing, and customer support and customer service automation can dramatically improve your customer retention rates by letting human agents defuse problems. Analytics tools that look at customer life cycle can show you when churn happens and why, so you can identify and address pain points.
Launching Effective Marketing Campaigns
When it comes to launching successful marketing campaigns, especially in today's complex environment, it takes some rigorous planning and a lot of testing to really develop effective marketing campaign approaches. To truly leverage a CRM system, you need:
- A Clearly defined Marketing Strategy - across all channels
- Evolved Analytics - With built in feedback loops
They say if you can't manage it, you can't change it. If you would like to improve your measurement system, you might want to download our guide.
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Thanks and don't forget to leave a comment!
We hope you found the high-level content management requirements outlined in this blog useful and informative. As we strive to improve our content and deliver valuable insights to our readers, we would love to hear from you. Did you find the point about the importance of maintaining user profiles interesting? Or did you learn something new and valuable about content management systems? Let us know in the comments below. Additionally, if there are any other areas related to content management that you would like us to explore further, such as keyword research or inbound vs. outbound marketing support, please share your thoughts. We are always looking for ways to enhance our readers' understanding and expertise in this field.
