Nearly every business across nearly every sector has an always-on goal of continued growth. With growth comes new services and products for customers, built and deployed by more staff, which, ideally, leads to better customer experiences and outcomes. Leaders tasked with achieving growth don’t have a clear, straightforward game plan to follow, as every business has its own unique set of challenges and opportunities. But the red thread for everyone is that scalability requires perfecting a balancing act—one where people, processes and technologies are in harmony, working together to make steady progress toward their business objectives.
This is way easier said than done, of course, yet continuous growth is a business-critical initiative for most organizations today, so it has to be done.
Whether leaders realize it yet or not, enabling scalability ties directly back to deploying a winning content program—after all, every business is a content business. Landing new customers and keeping existing customers engaged requires a positive customer experience, which requires quality content. No matter where they might be along the customer journey, their interaction with your brand needs to be memorable and valuable. If it isn’t, there’s an abundance of other choices across the market today. Swapping out your brand for another can happen in minutes; it’s that competitive out there.
This means content teams, specifically, are feeling the pressure. They need to stay ahead of the evolving digital experience landscape. They need to know which channels and touchpoints are most impactful, and they need to ensure the content they’re serving up is relevant and timely. Importantly, they need a content management system (CMS) that allows them to not only keep up with evolving business demands but that enables them to drive the business forward.
How content challenges impact business growth
Content teams create and deliver customer experiences through the CMS. Many companies are still working within the parameters of legacy systems, which can’t evolve as fast as demands are evolving, while others are lured by market hype and select a CMS that doesn’t really suit their business needs. Regardless, the reality is that leaders have a wide field of content technology choices today, but they may not realize just how important their choice is for business growth.
When the CMS doesn’t function properly and/or isn’t in sync with a company’s people and processes, the team can experience challenges like having to operate across multiple content repositories or managing more content with fewer resources. These challenges can then snowball into difficulty with consistently delivering engaging content.
Brightspot-commissioned research from Forrester Consulting last year found that nearly half (49%) of respondents say that content challenges like these make it harder to create cohesive customer journeys; 47% found inefficient content processes can delay new marketing experiences from coming to market. So yes—content is that important to business growth.
Every respondent struggled with at leas one content management challenge, led by technology complexity and the need to scale programs across digital channels and product lines.
Solving the scalability problem
Naturally, there’s no perfect answer for how to reduce (or ideally eliminate) content challenges to make more room for innovation and growth because everyone is working from a different starting point.
According to these Forrester study findings, most respondents said they’re working with assembled content management stacks of bought and/or homegrown tools. This includes CMS platforms, but it also includes editing suites, collaboration tools and other digital asset management solutions. For many, it's an intricate web of solutions that should work together seamlessly but usually don’t. Only 18% reported that they’re operating with one comprehensive content platform today. This is telling of a market that requires many more components and capabilities than ever to deliver the kind of experiences that customers have come to expect from the companies and brands with which they most frequently they engage. A single solution might work for your business today, but can it scale to handle the growing numbers of channels as well as third-party integrations and solutions of the future.
So, what exactly can leaders do to solve their content problems and therefore solve their scalability problem?
Brands too often rush into CMS implementations without carefully considering which family of tools will best support their people, workflows and goals.
First and foremost, know that if your technology isn’t working for you today—and isn’t allowing you to scale your program—it definitely won’t be doing so tomorrow. Nearly half (45%) of Forrester respondents acknowledged that optimized tools would help them address the need to scale their programs across digital properties and products. If that’s you, you should consider making a change.
And if you’re a leader already ready to make a change, remember to base your technology choices on business objectives, which include content objectives. This requires having a clear understanding of current content needs and capabilities and accurately forecasting future content needs. That way, instead of forcing your business’s content strategy into parameters provided by a particular CMS solution, you’re flipping the script and selecting the technology that fits into your strategy—and that can evolve as your approach evolves.
Knowing there’s no single right answer for everyone, and knowing that the complexity of expanding tech stacks can feel overwhelming, it’s also important to lean on integrators and managed services providers when you need help. Evolving your program to be better suited for business growth isn’t something you have to figure out alone. Allow tech experts and content connoisseurs to help you pinpoint challenges and identify solutions so that you can bridge capabilities as needed and scale efficiently and effectively.
We all know that “content is king” is a phrase for a reason. Developing and delivering quality content to customers (both new and existing) is critical to a brand’s success in a crowded market—and certainly to a company's future growth.
