Digital marketing teams aren’t the typical poster children for content management systems—with a CMS more commonly held as territory for newsroom and corporate communications teams. But we’re here to tell you that that’s outdated thinking.
Think about yourself as a consumer, and your own day-to-day digital habits. You’re checking email, reading websites, browsing social media, searching for information, and so on. There’s a digital marketer hiding somewhere in all of those channels, inserting their messages in hopes of “meeting you where you are.” As a consumer, you probably also respond differently to different content across those channels—maybe you always ignore the sponsored ads at the top of search results, but a quippy headline on Instagram gets you to click.
All of those creatives—whether it’s SEO, SEM, social-media marketing, videos, blogs, ebooks, webinars, you name it—involve varying levels of content creation and management. So why wouldn’t a digital marketing team want—and benefit—from the power of a CMS?
The role of CMS in digital marketing
First, let’s cover the role of a CMS within a digital marketing team, as well as the potential benefits. Most CMSs are designed to enable non-technical users to create, manage and edit content using an intuitive UI. In addition to that, a CMS can also:
- Simplify content creation and publishing. Reducing barriers to content creation can magnify a team’s efforts—potentially attracting (and retaining!) customers with additional, and more engaging content.
- Provide built-in SEO features. SEO can help boost the ranking of content in search engines.
- Integrate with other systems within a team’s marketing stack. For example, content might be created and edited using the CMS’ workflow tools, then distributed to an email service provider like MailChimp for delivery. This type of integrated CMS approach can improve overall performance and effectiveness of campaigns.
Let’s dig more deeply into each of these areas to truly understand the benefits of a CMS to a digital marketing team.
How a CMS can simplify content creation for digital marketers
There’s no understating the sheer volume of content that a digital marketing team creates—from newsletters and Instagram stories, to white papers, e-books and webinars, as well as website content like homepages, landing pages, blogs,and articles (such as, ahem, this one). The marketers behind those messages are crafting, managing, deploying, tracking and testing performance—of every single piece of creative.
Each of those content types can benefit from a CMS, where content creators and editors can then collaborate from a single source of truth. Many CMS systems also provide workflow tools, which help ensure content is fully vetted by the appropriate stakeholders before publication, as well as powerful preview and scheduling tools so content is always deployed perfectly, at the desired time.
How a CMS can enhance SEO
In addition to streamlined content creation and publishing, digital marketing teams can also leverage a CMS to further their SEO goals.
Here are a handful of the benefits that many a CMS will provide a marketing team:
- Customizable page elements. A CMS should let you customize a page’s title, meta description and the alt text of images—these are critical to on-page SEO, because they tell search engines what the content is about.
- Control over permalinks and redirects. A good CMS will let you create and edit 301 redirects, which allow you to send visitors and search engines from one URL to another. (This allows you to avoid broken links and preserve your SEO ranking if you retire content.)
- Taxonomy elements. Most CMSs will allow you to organize your content into top-level pages and navigation, as well as categories and tags (aka taxonomy). A site’s taxonomy also helps search engines understand what the site is about.
- Internal linking. A CMS will allow for the creation of internal links to other pages within a site, which also helps search engines crawl and discover all the content.
- Performant and responsive themes. A CMS should offer themes that work well on desktop, tablet and mobile—meaning the site loads quickly for users on mobile, which is a ranking factor for search engines.
These are just a handful of the SEO benefits a CMS can offer a digital marketing team—there are plenty of others, like blogging features, as well as SSL certificates, XML sitemaps and built-in analytics tools. But now let’s turn our attention outward, toward other systems the CMS might integrate with to benefit digital marketing teams.
Integrating your CMS with your digital marketing tools
If there is one thing we know about marketers, it’s that they love tools—so the thought of integrating a CMS with all of those digital marketing tools can seem daunting. Never fear! There’s no need to connect the CMS to every single system—here are a handful of technology partnerships to focus on, where the benefits to your team will most immediately be clear.
- Analytics tools. These tools are tracking the traffic and behavior of your website, as well as visitors to any landing pages—most teams are either using Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. A CMS integrated with these tools can allow you to track performance of your site and campaigns directly within the CMS, making your team more efficient by reducing context switching and distractions.
- CRM tools. These tools are tracking your relationships with your customers (and your leads)—the most popular CRM tools are HubSpot and Salesforce. Connecting your CRM and CMS can help enhance customer experience and loyalty, particularly important if you’re using a personalization approach where customers receive bespoke messaging according to their preferences.
- Email marketing tools. Teams are using these tools to create and distribute email content to subscribers (as well as to manage the list or lists of subscribers). There are a wide range of providers in this category, with MailChimp, Constant Contact and Campaign Monitor chief among them. An integration between your CMS and this system can streamline the “create” step here—allowing teams to build newsletter content within the CMS and the email provider managing the distribution.
- Social media tools. These tools manage and monitor a team’s social media presence, as well as create and distribute content to subscribers or followers. There are also a wide range of options here, with some of the most popular being Hootsuite and Sprout Social. Integrating the CMS with these tools allows teams to fully coordinate social posts across digital marketing efforts.
- Automation tools. These tools are the secret workhorse behind many a digital marketing team, with 76% of companies reporting using automation in their efforts. These are tools like Zapier, which perform handoffs between systems—for example, sending a new newsletter subscriber from MailChimp to the CRM via a “Zap.”
These are just a handful of the systems a CMS might need to integrate with; focusing within these integration areas should move the needle the most in terms of efficiency wins for digital marketing teams.
Maximizing your digital marketing with the right CMS
As you can see, embracing a CMS is a move the wisest digital marketers will consider making in 2024. A CMS has the potential to simplify content creation, enhance SEO performance and seamlessly integrate with analytics, CRM, automation and other platforms. This strategic approach to digital marketing content creation has the potential to not only streamline workflows, but also to amplify the effectiveness of campaigns
