Does Your Web Site Have a Content Management Problem?

At the end of the 90s, research forecasts of online retail sales were aiming for a modest $15 billion by the end of 2003. Compare that with recent figures from Forrester Research indicating that online retail sales in the US alone reached $175 billion in 2007, up 21% from $144.6 billion in 2006. And what’s more, despite a predicted slowdown as the industry matures, it will still add on approximately $30 billion in revenue every year for the next five years.

Unfortunately, online marketing doesn’t come in a pre-packaged kit with friendly do-it-yourself instructions. There is only one really important rule for online marketing: the best content that’s most accessible earns the most, which is why a content management problem is one of the most serious obstacles to a revenue-generating online presence.

What a good Web site can do for your business

The business benefits of a good corporate or sales Web site are pretty much old hat now. But considering how many organizations ignore these basic principles, it would do well to go over them again:

• Reach more people

It’s the one advantage that has made the Internet the best thing since sliced bread: time and space become irrelevant. Thus, your Web site is able to reach out to many more customers than your brick-and-mortar store ever could. This becomes particularly relevant when you consider that 210 million Americans alone went online in 2007, and by 2012, over 1.2 billion people are slated to go online.

• The online-offline connection

The returns from an online presence shouldn’t always be measured only in terms of online sales. As one study discovered, 51 % of customers surveyed researched products online before buying them offline. Thus, the study pegs the dollar value of offline sales influenced by online research to rise from $400 billion to $1 trillion in the next five years.

• Lead generation and branding

Two key measures of an effective Web site is how many leads it generates and how much it helps build a brand image. Consider the results of a survey by Forrester Research: 42.1% of respondents felt that online marketing was an important marketing tactic for generating quality leads, next only to in-person events, trade magazines and public relations. For online branding too, the tally for online marketing stood at a strong 40%. 

• Cost effective advertising

Online advertising and marketing spending is expected to undergo a compounded annual growth of 27% over the next four years, reaching $61 billion by 2012. An idea of why this is happening comes from a study by the Target Corporation which found that in terms of ROI, internet advertising performed two-and-a-half times better than magazines and 15 times better than television.

So, does your Web site have a content management problem?

Although most organizations understand the fundamentals of content production, there are a number of problems that occur due primarily to bad content management. To discover if you have a content management problem, just answer the following questions about your company’s Web site:

• Do customers have trouble finding what they need?
• Is a lot of the information they find outdated or wrong?
• Is content overwritten or erased accidentally and are previous versions unavailable?
• Is navigation changing from page to page?
• Does the homepage feel out of place on the site?
• Is there difficulty ensuring that content is authored and audited by the right people?
• Are the right people not able to put up content because of access control issues?
• Is content not being updated quickly enough?
• Are there difficulties in publishing, changing the format of or removing content from the site?
• Does all the content exist in separate silos?
• Are there difficulties in tailoring content towards specific customers?

If you answered “yes” to all or most or even some of these questions, then there is definitely a need for a quality content management solution.

What your CMS can do

What a CMS solution primarily does for your organization is to introduce a certain amount of automation and workflow structure into the content creation and publishing process, thus removing all the errors that come from ad-hoc publishing routines that occur in a plain-HTML process:

• Distribute content creation

The primary advantage of a CMS system is that it puts content creation in the hands of the subject matter experts, who are usually non-technical business users. This means that it is much easier to put the content creation responsibility in the hands of a wider pool of employees, without requiring a technical team to constantly be on hand to make changes or updates. This also ensures that all content is timely and up-to-date.

• Ensure content and brand consistency

Putting content creation in the hands of a larger pool of contributors also requires greater vigilance about content and brand consistency. Quality CMS solutions ensure that all common parts of any message such as the information about products, services, company profile, logos, and so on are single-sourced; thus ensuring that every message going out is properly representative of the organization.

• Improve usability

An important contribution of a quality CMS solution is the improvements on information architecture it can provide. This contributes directly to the quality of user experience on a Web site as well as decreasing the time required for information retrieval.

• Prevent liability

The back end of content management not only involves ensuring that content is authored by the right people but also that it passes through the right approval channels and is auditable. In Web environments working on HTML, the lack of expertise makes the review and approval process more haphazard and cumbersome. A CMS, on the other hand, brings some of the rigor that is commonly associated with print publication, ensuring that every piece of content passes through all the correct approval channels. Also since Web content is so ephemeral, every version of any published content must be captured in order to minimize liability of the organization. Content management systems provide just such a trail.

• Ensure compliance

One of the most difficult aspects of the current information explosion is the tightrope walk between keeping up with competition while ensuring regulatory or other compliance. Here a CMS helps by ensuring that all updates and deletions of content are consistent across the Web site, thus preventing liability from stray pieces of content.

The business benefits

There are a number of significant business advantages from the quality and workflow improvements delivered by an efficient CMS system:

• A CMS helps marketers respond effectively to new marketing challenges by allowing them access to Web resources without being at the mercy of over-stressed technical staff.
• A CMS ensures more efficient scaling of the technical team by putting publishing in non-technical hands and freeing up IT for important technical tasks like building applications.
• It ensures quality, accuracy, value and timeliness of content by ensuring that subject matter experts are free to publish content without the unnecessary mediation of technical personnel. And this is above the cost advantages gained by not needing technical assistance for every small modification.
• It improves usability and information retrieval times and therefore contributes to user satisfaction, especially in an age of more ruthless and less patient online user behavior.
• The organization’s branding is also more effectively controlled without requiring significant costs to maintain the structure and consistency of design and branding.
• A content management system fosters greater knowledge innovation by freeing up content from traditional, static silos and allowing greater interaction between an organization and its customers.