Omnichannel retail marketing encompasses all the interactions and touchpoints a customer has with your brand. Good omniretail marketing makes customers feel like every action is a continuation of the previous action, optimizing every touchpoint to create meaningful customer journeys. This means marketers need a strong understanding of where and how customers engage with your brand.
Retail brands use a content management system (CMS) as a backend repository to store and manage all of the brand’s content. Using APIs enables your content to then be published to any channel, device, or digital experience seamlessly. Creating omniretail experiences freely across channels requires a modern CMS that is front-end agnostic and uses APIs to deliver content.
To choose the best CMS for your business, you first need to ensure its features align with your needs and goals. If, for example, you’re interested in optimizing your content for search engines, you may want to consider a technology partner with built-in SEO tools. Or perhaps your brand has a distinct look and feel that requires custom themes that are also responsive.
Here are some key CMS features that brands need to consider when making their choice:
As your retail brand scales, so will your content needs across all channels. This will include content for sales, promotions, seasonal changes, personalization, and much more. Once you move to a modular architecture, the possibilities of content creation and marketing are expanded. Segmentation created from customer data will give you the opportunity to create specific and meaningful marketing campaigns or personalization touchpoints.
If you’ve moved to a new content management system, the marketing team may require more staff to manage and create the new content being leveraged across the platform and they will definitely need to be trained on the new functionality of your chosen CMS.
In today’s digital-first world, content is the customer experience. Whether you're a customer or an employee, you interact through content, you differentiate using content, and you achieve your goals with content. Content is what powers every single experience throughout the customer lifecycle— from virtual window-shopping to post-sale loyalty programs.
Retailers that are showing the way have found the secret sauce to harnessing the power of content that exists everywhere (in their DAMs, PIMs, other CMSes, etc.). How? Through the power of a composable content platform, which unlocks their siloed digital content and helps teams identify new ways to reuse and remake that content into fresh digital experiences.
To learn more about how Contentful can help you make the most of your content, click here.