Content: Needs & Considerations
Content needs and considerations
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.
Considerations When Choosing CMS Vendors
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:
- Intuitive dashboard: Admin dashboard that allows you to manage all tasks in content production and distribution
- Responsive themes: Ability to build or choose a theme to establish a consistent look and feel across your site
- Content editing and publishing tools: Create and publish different types of content, including images, videos, forms, and more
- Version control and back-ups: Save and track as you go, including having a back-up
- Multi-language content creation: Create different language variations of your pages
- Publishing controls: Assign different roles and levels of access to create a workflow for creating, approving, and releasing creative assets
- Built-in SEO tools: Optimize your content for search and improve your ranking on search engine results pages
- Robust integrations: Integrations with third-party software into your workflow so data can easily flow between applications (this includes social media, CRM, and marketing automation)
- Detail analytics: Built-in analytics to support content strategy refinement, or integrations with external solutions
- Pre-made templates: Single-page layouts to simplify your publishing process, whether pre-designed or custom
- Content staging: Functionality to stage and preview content before publishing
- Security: Built-in protections for your visitors’ data and your brand reputation
- Support: Extensive documentation and an engaged community
- Migration: Features and process for getting your data safely off your current platform and onto the new CMS
How content and content generation needs will change
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.
Contentful Spotlight
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.