A Roadmap to Digital Success in 2020 and Beyond

Digital experiences are determining the fates of businesses across the globe and at the center of this disruption lies the CMS. Picking the right CMS to be the foundation of your Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is necessary for engaging today’s customers with the digital experiences they’ve come to expect.

Doing Business in the Age of Digital Experience

For companies across the globe, the terrible teens of the 21^st century have been a time of major change and upheaval. Enterprises and even entire industries have come and gone, with biggest winners of the past decade being the ones that are best able to leverage digital to disrupt the business landscape and empower their own agility.

At the center of this shift is the customer experience. Today’s customers just expect more from brands. They’re done jumping through hoops—they expect brands to engage them on their own terms, where they want and when they want. If your customer experience doesn’t actively empower your audience to accomplish their goals and answer questions quickly, you’re going to lose them to a competitor that does.

Reaching Digital Maturity

If the past decade was the terrible teens for digital experience, I think the next decade will be the coming-of-age story. Businesses around the globe are realizing that a great customer experience is no longer just a nice-to-have—it’s vital to their very survival. The challenge now is executing on their visions and bringing these digital experiences to life.

Over the past six months, I’ve been touring around the United States extensively and talking to different people representing businesses of varying sizes across a number of industries. While each industry has its own unique perspective on what digital experience means to them and how to execute on it, the technology and strategy remain consistent. They all keep coming back to the same thing: the importance of a digital experience platform (DXP).

Based on what I've heard across my travels, there is a critical need for businesses to change the way they are engaging with their customers, partners and employees. A DXP can help with engagement, acting as a strategic interlocking of important digital tools and technologies that solve many of the challenges modern businesses face, including:

• Managing multiple sites—and doing so at scale
• Serving content across all modern and emerging digital touchpoints
• Connecting and integrating with a growing back office of enterprise and marketing apps
• Integrating with the growing number of data sources to capitalize on this valuable insight
• Delivering a persistent experience that spans all channels and customer engagement touchpoints

More and more, people have been approaching us to discuss how to bring DXP into their leadership conversations as they see the vision and benefits a DXP can offer their organizations. This makes sense, since DXP is still a relatively new concept, and to further complicate things, every analyst and vendor out there seems to have their own unique spin on what a DXP is and what makes for the ideal DXP.

If there is one through line in all of this confusion, it’s that the CMS is the foundation of a successful DXP. Content remains the key to engaging today’s customers, so you need a CMS that enables you to quickly and easily create and manage the content that powers winning digital experiences. This is why the CMS lies at the center of any successful DXP.

A Roadmap to DXP Success

Most modern companies have a CMS. Whether it’s a free open-source solution like WordPress or a proprietary one, Content Management Systems are commonplace today. However, your CMS may not be setting you up for success in terms of your digital experience platform strategy. The scope of a DXP extends well beyond what the conventional CMS can deliver, including capabilities like digital asset management, third-party integrations, personalization, predictive and prescriptive analytics and more.

So, what should you be looking for in a CMS that will be the cornerstone of your digital experience strategy for the next 10 years and beyond? Glad you asked!

Since I've been traveling so much recently, I decided to come up with an easy-to-follow roadmap that will help you arrive at your digital destination—a CMS that will set your digital experience strategy up for success, both today and in the future. Just ask yourself these seven questions as you evaluate your CMS options and you'll be on the road to digital success in no time.

Download Roadmap