Critical Factors When Choosing a Modern CMS

Finding the right CMS can be hard. In this blog, we explore what to look for as you consider your various options.

For businesses today, providing an engaging customer experience across all digital touchpoints is paramount to success. From a marketing perspective, it is crucial that content is distributed across all available devices that customers are likely to use. This includes websites for laptops, tablets and mobile as well as content for other devices like wearables. Importantly, this content needs to be on-brand and consistent across all platforms—at all times.

The easiest way for marketers to ensure their communications are unified is by using a content management system (CMS). The right CMS enables marketers to update content with ease and control how it appears on each digital platform. Additionally, the CMS most suited to a business will have the added benefit of strengthening brand and messaging unity across all devices, while delivering a seamless experience for customers.

What to Look for in Content Management System

Not all CMS platforms are the same, and it is important to bear this in mind when selecting what is right for your business and your marketing team. First, you’ll want to select a CMS with a headless function. In other words, this is software that separates content distribution abilities from frontend web design functions. This will enable marketing professionals to distribute content across many platforms—not just the company website—without adding more complicated content management systems.  

Secondly, your CMS should be easy to deploy without putting a strain on your IT resources. Ultimately, you want your marketing team to be able to manage and maintain your CMS themselves, providing them with the autonomy and agility they need in today’s ever-changing digital world. This also enables your IT team to focus on mission-critical tasks instead of handling routine content updates.

For any marketer, data is crucial for increasing campaign effectiveness and driving engagement, so a good CMS system should offer a level of personalization. You want to be able to identify where users are located and what areas of your site they are exploring, so that you can then send them content that is based on their behavior. This is only possible through a CMS that has analytical capabilities—such as Sitefinity. The “Enterprise” edition of Sitefinity is a digital experience cloud that can track users throughout a website based on their activity. So depending on which pages they land on, what downloads they save and which forms they choose to fill out, your teams can use the powerful predictive and prescriptive analytics capabilities that come built-in with Sitefinity to determine how to best engage with your potential or existing customers.

Another key feature to look for in a CMS is whether it enables marketers to manage multiple languages and related websites simultaneously. This is particularly important in diverse regions like Asia-Pacific, where you not only need to support pages in different languages but also content that speaks to unique audiences with their own cultural values.

For all businesses, security is of the utmost importance. Virtually all CMS platforms have been designed to be hard for hackers to crack and provide an additional layer of protection for personal information that may have been entered by customers into your site. A good indicator of the level of security that such software offers is to always check that it complies with laws across the globe. EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is certainly waking up the world on just how much our privacy is being violated. However, it wasn’t the first. Countries around the world have adopted comparable data privacy laws, including Singapore’s and Thailand’s Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA), and Australia’s Privacy Act.

The final tip is to ensure that your CMS allows for integration. Sitefinity enables this in two ways: firstly, as a marketplace for integration by simply adding to Sitefinity’s integration feature. Secondly, Sitefinity allows for coding and building other software if nothing is available in the marketplace by connecting to application programing interfaces.

What Makes Sitefinity Different?

The most standout feature for Sitefinity is how simple it is to use from a marketing professional’s point of view. The interface is intuitive and an in-depth knowledge of coding is genuinely not required. Sitefinity also enables users to upscale their communications offerings by expanding beyond their website and traditional content distribution channels.

A case in point is ABB, a global leader in power and automation technologies. ABB maintains 111 websites in various countries and for various products, and this number continues to grow. With Sitefinity, ABB’s site editors are able to edit content quickly and accurately across all 111 sites, which consists of country sites, solution sites and multiple portals used for intranets and ecommerce, including languages and personalization. Moreover, with the platform’s user-friendly UI and multisite management capabilities, ABB was able to transition all 111 sites in less than a year.

Sitefinity can also integrate with numerous applications beyond mere devices, creating opportunities for greater engagement with more prospective customers than before.

Sitefinity vs. Open Source

While open-source platforms certainly do have advantages—namely, they are free and encourage community collaboration—there are also far fewer controls in place to ensure development is going as planned. As a result, there is a heightened security risk, which places further strain on IT resources to pay close attention to security patches required to restrict access to the source code.

With Sitefinity, the source code is locked down and anything that gets developed is automatically checked as progress is made. Plus, there are security patches that have been specifically designed for your website. Sitefinity also requires fewer IT resources than an open-source platform because the user experience has been designed for ease of use.

But perhaps most importantly of all, there comes a stage in any business where it is expedient to migrate to a company-backed platform, such as Sitefinity, from an open-source platform. Maintenance and management costs will eventually get too high on open-source, and the security risks will be far too great.

That’s why CMS like Sitefinity is the future for digital marketers—both in Asia-Pacific and globally. But don't take our word for it—request a Sitefinity demo and see how our platform can help you easily manage your digital presence.

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