Developing Your Audience With a Content Management System
For consistency, you need a system that has the ability to centralize content and deliver it to multiple information sources, everything from campaigns, direct e-mail newsletters and podcasts to advertisements, and each piece of content must deliver a single consistent message.
While one key characteristic of the Internet is speed, another equal characteristic is usability. A Web site must be visually appealing and simple to navigate and use. Parameters such as Web site design, landing pages and context-related content are absolutely critical for attracting visitors.
Measuring the Success of Your Online Initiatives
A competitive economy always demands more value for every dollar spent. While the opportunities that can be explored via an online medium are immense, so are the challenges.
As seen in most organizations, e-marketing strategies are disconnected from each other and exist as islands of information. So, you may have analytics software that gives you the details about the most popular sections in your Web site, a CRM application that creates a complete picture about your customer, and email marketing software that sends out customized mails to selected lists of people who have visited or downloaded content from your site. To top that, you have new mediums such as blogs and podcasts adding to the content mix. You may also have explored different mediums such as buying ad space on popular Web sites, or placing syndicated content such as white papers or Webcasts on specialized Web sites such as Bitpipe or Knowledgestorm.
Now, unless these different pieces of the content landscape are connected and integrated with each other, the ROI of such initiatives will remain unclear. For instance, can you tell if a particular white paper has contributed to a sale, or which particular campaign is helping you convert leads into wins?
To measure the success of an online strategy, you must have an integrated mechanism that enables your organization to track the success at a micro as well as at a macro level.
How Can a CMS help?
If quality of content, ease of publishing, and making your Web site search engine friendly are critical success factors, then a Content Management System (CMS) scores on all counts. A CMS is a tool that eases the creation, maintenance and management of a Web site.
Listed below are a few factors that show how a CMS can help you build a good quality Web site, while ensuring that your Internet audience keeps on growing
· Boosting Search Engine Rankings
If the world of meta tags, anchor text, and keyword density make you feel that search engine optimization (SEO) is rocket science, a CMS can demystify SEO techniques and give business owners the power to fully make their Web sites search engine friendly. A CMS can also help non-technical people create page titles, URLs and meta tags while also suggesting keywords that would make sense to spiders crawling the Web site.
· Creating a Good Navigation Structure
Just as human beings like being given directions, search engine spiders too are fond of Web sites that have good structure and make finding content an easy task. A CMS can automatically create navigation paths, helping search engines go deep into Web sites to find and index relevant content. The more Web pages search engines find, the greater are the chances of the Web site being ranked higher.
A CMS can also enable organizations to maintain W3C compliance for enabling a good structure for their Web sites. The W3C stands for the World Wide Web Consortium and provides the guidelines by which Web sites and Web pages should be structured and created. Compliance helps insure that your Web site functions the same when accessed from any browser or device. It also ensures that proper use of standards which in turn, helps search engines interpret content easily. Further, CMS help create a comprehensive sitemap which ensures that search engines can follow and index each link.
· Improving the Speed and Ease of Publishing Content
Organizations can accelerate their speed of publishing content by giving subject matter experts tools that simple, and intuitive to use. And when you have good quality content being updated regularly, it is a matter of time before the Internet audience takes note of your organization’s efforts.
· Improved Web site Searchability
Since a Web site CMS manages all content consistently, built-in search engines make finding content on a Web site fast and easy.
· Improved Measurability
When you integrate the CMS with your CRM or Sales Force applications, the chances of success increase exponentially. For example, detailed information about the surfing habits of your buyers, or preferences selected during choosing newsletters, can be used by the CRM system to deliver targeted, customized offers to prospective customers.
Similarly, integration between the CMS and email marketing software can allow marketers to create campaigns using the CMS, and launch them using the email marketing software. Registrations, enquiries and user feedback can be automatically captured, and analyzed further using an analytics tool.
As you can see, this gives marketers a closed-loop lead generation tool – tracking buyer habits from surfing by using Web analytics tools, providing one view of the customer through the CRM, and then capturing the feedback and improving it further by analyzing the results of the campaign. Besides the ability to track the leads to the sales, an integrated system gives organizations the ability to track effectiveness of campaigns, with an accurate analysis of data for predicting current and future market trends. These statistics can be used by organizations to enhance their e-marketing strategies, and fine tune the methods to attract the users they want.
The Hosted Advantage
If you opt for a CMS delivered using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, the benefits get amplified. You have no hassles of managing hardware or purchasing software – all you do is rent the software from the service provider. As a customer, you just pay a fixed subscription fee on a monthly or quarterly basis and leave the task of managing, maintaining and upgrading the software to the vendor.
Organizations also save costs as they do not have to budget for a developer who tweaks the HTML code, or a Webmaster who actually takes care of hosting. Some SaaS players even provide a dedicated account manager with an escalation path for support. By using a SaaS model, organizations can also cut down on their risk and choose different functionalities as they grow.
Further, as billing is on a monthly or quarterly basis, costs are spread across the lifetime of a product’s usage. This is an extremely attractive value proposition when compared to the traditional software model, where costs are paid upfront and the risk of product implementation and adoption is totally on the customer.
For more info: http://www.crownpeak.com
Robrose
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