CMSGartner listed 20 leading systems in its last Magic Quadrant for WCM and mentioned a total of 75 established vendors, whereof some of them offer today excellent digital marketing suites: Adobe, CoreMedia, Imperia, Infopark, Kentico, Liferay, Magnolia, OpenText, Sitecore, Umbraco, WordPress ...  Plenty of other CMS vendors, however, promise similar marketing benefits to win our favor.

Indeed, all CMS offer similarly good basic functionality, but nowadays that is no longer enough: The web has become extremely important to business, as it changed how people get informed. Fortunately, some CMS, like Sitecore, can amazingly do much more than just maintain content, by combining Content Management with E-Commerce and Digital Marketing, offering more sophisticated CMS solutions and serving different needs.

Marketing, editors, IT, sales, or executive management - each area has important wishes regarding the web:

  • Marketing, for instance, wants to ensure that the web pages are displayed properly on smartphone and tablet, as well as rolling out new websites easier on an international level.
  • Editors want to design forms themselves and optimize deals with A / B testing.
  • IT wants to consolidate the smorgasbord of content management tools and systems the marketing department is making use of.
  • Sales wants to find out with CRM what the customers are doing on the website (e.g. download of a brochure means interest).
  • The management would like to know the web and digital marketing ROI and the impact of CMS on the company's success.

Therefore you should create an ambitious, well-assessed wish list that way. You will see how much more your CMS will suddenly need to be able to do, to be able to deliver. Then, take this wish list and discuss it with your existing CMS provider or your agency.

In addition, you can read the WCMS reports from Gartner and Forrester to learn more about the strengths and weaknesses of the current leading systems, or look for an experienced, certified service provider which knows all about your desired CMS and offers services such as consulting, design, and online marketing as well.

By Daniela La Marca