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PRODUCT-LED GROWTH

Is your CMS efficiency being maximized?

Published June 10th, 2022

The pace of change within the Content Management System (CMS) market is staggering. As devices get more varied, users become more discerning and accessibility a necessity, it’s forcing content to be structured so it can go anywhere, do anything and yet keep its meaning and message intact.

Di Mace

Communications Specialist at Tiny


To achieve that goal, your CMS needs to efficiently manage your content.

Interfaces are the go-betweens for us and all kinds of critical tasks and the words that fill them need to be written, edited and structured in flexible ways. So how, without making different content for every new device, platform or channel, do you get that done? How do you efficiently make more of the content you create?

Your CMS is the key.

It needs to be efficient and productive, while you’re similarly proactive in the ways you produce and deliver content. Once you define your goals, plan your processes and use the right tools, it’s easier to build content in flexible ways, so that it better copes with our changing future.

What makes an efficient CMS?

Great content editing, usability, collaborative permissions, flexible digital marketing tools, cross-channel publishing, extensibility, and integration are all invaluable characteristics of an efficient CMS.

An efficient CMS also opens opportunities for creators — to present content in unique and interesting ways. It should allow your designers and developers to dictate the look and feel of your content while helping less skilled users to easily edit, manage and create content. It should also facilitate collaborative work, so that all team members (with varying permission levels) can do what they need to and keep the content production process moving.

How does your CMS control content?

Your CMS interface allows you to create new content, edit existing content, perform editorial processes on that content, and ultimately publish it — for people to consume, on their preferred device. That publishing function occurs through your website and, depending on the system, can extend to pushing it out on other digital channels.

In short, it allows you to deliver the right content, at the right time, in the right way to the right people. For those reasons, your CMS needs to efficiently support your content creation process.

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Content management process: how is content created

What is content?

Content is an investment. It can be consumed (on- and off-line) both immediately and for years to come, as well as being repurposed, rearranged, reformatted and republished.

Its ultimate goal, however, is to be consumed and evaluated by another human being.

In his seminal book, “The Content Management Bible”, author Bob Boiko dedicated five chapters to the deceptively simple question of what is content, and he wrote:

If you strip away all of the technology and terminology that we use to describe information systems, what do you have left? A simple and utterly commonplace idea: information systems help you talk to people who are not in front of you.

Given that it’s an investment, content therefore needs to be created, managed and maintained in purposeful ways, so the effort and resources used to create it, is maximized (and harvested).

How’s content created?

Content is created through an editorial process, to achieve a specific goal.

The editorial process:


Initiates

Prepares

Structures

Delivers information to your audience

It frequently involves the steps of:


Ideating

Drafting

Authoring

Editing

Reviewing

Approving

Versioning

Comparing

Controlling

Each of those editorial process steps is vital to the achievement of your content goals.

Tools to enhance your CMS editorial workflow

1. The content creation process

First, you need a goal and a plan. It needs to include what you want your content (and overall digital experience) to achieve, and the steps needed to achieve that goal.

Next, you need to efficiently create the content. During that process, there are lots of small, messy, subjective and sometimes imperfect decisions that your writers, subject matter experts and editors make when they’re sitting at their keyboard.

Each of those decisions, take your content in a different direction and deliver different outcomes along the buyer’s (or customer’s) journey. However regardless of those decisions, it’s a given that your content is rarely created once — it’s an iterative process, where changes happen before, during and after that initial surge of creation.

Therefore, your authors and editors need to be supported with flexible authoring tools. Those tools need to provide them with:

2. Content flexibility and accessibility

Your content needs to be consumed by as many people as possible — no matter their needs. That means built-in accessibility. Given that it’s become a legal requirement (not a nice to have), you can no longer risk your team being unprepared or your content being non-compliant.

At the bare minimum, content needs to have good contrast for readability, large icons and texts, and keyboard navigation. Better still, having an advanced accessibility checker built into your CMS makes sure your content:

  • Is compliant with company requirements
  • Is compliant with local laws
  • Is compliant with WCAG and ARIA standards
  • Points out accessibility issues
  • Highlights missing alt text
  • Automatically fixes the issue or suggests remedial options, before publishing.

Then there’s those international content projects. Here, a built-in multilingual spell checker is a must-have for your authors and editors. It needs to cut down on your publishing errors by:

  • Automatically activating when someone types in the editor
  • Spell checking in multiple languages (plus medical terms)
  • Letting you build a custom dictionary of words (including your company’s name) that’s globally accessible across your organization.

Extra features like these, help to speed your editorial workflow and improve the authoring experience for your subject matter experts.

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3. Omnichannel content

This is where things can get messy. Our omnichannel world demands a lot more of every CMS, and the content it contains. There’s so many devices and preferences, it’s no longer a case of building great customer journey content, that’s only seen on a desktop web browser.

In addition to websites, the modern customer experiences multiple touchpoints that rely on different screen sizes, channels, platforms, form factors, integrations and media formats. So, your content needs to suit smartphones, wearables, IoT, signage, augmented reality… and the list goes on.

Therefore, content needs to be structured so it can be distributed easily (without reworking or restructuring it) across all those places, in the right way at the right time.

Here, the editing and authoring experience is crucial. It needs to seamlessly integrate with your CMS (be it a headless, hybrid-headless or API-first one) so that it can reuse your content across every required channel.

Omnichannel may mean more systems, more integrations, more development, and more management. But on the human side, it means developers and content editors collaborating more closely to ensure content is at the center of all your human and digital experiences.

What’s the future of content management?

Sadly, there are no shortcuts to great content.

However, its production is made so much easier with the right plan, tools and processes in place. Avoid taking a haphazard editorial approach that ill-fits your buyer’s journey, by instead taking a ‘content-first approach’… where your content is tailored and modeled for re-use.

So that it reaches the right person, at the right time, in the right place.

READ our CMS Guide

Take the guesswork out of finding the right rich text editor for your current and future needs with our curated guide on The Six Problems Faced by Modern CMSs

Read more

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