Modern marketers produce many different types of content - blogs, websites, email newsletters, social media, and more. The term “content” now encompasses more than just written copy and has thus lead to the development of different systems to manage it. In the following sections, we’ll define Content Management Systems (CMS), Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMS) and Web Content Management Systems (WCMS) and then compare and contrast their functionalities and benefits.
CMS, EMS and WCMS Definitions
In one of our previous blogs, we covered the basics related to CMS, ECMS and WCMS similarities and differences, but technology moves fast and a lot has changed. Before diving into the details of the different platforms, we’re going to start with a definition of each:
- Content Management System
A CMS is the standard platform for managing different types of content and is readily available to all types of businesses. A CMS typically allows multiple users and provides a dashboard for organizing and managing structured content, such as blogs, photos, videos and more.
- Enterprise Content Management System
An Enterprise Content Management System is a more robust, powerful, content organization system. An ECMS includes all of the technologies used to capture, manage, store, and deliver content and documents related to an organization’s processes. Administrative rights and role management can be assigned within the ECMS, and it can integrate with other systems, such as a WCMS or Document Management System (DMS).
- Web Content Management System
A web content management system (WCMS) falls within the ECMS category, but is differentiated by its focus on web content. This software-based tool set provides a way to author, manage and maintain digital information on a website without prior knowledge of web programming or markup languages.
Comparing CMS, ECMS and WCMS
CMS, ECMS and WCMS are often mentioned as though they’re the same thing. However, this is incorrect, as an ECMS is an overarching organizational backbone, a CMS includes all types of media - documents, images, etc - and manages them from creation to archiving, and a WCMS is a subset of CMS focused solely on web content.
But, CMS and WCMS are not completely different and do share the following similarities:
- Provide editing functions and MS Office integration
- Can archive and be used for other library services
- Manage metadata
- Offer the ability to edit or approve workflows
- Have the same content copy storage for in-progress work or live environment/staging content
- Can take website snapshots and preserve content
- Provide content delivery for both desktop and mobile viewers
And, WCMS provides additional features, including the following:
- Retention of records and disposal, when appropriate
- Enterprise-wide workflows for business processes
- Enables storage hardware integration to prevent content duplication
- Preservation and archiving of digital assets
- Delivery of content to a desktop client, printer, or a different software as well as the web or mobile device
Until recently, there existed a strong division between the use of ECMS and WCMS; ECMS was mainly used for managing content within and enterprise, while WCMS was used for managing content outside of an enterprise. This siloed approach eventually lead to headaches for marketing teams, since today’s modern multichannel world often requires cross-integration to accomplish content management tasks. Thus, CMS has evolved and is now more adaptable and integrated.
Always Evolving CMS
Reaching customers in the digital world requires a multichannel approach. Marketers are now trying to reach customers on their mobile device, while browsing social media or by predicting their activity with artificial intelligence (AI). Thus, there’s a need for marketing tools to share information across multiple channels, quickly and with agility. As such, content management systems are evolving to support this more nuanced marketing experience and incorporating integration services platforms that use the Cloud to improve scalability and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).
The evolved CMS are taking advantage of recent AI functionalities to gain a deeper understanding of customers and to automate the process of image and video tagging. The robust customer insight data offers marketers the opportunity to personalize content and delve into context marketing, reaching potential customers any place and time with the right message. AI also helps the CMS improve the management of structured, and unstructured content, which in turn leads to a more predictive and accurate way to deliver content and drives monetization.
As CMS have evolved in functionality, they’ve also evolved in their ability to integrate with other software and platforms. A recent CMS development is that of a Headless CMS, which is a back-end only CMS built from the ground up as a content repository that stores content in the Cloud and makes it accessible via a RESTful API for display on any device. Additionally, modern CMS can also integrated with marketing automation tools to enable omnichannel email campaigns. Leading CMS solutions are now capable of cross-platform integration with numerous other platforms such as CRM and ERP, among others.
The ultimate benefit of using a CMS in conjunction with a CRM, or ERP, is to gain a greater view of customer and prospective customer data and to then improve the customer experience based on intent, history and context. And diving further into the operations chain: a CMS can also be integrated with back-end systems for catalog and inventory management, tracking and shipping across multiple stores and warehouse locations and more. With these tools enabled to speak to each other, marketers can then test content, sales, campaigns and other outreach initiatives and gauge the results against sales numbers to maximize their efforts.
As customers spend more and more time on mobile devices, social media, etc., the drive to successfully launch contextual marketing efforts is ever growing. CMS have evolved in order to manage all of these digital marketing efforts and now include features such as Digital Asset Management (DAM), Personalization, Testing & Targeting, Portals, Consumer Analytics, Site Search (and others) and more. These evolved CMS platforms, like Sitecore, enable businesses to make better decisions about marketing efforts, while also providing the infrastructure to grow, and change, over time.