Content management systems (CMS) are a key component for any commerce business. They play a big part in powering a retailer’s online presence and helping them to create the rich product stories their buyers expect, powering fast and agile digital experiences.
But there are a lot of CMS options out there that are likely not cutting it, and more specifically, not cutting it for your business needs. Similar to how website content needs to be updated regularly to keep it fresh and relevant, updating your CMS is an essential part of website maintenance, and essential also for facilitating business growth. While sticking with a familiar CMS might seem like the easier option, an outdated CMS can introduce hidden friction across your entire content supply chain.
Here are five reasons why you should consider updating your CMS. We’ll explore the main benefits of upgrading, from improved cost efficiency and security to greater creative freedom and the ability to scale for omnichannel experiences.
1. Cost efficiency: avoiding unnecessary expenses
An outdated CMS often incurs hidden expenses such as increased maintenance costs, security vulnerabilities, and inefficient workflows. These issues can lead to costly data breaches, frequent downtime, and higher labor costs due to the manual handling of tasks. And fixing these issues as they arise can lead to higher costs in the long run.
Upgrading to a modern CMS increases cost efficiency by streamlining operations through the automation of repetitive tasks and intuitive, low-code interfaces for marketers. This significantly reduces the reliance on developer teams for content updates, allowing your teams to publish faster and focus on value-creating initiatives. Combined with improved security features and enhanced scalability, this means lower, more predictable costs as your business evolves and grows.
2. Unlock creativity beyond restrictive templates
More traditional CMS options are generally out-of-the-box and driven by templates, so you might start to find that your website looks similar to others brands and retailers. Templates are great if you’re a new business and have little technical expertise, but templates are also restrictive, and mean that you’re confined to the look and feel of what the CMS will allow, rather than what you envisage for your brand. There are generally limits with the UX design principles you can apply, so your brand identity gets deprioritized.
Probably the most exciting reason to upgrade your CMS is the additional features and enhanced functionality it will provide. You’ll benefit from either more efficient code, low code or no code, depending on the CMS you choose, which enables a faster, more responsive website. With an improved back-end interface and more front-end capabilities, you can create a digital experience that will delight your customers, boosting engagement and increasing conversions.
3. Easily add new customer touchpoints for a cohesive omnichannel experience
Shopping behavior is continually evolving and while brands and retailers once only had to worry about the in-store experience, the purchase journey is no longer linear. Today, most consumers will switch between many different channels and touchpoints before deciding to buy. They expect to be able to seamlessly interact with your brand and shop wherever they choose. And post-sale, they will continue to use different channels to engage with you.
If you put a roadblock in their way, you risk losing them. But a lot of traditional CMSs aren’t built to cater for the omnichannel experience that your customers expect. They’re built for desktop-first, focusing on one single sales channel, meaning that it’s a lot harder (and more costly) to integrate other touchpoints.
A modern CMS enables retailers to build and maintain a cohesive omnichannel experience across websites, mobile apps and social media, ensuring that product information and messaging is uniform across all touchpoints. Brands and retailers can create a unified and engaging customer experience, making it easier for their shoppers to make a purchase decision, and driving loyalty and higher sales.
The Amplience CMS empowers you to “create once, publish everywhere”, and deliver the same content to multiple different channels simultaneously, using integrated tools and APIs. You can create your assets or content once in a single platform and optimize the presentation for each channel, helping you to successfully drive your omnichannel strategy. And with real-time preview and visualizations, you have full confidence in the experiences you’re building.
4. You can deliver the right localized content to your audience, wherever they are in the world
A traditional CMS isn’t built for localization and because content producers and editors are heavily reliant on development teams for launching into new markets, content localization can be a very slow process, disabling the agility and reactivity that commerce businesses need to be successful. While there is an option to use custom plugins to translate content, these can negatively impact performance, scalability and security.
And content localization isn’t just about translating content! Brands and retailers also need to consider cultural nuances and regional differences to truly optimize their content for the intended audience. With a modern, headless CMS, like Amplience’s Dynamic Content, you benefit from increased localization capabilities, so you can maintain a relevant, engaging digital experience, wherever your customers are in the world. Our CMS provides two methods for localizing content:
Field level localization – where content producers create a single content item with fields for each supported locale.
Content item level localization – where content producers create a separate content item for each locale.
Localization is crucial to successful business growth, and drives increased engagement and trust, which in turn boosts customer loyalty and ultimately, conversions. This process can be further streamlined using Workforce, our task-driven AI agent solution. It can automate repetitive localization and transcreation tasks, turning a potential bottleneck into a seamless content flow.
5. You need scalable technology to support your business growth
A traditional CMS often limits scalability because of its tightly coupled architecture. A modern, headless architecture decouples the front-end experience from the back-end content, providing the foundation for an evolution into a cognitive content system. Based on business needs, brands and retailers can add, remove or change presentation layers as needed to accommodate changes in traffic or usage patterns. They can easily scale up or down without having to worry about the underlying content management system.
Additionally, a modern CMS facilitates easy integration with other systems and applications that can streamline workflows and improve productivity. It provides businesses with the flexbility and agility they need to adapt to changing market conditions, helping them to scale their content creation and delivery efforts more efficiently.
This scalability is crucial for growth because it allows you to add new customer touchpoints, such as mobile apps or in-store displays, and handle increasing traffic without having to re-platform. It provides the flexibility your business needs to adapt and evolve.
So, is it time to move away from the traditional CMS?
An outdated CMS is more than just a piece of technology. It’s a constraint on your entire content supply chain, limiting your brand’s ability to move at the speed of your ideas. By evolving to a modern platform, you empower your teams with the automation, flexibility, and creative freedom needed to thrive in a distributed, global market.
If you want to find out more about how the Amplience platform can support your commerce business, get in touch with us today.
