How an Agile CMS Complements Modern B2B Marketing Endeavors
An agile CMS is essential for ensuring timely, seamless experiences for B2B businesses. The misalignment between disjointed content systems often bothers B2B organizations. As a result, marketers struggle with redundant, old, or unsearchable content that can be very troublesome for organizations to handle. That's why it gets extremely challenging for marketers to engage with customers and prospects across multiple channels and touchpoints in a timely fashion.
Headless content management systems were designed to tackle these obstacles; however, in some cases, they made things worse. These CMSs addressed the needs of the developers by separating the frontend experiences from the backend repository; however, this introduced new bottlenecks, and marketing teams lost control of optimizing the experience process.
Fortunately for B2B marketers, a new type of CMS is emerging that does away with the limitations of a headless CMS.
The term “Agile CMS” was coined by Forrester to describe a type of CMS. Such CMS satisfies and aligns IT teams with marketing practitioners and provides them with a common set of tools and a shared purpose.
Agile CMS thus is replacing the headless CMS. An agile CMS shares many principles with Agile software development. Such software is designed to be used by multiple teams across an organization, and allows for rapid iteration to adjust with the content requirements of the target audience groups, and helps drive seamless customer and prospect experiences across omnichannel.
The need for such an agile approach is driven by rapidly shifting audience expectations and the requirement for internal tools that support and intensify the results of successful collaboration.
The Essential Elements of an Agile CMS
An agile CMS needs to address the needs of B2B marketers as well as the developers. According to Forrester, it includes the following 4 parts:
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The Content Hub
This is a single repository for people who work with normalized content such as marketers, campaign managers, and content writers. It acts as a single location where the marketing team can find and manage all content.
An agile CMS’s content hub is designed with marketing end users and they are mostly designed for developers. This is quite unlike other CMS solutions.
- Tools for Planning and Collaboration
When adopting agile methodologies collaboration and communication become absolute imperatives. This concept extends to the makeup of an agile CMS. It capitalizes on the best practices and ensures constant feedback and communication among everyone involved allowing collaborative planning for new content and experience projects.
- Content Services
An agile CMS adopts the fundamental principles of headless by providing API-first content services to create, manage and track content at scale, powered by intelligence and governance.
The flexible API layer connects the content hub repository to customer and prospect experiences across all channels. The purpose of that isn’t just to provide flexibility in the frontend technology choices and extendibility of the content management interface both for marketers and / or developers. An agile CMS fits seamlessly into the existing technology stack of a B2B company.
These tools support the flexible working hours for employees (both work from home and remote positions) and along with structured workflows, built-in best practices, and standards, accelerate time and market to optimize ROI for B2B businesses.
- The Development Platform
The agile CMS is still evolving and so is the need to provide flexibility in the frontend technology choices and extendibility of the content management interface both for marketers as well as for developers. An agile CMS fits seamlessly into the existing technology stack of a B2B company.
Factors to Consider When Implementing an Agile CMS Strategy
While considering an agile CMS, marketers should keep the following points in mind:
- Determine whether the CMS being evaluated has all the components listed above
- Consider a single content hub that has been designed to streamline content collaboration, planning, and workflows to reduce the time-to-market and the time-to-benefit
- Confirm that appropriate collaboration and planning tools are present to support smooth content production operation for business
- Ensure that the CMS caters to content practitioners as well as developers.
Wrap Up
The technologies within the CMS space are evolving and it may be challenging for marketers to keep pace with the evolving terms. B2B marketers need to reach their customers and prospects with compelling content that drives customer loyalty and fuels their bottom-line endeavors. An agile CMS is developed to do just that.
We hope that the above post helped you understand the importance of an agile CMS strategy and visualize how it complements your day-to-day marketing endeavors.