A content management system, or CMS, offers an incredible amount of data about your enterprise website. This data provides valuable insights into your existing content, personas, and the ability to make informed decisions about the future direction of your marketing plans. This article demonstrates how a CMS allows you to make data-driven decisions with a discussion of how customer understanding, content creation, A/B testing, and dashboard predictive analytics relate to CMSs.
Customer Understanding
The foundation of a successful enterprise website and marketing campaign is a deep understanding of your target audience. Before you can even begin to map a customer journey, you must first know as much as you can about the different types of audiences to whom you're marketing.
A CMS sorts contacts into your designated segments through lead scoring based on various touchpoints. Analyzing the user behavior data of predetermined personas allows you to tailor elements or even entire web pages to deliver messages that resonate. You will also know the right time to provide the right content for a successful conversion.
Marketing and sales departments can use lead scoring data even for contacts below the predetermined threshold of points. These leads may still be in the interest or evaluation stages, so with that knowledge, you can nurture those contacts with a variety of digital experiences supported by a CMS.
Content Creation
You can also use CMS data to review the performance of all the content your organization has worked so hard to create and publish, see what's performing best, where people are entering and exiting your site, and even where they're coming from. You can then use all that data to continually refine and improve your content. With a CMS, you can get insights on data points such as:
- Page views
- Average time on page
- Bounce rate
- Top entry and exit pages
You can also determine the behavior of your visitors, which content the user interacted with, and which content they skipped over. A CMS can also help improve your analytics even further with custom integrations.
Custom content reports can be used to review and analyze your most popular content or the content that could be pushing your leads away. For example, a past InGen client uses an integration to see how far users read into a document or if they skip to certain pages. An integration like this complements CMS data.
A/B Testing
There are dozens of elements in any one marketing campaign: the audience, the headline, body text, call to action, button color, size, or location—and any one of these elements can be optimized. By utilizing CMS A/B testing to create two versions of a specific advertisement or message you can determine which piece of content provided the greater results.
We helped our client, Deaconess run A/B testing to optimize their homepage. Through website analytics and heatmap analysis, our web professionals conducted design experiments and provided data-driven recommendations that ultimately resulted in increased conversions, time on the site, and desktop search.
Dashboard and Predictive Analytics
Many marketers find the data gathered on a CMS dashboard the most helpful as an overview of enterprise website performance. A dashboard gives you the whole picture with up-to-date information for each interaction. You'll have the data for who came to the site, what they did, and the contact information to get them into marketing and sales campaigns.
Some content management systems such as Sitefinity even offer machine learning recommendations and auto-discovers touchpoints to increase conversion rates. Sitefinity calculates your potential conversion increase for the next 30 days for each of your audience segments, constantly providing new recommendations for a “best next action” to drive customers toward the desired action. Take a look at all the reports you can run with Sitefinity.
Without real-time knowledge and the ability to utilize information on successful user interactions, friction areas in the buyer journey, or ongoing campaign execution, you cannot develop data-driven decisions that contribute to bottom-line results.
Are you already using a content management system but it's working against you instead of for you? InGen can help simplify your world. To provide clarity surrounding team efficiencies and growth, we use a proven, time-tested process that optimizes your software.
Get a free site assessment today to get actionable insights.