How a Content Management System can Grow your Business

As a follow up to our discussion on selecting a Content Management System (CMS), today’s topic is about why a CMS helps you grow your business. A CMS has obvious benefits from cost savings and business productivity standpoints. With a robust and well-implemented CMS, you can expect to save time by distributing the content publishing responsibilities across your company. A rich text editor similar to MS Word minimizes content publishing time by bypassing the necessity of entering code. The system also centralizes communications, allowing you to share information rapidly with internal and external customers efficiently.

Along with the cost and efficiency benefits, CMS implementations can also drive increased traffic and qualified leads to your business. CMS users are believers. They see how it can reduce bottlenecks and streamline processes. As you learn more about CMS, you will begin viewing the CMS implementation not so much as a technological headache and more as a business tool that drives revenue. This makes it easier to sell CMS implementations internally to your senior management.

So how does a CMS help drive business growth? The quantity and quality of content on your website is directly proportional to the quantity and quality of the traffic you receive. The more quality content you have, the more quality traffic you acquire.

Keywords also play an important role and are present across various elements on each of your website pages, like Page Titles, Headers, and of course the body copy. Your content must target visitors with the right keywords. Once those keywords attract the right visitors to your website, you must target those visitors with the appropriate calls to action and compelling offers designed to urge them towards the next step - providing you with their information in return for compelling content.

A feature rich CMS, founded on the goal of lead generation, will help:

• Enable your marketing team to easily create content and integrate the right search-engine friendly keywords across various page elements. Content authors can easily update, check-in/check-out content, submit content into workflows for approval, revert to previous versions (versioning), and schedule content for date and time based publishing.
• Create landing pages with calls to action and compelling offers that drive conversions. You can target your Paid Search, Email and other marketing campaigns with links to custom URLs, just as you do with your targeted landing pages. Targeted, compelling landing pages are the quickest way to increase visitor conversion. STOP using your generic homepage for all your marketing campaigns. Your homepage talks broadly to several audiences, weakening your message. You bring in visitors from many demographics, so you must also target each demographic with its own content.
• Introduce social media tools such as blogs and commenting to drive interaction and engagement on your website. The more your visitors engage with your content, the sooner you will establish trust and credibility. The blog is a great place to drive your thought leadership, which further establishes trust and credibility. Blogs also make effective feedback channel s, allowing you to gather customer wants, needs and interests through the comments they leave. By having a CMS, your team can publish blog posts easily, on a regularly scheduled basis, allowing you to create a high quantity of quality content, attractive a high number of quality traffic and leads.
• Establish a discussion forum to engage with your customers, partners and others. The forum can be a great place to create a self-service environment, get your customers to talk to each other, and get your customers to become an evangelical tribe, spreading the word about your company and your products.

As part of our ongoing webinar series, our next webinar will demonstrate the topics discussed above using a .NET Content Management System. If you want to see a CMS package in action and learn how it can drive the growth of your business, be sure to register for this upcoming webinar.