"You must have a Content Management System (CMS) for your inbound marketing strategies to be successful."
Not everyone would agree with me on this bold statement. Okay, I can understand why some might differ, and I can see a couple other tools being used creatively to meet the needs of inbound marketing as well. The point is that there are a few major areas of a CMS that make your life a whole lot easier when implementing an inbound marketing methodology. Here are a few reasons why I think a CMS, or something very similar, is vital for your inbound marketing success:
1. Publishing
A key factor of inbound marketing is the need to consistently publish new content; a CMS makes this goal more attainable. Here at Diagram, we publish 3-4 blogs per week; can you imagine if every single time I needed to publish a blog I had to bother another department? That would be a nightmare, not just for them, but for me as well. Enabling marketers to publish content on your business’ website is a huge advantage, and it’s quite necessary to keeping up with inbound marketing goals. Not only is it easy for me to publish a blog, but I don't have to know a whole bunch of coding in order to do so. Remember, I am not a developer. I respect them very much after seeing mass amounts of code, which gives me an instant headache, so I’m glad I can format and publish content without having to be skilled in that area.
Another benefit to having a CMS in place is that most CMS platforms allow you to set up content permissions and workflows. This allows you to enable your marketers to create content without worrying that they will affect any of the site’s other code. This makes us feel more comfortable too, since we know we won’t mess anything up. A CMS will give you the capability to match the permissions with the skill level of the editor. I feel a lot more confident about publishing blogs when things are clearly set up for someone at my skill level.
2. Code-free Organization
I cannot imagine how overwhelming our website’s code would look without the organization of our CMS. Our developers can configure the CMS from a very high level, such as taking care of things like structuring CMS folders, all the way down to the fields that are labeled for me to put in Meta descriptions and tags so that the blogs are organized throughout the website and ready for search engine optimization. Once again, no code! This makes me a very happy marketer. When I first started working on publishing Diagram blogs, code scared me to death, but don't let me discourage you from learning some simple HTML code. It's nice to know that I don't need to be an expert in order to get these basic things done on a day-to-day basis, but I have to admit that knowing some code has helped me flourish in other areas, such as creating other types of content blocks that are not so strictly structured on the website.
3. Content Control
Even though some of the other areas of our website are not as structured as the blogs, I still have been able to use very minimal code to make these areas work exactly how our team would like. The other areas of the website that I believe marketers should know how to edit are the call-to-actions (CTAs), and a CMS makes this very easy to do successfully. Being able to change the language and build new CTAs without contacting another department has made our team a lot more efficient. It has taken a little bit of a learning curve, but we have even gotten to the point where our team can make updates to almost any part of the website without having to contact another department, although we do still occasionally ask some questions. Sorry to bother you guys! :) But as we’ve learned about the CMS, our need to ask others for help occurs much less than before, and I believe this is largely due to our great CMS guiding us through the content publishing world.
These are just some of the ways a Content Management System can provide vital functionality for inbound marketing; depending on the platform you are using, there are other tools available, as well as integrations with Marketing Automation Platforms and social media. What other features would you love to see in a CMS? Is there a tool that you use and couldn't imagine doing your job without? Let us know in the comments below, and, as always, feel free to contact us to speak with a marketing specialist with any questions you might have.
Image Credit: joepopp via Photopincc
