When choosing business technology, you aim for the most effective tool. For marketers, making choices about their own web technology is the new normal. Each year, martech spend moves from IT budgets to marketing budgets, and marketers are increasingly the primary stakeholder in their marketing stack. This means formerly non-technical managers must now understand and maximise all available innovation.
Websites have steadily innovated, but still tend to be built like file cabinets, filled with hundreds of documents for the user to browse. However, with personalisation and artificial intelligence, sites can do much more than render the same static content to all users.
The challenge is that without a strategic framework that starts with the customer, it's impossible to build and run this kind of modern web portfolio.
The Strategic Marketers Most Important Tool
Choosing a content management system is more than a technical exercise in an Excel-based showdown. The CMS is more than a website. It defines the workflow for entire teams for several years ahead. A CMS should create the guardrails to production while ensuring creative, relevant work gets published. It should also be able to provide a custom, personalised experience to users.
Having the right CMS in place allows the marketing team to focus on these different customer profiles. This requires a mix of skill, good data, feedback, and intuition. The marketers that are consistently able to balance these traits are the ones who can move fast and adapt creatively to market changes.
From Guesswork to Journey Mapping
What problem are prospects seeking a solution for? What information or interactions could attract or deter them from achieving this goal? What beacons can you put on their path to guide these interactions?
Savvy marketers focus on these journeys and look for touchpoints. They build and improve these touchpoints and regularly measure their value. Journeys and touchpoints differ for customers and will also change as your organisation evolves. So, tools that assist agility and speed are essential when choosing a tool that adapts to fickle customers and changing technology.
Touchpoints can be campaign-specific microsites, landing pages, webinars, events, or retargeting campaigns. This is where an agile, flexible CMS is required. Successful marketers we work with can launch sites that are in weeks rather than years. More importantly, these sites are touchpoints on a journey, not file cabinets of web pages.
Smart Websites are Touchpoints
Modern websites can render different content based on user intent. Specific offers are displayed based on time spent on the pricing and bottom-of-the-funnel pages. Websites are smarter than ever. They are essential because user journeys aren’t simple linear paths.
That’s why we made Convivial, to simplify personalised journeys so marketers and content editors can create these beacons of clarity and help answer their customers' existential questions.
