Do we really need another Content Management System?

Inter­est­ing that his­tor­i­cally, a Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem (CMS) is typ­i­cally defined as a tool to man­age assets. Is a CMS tool really just a com­modi­tized util­ity to man­age assets? Why do we need to man­age assets? Shouldn’t we be man­ag­ing cus­tomers? The cus­tomers that visit our web­site exhibit dis­tinct behav­ioral pat­terns, and we should be cre­at­ing and opti­miz­ing these assets based on a sci­en­tific, repeat­able process that allows us to opti­mize the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence for the 96% of vis­i­tors that aban­don your web­site with­out accom­plish­ing their goal. Sure, we tend to cre­ate con­tent based on the­o­ries and hypoth­e­sis, or the HIPPO in the room, but this can only take us so far. We need a com­bi­na­tion of tools that enables a true cre­ative opti­miza­tion cycle to con­vert web­site vis­i­tors to customers.

CQ5 is being deeply inte­grated into a Closed Loop Opti­miza­tion Cycle that allow con­tent cre­ators to enrich the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence through the cre­ation of opti­mized con­tent that’s a unique com­bi­na­tion of Art + Science.

One of the projects I’ve been involved in, mainly because I love being at the fore­front of this evo­lu­tion, is the inte­gra­tions between CQ5 and Site­Cat­a­lyst, Test&Target and Sur­vey from the Adobe Online Mar­ket­ing Suite. As an Omniture/Adobe con­sul­tant for the last few years, I’ve expe­ri­enced the chal­lenges of many orga­ni­za­tions to not only deploy their ana­lyt­ics solu­tion, but also to main­tain it as they engage with Agen­cies or inter­nal mar­ket­ing depart­ments. How many times have you been asked to pro­vide ana­lyt­ics around a new micro-site or van­ity page that you weren’t aware even existed? Have you ever iden­ti­fied an opti­miza­tion oppor­tu­nity on a page and requested that IT deploy a Test&Target mBox on the page, only to find out that the page tem­plate is locked down until the next release cycle, next quar­ter? Sim­i­larly, Sur­vey is an excel­lent tool to under­stand cus­tomer sen­ti­ment, but per­haps the page tem­plate you want it deployed on is locked down until the next release cycle.

Inte­grat­ing the Online Mar­ket­ing Suite with CQ5 allows the Mar­keter to iden­tify oppor­tu­ni­ties and take imme­di­ate action on those oppor­tu­ni­ties, result­ing in a shorter Opti­miza­tion Cycle which dri­ves rev­enue into the orga­ni­za­tion faster.

The first of these inte­gra­tions, CQ5 with Site­Cat­a­lyst, allows the Ana­lyt­ics depart­ment to cre­ate and main­tain an ana­lyt­ics schema, or Map­ping, within the CQ/CRXDE inter­face. When new con­tent is cre­ated, it’s a 3 minute process to deploy the Map­ping to the newly cre­ated con­tent, whether it’s a sin­gle page, or an entire web­site. CQ5 will even change the Site­Cat­a­lyst report suite ID when acti­vat­ing con­tent from Author mode to Pub­lish mode, ensur­ing that inter­nal devel­op­ment traf­fic doesn’t unnec­es­sar­ily pol­lute your pro­duc­tion ana­lyt­ics. Using the Work­flow fea­tures of CQ5, any new con­tent can also be sub­ject to audit by the Ana­lyt­ics team prior to being pushed to production.

Site­Cat­a­lyst is a very pow­er­ful tool to under­stand and ana­lyze actual behav­ioral pat­terns on your web­site, but to fur­ther enhance your view of your cus­tomers, includ­ing opin­ions, atti­tudes and moti­va­tions, you’ll want to deploy a tool like Adobe Sur­vey. The deep inte­gra­tion between Sur­vey and CQ5 allows your orga­ni­za­tion to build a sophis­ti­cated sur­vey based on time, vis­i­tor behav­ior or other meth­ods, then deploy the Sur­vey by sim­ply drag­ging and drop­ping it onto the page. Sur­vey responses can be eval­u­ated in con­text with macro-site behav­iors in Site­Cat­a­lyst, or used for fur­ther web­site Opti­miza­tion through the Test&Target integration.

Main­tain­ing the mantra of allow­ing the Mar­keter to quickly deploy opti­mized con­tent; within CQ5, you can drag and drop a Test&Target mBox, or mul­ti­vari­ate test­ing con­tainer, onto a page, and cre­ate default con­tent in less than 5 min­utes. Hav­ing an mBox on the page allows the Mar­keter to use the Test&Target tool to cre­ate an A/B or mul­ti­vari­ate cam­paign to deliver the right con­tent to the right vis­i­tor. This again dra­mat­i­cally decreases the Opti­miza­tion Cycle and can have a pow­er­ful impact on your orga­ni­za­tions revenue.

Con­tent Man­age­ment is under­go­ing an evo­lu­tion and, in con­cert with deeply inte­grated opti­miza­tion prod­ucts, is becom­ing a core com­po­nent of Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Man­age­ment. I’m happy to be rid­ing the edge of this wave, and I hope you’ll join me for the ride.