The Evolution in Content Management is Long Overdue

Most organizations use between three and fifteen different products in their marketing technology stack. The problems with this model that we encountered included unpredictable costs from consulting and engineering efforts, bottlenecks from manual hand-offs and repetitive workflows, and unanswered questions despite moving and merging data between multiple applications only to find we still couldn’t answer fundamental questions.

Having experienced the pain of these disjointed marketing technologies a few too many times, we decided to take a step back and figure out how to solve this problem.

We realized that organizations of all sizes deserve a highly efficient and productive marketing team, not just the largest companies in the world like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle. Ultimately, we decided to put engaging and educating the customer at the center of our system and everything grew out of that.

The CMS has historically been considered a cornerstone of any marketing organization. However, the reality is that it has often served merely as a repository for final, approved website copy for publishing, effectively functioning as just another data silo and severely hampering the reusability of content across the marketing organization.

Time for a Change

What if, just maybe, the CMS was the central point of interaction for all the content and the marketing team's activities?

• What if the marketing plan fed directly into the creation of the content?

• What if that plan could connect the marketing campaigns with the content?

• What if the workflow was seamless between the creating, editing, and publishing processes, removing all the mundane and manual copy-and-paste activities from the marketing team's process?

• Oh, and what if, when the content is published it is just shared to your social channels automatically?

• What if landing pages for campaigns were automatically created, with the connected lead capture form gating a key asset, and a follow-up email campaign to nurture the leads?

• And, what if all the email marketing, social, and website interactions were gathered in a homogenous system to simply enable the marketing team to succeed by having actionable insights into the performance of the marketing activities?

The pressures on most CMOs are staggering - increased pressure to prove return on investment (ROI), attribution challenges, very complex and non-linear buyer journeys, and longer sales cycles to name a few. Marketing needs an optimized solution given the growing demands, reduced budgets, and shorter timelines most organizations are experiencing.

The Evolution: Generative CMS

The Generative CMS represents a significant evolution in content management, offering enhanced efficiency, scalability, and creativity through the power of AI. It combines AI-powered features with human creativity, oversight, and editing to achieve the maximal results.

It centralizes and makes available all the content and analytics to drive, enable, and simplify the functions of the marketing team. The purpose of this Generative CMS is to augment human creativity and productivity rather than replacing it, allowing content teams to focus on higher-level strategy and creative tasks while automating more routine aspects of content management.

Operational Capabilities

The Generative CMS underpins the marketing organization's operations by providing:

• Campaign strategy management

• Content planning

• Website management

• Content creation, management, publication, and social posts

• Email campaign management

• Complete, end-to-end, privacy-oriented analytics.

Content flows across all marketing activities, making it logical to manage all related activities together in a single system as opposed to a web of disjointed tools.

This directly enables marketing to tailor content for a variety of audiences via a variety of channels to meet the ever-growing set of demands, reduced timelines, and shrinking budgets.

The Generative CMS supports and enables every one of the previously mentioned "what if" scenarios through a combination of AI, analytics, and intelligent automation.

Key Features

Here are the key features that set a Generative CMS apart from a traditional CMS.

Automated and Assistive Creation

By defining your target use cases, by industry and persona, and the types of problems your product can solve, the Generative CMS can suggest content topics and create article outlines to get your writers started. It can also auto-summarize content and share your social posts.

Ideation, Planning, and Optimization

Management and facilitation of the content plan starts in the Generative CMS. You can begin by building out a buyer journey and associating content to the stages of that journey. Behaviors are then analyzed and used to provide recommendations for the live website, email nurtures, and further planning and ideation.

Advanced Tagging, Linking, and SEO

By providing simple and consistent labeling of content, the Generative CMS provides very advanced capabilities like linking groups of pages together (e.g., a multipart article series or product announcements). The Generative CMS also can provide automatic linking of keywords to a specific authoritative piece of content on the system. These capabilities reduce the need for marketing to go back and constantly update links between already published pages, which becomes nearly impossible as larger volumes of content are produced.

Managing Digital Assets

Digital assets, especially audio, video, and documents have a bad habit of keeping their information buried inside them. The Generative CMS can extract and make the contents available for use within the CMS. PDF text is automatically extracted, while video and audio are transcribed and summarized. Unlocking a vast amount of information and enabling marketing to reuse the information as easily as possible.

Personalization at Scale

Personalization is all about meeting the customer where they are at any given point in time. Recommendations can help to provide the most relevant content to a user to give them a personalized experience. Calls to action (CTA) can be made dynamic based on the user, instead of having a static CTA which becomes stale within a few months. Most important to a marketing team is the ability to personalize every email nurture to the specific user.

Comprehensive Analytics

While individual point solutions provide siloed analytics, a significant benefit of the Generative CMS is that its holistic view of content and analytics can provide contextualized insights for each use case. General website performance, email analytics, and even social inbound can be combined to provide a complete picture as well as a correlation to events. Generative CMS analytics quickly become more advanced than any other analytics system available to marketing.

The Future of Content Management

Every content management system or adjacent technology is trying to provide generative capabilities to their system. And while they may solve a specific problem, they are missing the forest for the trees, which leaves marketers with a disjointed tech stack and limited analytics.

Technology sprawl and data silos are silently hindering every action of the marketing organization. The job of the CMS has expanded. Don't be left behind.

The Generative CMS is the cure for an over-tooled, maxed-out digital team. We invite you to learn more about Leed's Generative CMS and see how it can streamline your marketing organization.