The New Cornerstone of Marketing: The Generative CMS

Historically, the CMS is considered a cornerstone of any marketing organization. However, the reality is that it usually serves merely as a repository for the final, approved website copy ready for publishing, effectively functioning as yet another data silo.

Time for a Change

A Generative CMS is not a data silo.

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.

The purpose of the Generative CMS is to augment human creativity and productivity rather than replace it, allowing content teams to focus on higher-level strategy and creative tasks while automating more routine aspects of content management.

Integrated Marketing Operations

The Generative CMS underpins the marketing organization's operations. For a CMS to be considered a Generative CMS, it must provide fully integrated:

• Campaign strategy management

• Content planning

• Site design and management

• Collaboration for content creation, management, and deployment

• Email campaign management

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

A cohesive content plan drives all of those marketing activities, so it is only logical that they should be managed together. How else can a marketer be expected to successfully tailor content for multiple audiences while managing growing demands, reduced timelines, and shrinking budgets?

Automated and Assistive Creation

A generative CMS can automatically generate high-quality content based on specified topics, interests, industries, and personas, all within a context relevant to the marketer's intentions. This reduces the need for extensive human intervention in content creation, validation, and publishing, thereby saving time and resources.

While current large language models can certainly create content, companies need to focus on their area of expertise to build up a portfolio of original content for their target audience. Leveraging their original content into new content is where the Generative CMS removes a big burden. This capability could significantly speed up content production and help maintain a consistent flow of targeted fresh content.

Ideation, Planning and Optimization

Over time, as users visit your site, you get a clearer picture of who your audience is and how effective your content, campaigns, and website are at serving them. The information gathered about their interests, engagement, and behaviors is critical to the effectiveness of a Generative CMS, because without it there is no feedback loop to know what is working.

Unlike a Generative CMS, a traditional CMS provides no context for these analytics, so marketers must rely upon external services like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or some other expensive and privacy-invading service for analytics. The content from the traditional CMS must be brought integrated with those analytics into a third system to gather the information necessary to create an ideation feedback loop, informing what strategies are effective.

The Generative CMS, on the other hand, has all the context of your targeted personas, industries, and use cases to be able to suggest or guide how to engage that audience. It can automate the creation of marketing landing pages, email campaign workflows, email copy, and data collection from the emails. This allows for fully automated marketing campaigns with minimal human oversight.

Automated Tagging, Linking, and SEO

The traditional CMS provides a mix of tags, labels, and categories that require human intervention. Tags, labels, and categories are important to a CMS; however, most people in most marketing organizations don't know the right time to use which of these items because it is really overly complex and doesn't often aid in creating a better user experience.

Instead, the Generative CMS provides much more advanced capabilities. While labels are created by humans and are a good starting point, the Generative CMS can enhance the experience.

Linking related content is critical to content management. Imagine a series of product release announcements for your website. Each month your team puts together a new release and someone has to find and edit all the related pages on the website to link them together so that if, via organic search, a user finds a product release announcement from three years ago, they have a direct link to the latest announcement, or a direct link to see all the product release announcements.

A Generative CMS provides the capability to automatically link and update past content within a long series in addition to a simple multi-part article series. Imagine a five-part series on how to build a droid with a Raspberry Pi. Each article would require the marketer to edit each previous page to link to each new article in the series. The Generative CMS must provide the capability of the box to simply automate this task.

Additionally, a consistent linking strategy strengthens a site's SEO. Automatically linking the first instance of a targeted term on a page to an authoritative page on your site, and even suggesting other similar terms to link to that authoritative page, is a hallmark capability of a Generative CMS.

Digital Assets

In a traditional CMS, images, documents, and videos are often an afterthought. They don't have a place to belong in those systems, and if these assets are included it is like a square-peg in a round-hole. Traditional CMSs were not built to manage those assets.

A Generative CMS, on the other hand, must account for these assets out-of-the-gate. They are critical to all content getting published. The models within the Generative CMS can create realistic images from simple text descriptions and they can also generate descriptions or alt text from images. Both eliminate many steps in the workflow of bringing digital assets into the content. The same goes for documents and videos. Why would the marketing team want to jump through the complexities of using other systems for these materials when they are so critical to the content meant for your audience?

Storing videos in the Generative CMS enables quick, automatic transcribing and summarization of the video content, enriching the experience for the audience. Content contained in PDF and Word Documents can also be mined in the same way. Imagine the time savings the Generative CMS provides by directly accessing the content of a PDF white paper; the system can automatically create a new landing page to gate that PDF.

The integration of formatted asset files into the Generative CMS provides simplified and powerful publishing workflows and enriches the data yielding complete site and content analytics.

Personalization at Scale

The traditional CMS is a data silo, separate from the detailed performance analytics and the entire marketing plan, which makes personalization a costly and time-consuming effort. The Generative CMS, on the other hand, has access to all the content and all the analytics and performance information, providing the opportunity to personalize at scale. The most effective way to engage further with a visitor is through personalized recommendations.

Recommendations feed the entirety of the system.

• Suggesting content to a new or returning visitor on the website creates an opportunity to build trust and to gauge a user's interest.

• Curating an email nurture campaign targeting each individual.

• Providing a dynamic call-to-action on each page of the website.

Setting up, creating the content, and planning a successful email campaign requires a lot of steps in a long workflow. The Generative CMS simplifies the entire workflow because it already has all the content and engagement data. It can help create the landing pages, it can help tailor the email messages, even on a per-user basis.

Ensuring that content on the website stays fresh and accurate is a huge task. The calls to action put at the end of a blog usually have a shelf life of three months or less. No marketing team has the bandwidth to regularly review and edit every blog published to update the call-to-action. Instead, the Generative CMS can dynamically provide a relevant call to action for that user, in the moment.

Analytics

Because the Generative CMS will collect and analyze the performance of the website directly, It can identify and even suggest system-wide improvements to the website without relying on third-party analytics. A true Generative CMS must not and cannot depend on external services. It must use first-party data and be privacy-oriented to protect visitors from being tracked all over the internet.

The analytics collected by the Generative CMS need to be complete. That means they must account for:

• Site traffic, including active time on the page

• Video analytics, including where users paused in the videos

• Buttons and links clicked

• How far into a page did a user make it

• Form data collection and validation information

• Email campaign analytics

The Generative CMS cannot rely on external third-party data because it must be able to use the freshest data to react in the moment.

It also must be able to deliver what marketing needs. Not just data, but actionable information. It must be able to provide things like:

• Event correlation; why there was a traffic spike

• Account grouping; what groups of users comprise an account

• On any given page of the site, what is working and what is not

• Pipeline analytics; customer journey

Other Areas

For consistent adherence to policies and guidelines, the Generative CMS can check content for factual accuracy, brand consistency, and application of style guidelines before publication.

When the need arises for content in multiple languages, the Generative CMS can instantly translate content into multiple languages, making it easier to reach a global audience reducing the expense of completely manual translation efforts and allowing content to be quickly adapted for markets.

The next evolution in content management

The marketing landscape is changing quickly. Most B2B technology companies have between three and fifteen different tools to run their marketing operations. They do not work together without some form of engineering integration, which is usually fragile and very expensive.

The Generative CMS is not an optional technology; it is a requirement if you do not want to be left behind.