Why Content Discovery, Omnichannel Experience, and Acquisition is a Critical Must-Have for Your Platform Strategy

The digital landscape has transformed the way businesses create and deliver content, and how customers interact with it. However, with advancements come challenges, particularly for organizations, marketers, and developers. They are tasked with creating and delivering better digital experiences and content to serve their customers across B2C and B2B industries. In this white paper, we will explore the challenges faced by these stakeholders and provide strategies to overcome them. 

Key Content Management and Digital Experience Platform Challenges 

The challenges facing organizations, marketers, and developers can be traced back to the content management and digital experience platform. These challenges include: 

• Complexity – Content, technology, and data requirements are more complex, often conflicting with each other. 
• Personalization – Orchestrating human and personalized experiences by goal, not role. 
• Shift – From data by team to data/decisions by customer. 
• Privacy – Need for more data AND growing privacy requirements. 
• Access vs. Security – Greater access and creation vs. Security. 

The reason for these platform challenges is the disjointed journey, multiple touchpoints, and discovery becoming harder and more expensive. For example, there are 900+ touchpoints in B2C car buying and 700+ in booking travel, making 59% of all B2C sales digitally influenced. Similarly, 9% of all B2B sales are digitally influenced. Providing greater access for content creation versus security with a multitude of channels like voice, app, mobile, car navigation systems, and desktop adds to the challenge. 

Challenges Facing Marketers 

Marketers face many challenges that require constantly evolving and adapting to innovative technologies and strategies. Marketers must overcome various obstacles, from the endless search for information to managing broken systems to succeed in their campaigns. Additionally, the need for connected business messaging has become a critical factor in achieving a seamless customer journey. 

• Discovery – Most time is spent on discovery and browsing for information. Studies show that 82% of interactions are focused on discovery, and 18% are focused on experience and conversion (shopping). 
• Broken systems – Siloed departments, lost user intent across search, campaigns, and social media, content management is extremely hard to manage, and different teams operate with other goals, leaving customers unsupported. 
• Connected business messaging – There comes the use case for connected business messaging across the customer journey from awareness, discovery, consideration, conversation, purchase, service, and advocacy. 
• Integration – To get connected to business messaging, organizations must integrate the entire ecosystem together from infrastructure to engineering, marketing, inventory, CRM, sales, and customer support. 

Challenges for Developers and Development Teams

Development teams responsible for creating digital experiences face challenges such as remote work and issues of access and worker availability, department silos, focus on tons of activities versus outcomes, issues arising from using multiple tech stacks for SEO, paid, campaign, marketing automation, data warehousing, and privacy needs. Tight budgets are also a concern. 

Brands face a challenge in building a strong digital presence due to top SEO issues such as platform issues due to indexability and crawlability. 85% of SEO checklists fail due to CMS, which leads to brands JUST fixing and improving SEO. Additionally, platform security and integration can be a significant issue, with 40% of IT managers saying integration is too complex. Sixty-two percent of security threats are due to weak credential policies, and 20% of security breaches are due to remote workers. 

• Remote work and access/worker availability: With remote work becoming the norm, developers face challenges in collaborating and communicating effectively. They also need to ensure access to resources and tools for all team members. 
• Department silos: Different departments within an organization often work in silos, leading to communication gaps and a lack of alignment. Developers need to bridge these gaps to ensure the success of digital projects. 
• Focus on activities versus outcomes: Development teams may focus on completing tasks rather than achieving outcomes, leading to a lack of innovation and impact. 
• Issues arising from using multiple tech stacks: Developers need to navigate multiple tech stacks for SEO, paid campaigns, marketing automation, data warehousing, and privacy needs. This can lead to complexity and compatibility issues. 
• Tight budgets: Development teams often have to work with tight budgets, limiting their ability to invest in the latest tools and technologies. 

In addition to these challenges, brands also face SEO issues that can hinder their digital presence. These issues include platform issues related to indexability and crawlability, security and integration challenges, and weak credential policies that can lead to security threats.

With 85% of SEO checklist failures attributed to CMS, it’s crucial for brands to prioritize improving their platform’s SEO. By addressing these challenges head-on, development teams can build stronger digital experiences and help businesses stay ahead of the competition. 

5 Key Strategies to Overcome These Challenges 

As businesses continue to adapt to the evolving digital landscape, there are certain challenges that they must overcome to remain competitive. These challenges include providing provide seamless omnichannel experience, becoming experienced-led and data-driven, building a scalable digital infrastructure, optimizing content discovery and orchestration, and leveraging automation for efficient content creation.

Here are five key strategies that businesses can use to overcome these challenges including developing an omnichannel experience that focuses on content discovery and orchestration, becoming experienced-led and making data-driven decision making, building scalable digital infrastructure, using automation, and providing security and compliance.

The strategies emphasize the importance of investing in content orchestration and meeting the needs of a multi-channel orchestration system to enable omni-channel capabilities. Additionally, businesses must focus on data-driven experiences, build a scalable digital infrastructure, and use automation to improve workflows. Finally, businesses should prioritize security and compliance in their digital platforms. 

1. Develop an Omnichannel Experience Focused on Content Discovery & Orchestration 

It is time to shift from a multi-channel to an omnichannel approach that provides a consistent and seamless experience. By adopting a customer-centric approach and utilizing tools like asset libraries, you can create relevant and helpful content that aligns with the optimal path for your users and your organization. 

• Shift from a multi-channel to an omnichannel approach to provide a consistent experience across all touchpoints.
• Focus on a customer-centric approach rather than a product or service-centric approach by unifying the experience offered to customers across channels.
• Use tools such as an asset library to centralize and deliver assets seamlessly across search-optimized websites, local landing pages, and local listings.
• Align path analysis to buy cycle insights to create relevant and helpful content and increase depth of engagement.
• Follow the Experience Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness guidelines provided by Google to create helpful and relevant content aligned to the optimal path/goal for the user and the organization. 

2. Become Experience-Led and Make Data-Driven Decision Making

By using an agile CMS and a robust digital asset manager, you can easily deliver an agile presentation layer for both online and offline experiences. It’s important to cater to customers’ demands for personalization as a standard of service and use a matrix of content that caters to all stages of the purchase journey. 

• Focus on data-driven experiences that integrate business logic to show the right content at the right time. 
• Use an agile CMS with a robust digital asset manager that delivers an agile presentation layer for online and offline experiences. 
• Cater to customers’ demands for personalization as a standard of service. 
• Use an organized matrix of content that caters to all stages of the purchase journey, from awareness to advocacy. 
• Use multi-moment relevance to align across the purchase journey and reduce costs by 30% and increase revenue by 20%.

3. Build a Scalable Digital Infrastructure 

Using a cohesive platform equipped with a powerful digital asset management (DAM) system, you can manage assets for quality, findability, portability, and power discovery on visual search. Ensure that the platform is open to connectors to specialty use cases such as Dual CMS. 

• Use a connected platform with a robust digital asset manager and multi-use friendly technology. 
• Ensure the platform is “open” to connectors to specialty systems. 
• Use a dual CMS to separate key functions and access, edit, and display content. 

• Use a cohesive platform equipped with a powerful digital asset management (DAM) system and user-friendly multi-purpose features. 
• Use DAM to manage assets for quality, findability, and portability and to power discovery on visual search. 

4. Optimize Content Discovery and Orchestration 

CMS platform that captures a multi-intent journey and offers features like event calendars and blogs. By leveraging automation, you can optimize your content for different devices and eliminate duplicates while centralizing your assets to break down silos. 

• Use a digital experience CMS platform that captures a multi-intent journey. 
• Use features such as event calendars and blogs to add fresh content and increase clicks to the booking engine and impressions in search results. 
• Use automation to optimize content for various devices and browsers. 
• Eliminate duplicates and centralize assets to break down silos. 
• Use a multi-channel orchestration system to enable omnichannel capabilities. 

5. Leverage Automation for Efficient Content Creation 

AI-powered automation tools help create content with ease and auto-optimize assets for different devices and browsers. By leveraging automation, you can also power visual search and enhance the visibility of your content, as well as reduce manual work and free up resources for other tasks. 

• Adapt AI-powered automation tools to create content with ease. 
• Auto-optimize assets for various devices and browsers. 
• Power visual search and enhance the visibility of your content. 
• Reduce manual work and free up resources for other tasks. 
• Use automation to identify and eliminate duplicate content and optimize search engines. 

Use AI to identify and eliminate duplicate content, optimize search engines, and improve your overall content strategy. 

Key Takeaways: 

• Content, technology, and data requirements are complex and often conflicting. 
• Personalized experiences should be orchestrated by goal, not just by role. 
• Acquisition, experience, and conversion needs should be considered. 
• Resources and workflow must be understood. 
• Latest trends such as generative AI can help to break down silos.
• Select a CMS and digital experience platform that scales with business needs and enhances channel performance like SEO. 

Overall, it is important for businesses to prioritize content discovery, omnichannel experience, and acquisition in their platform strategy to meet the demands of the market and stay competitive. To achieve success in this area, businesses must understand their resources and workflow, embrace the latest trends and technologies, and select a platform that can meet their needs and scale with their business growth. 

To know more about the CMS platform strategy, contact us at sales@milestoneinternet.com or call us at 408-200-2211.  

To learn more, download the full deck and webinar.