Addictive Marketing Podcast
Choosing the right Content Management System (CMS) can seem like a daunting task, but it doesn't have to be. If you take the right steps, you can implement a CMS that fits your immediate needs, and grows with your organization. Listen in as we talk about how to choose the right CMS.
Transcript
Dave:
My name is Dave, you're listening to Addictive Marketing. I am here with Teri Sun, who is our chief strategy officer with the agency. And what we wanted to talk about today was a CMS, so a content management system. There are a lot of them out there. There are a lot of misconceptions. People can be afraid of them. There's a lot that goes into it, when you're choosing one for a web design or redesign. So we kind of wanted to talk about that today, but before I did that, how are you doing, Teri?
Teri Sun:
I'm great. Thanks for having me, Dave.
Dave:
All right, so let's kind of look at the big picture of what a CMS does. And you'd be surprised, at least I'm surprised when I talk to directors or VP's of marketing, CMOs, the word or the term CMS tends to scare them. Why do you think that is?
Teri Sun:
Great question, Dave. I don't really blame them. Technology can be intimidating. What I would say is that it's not about the content management system. It doesn't matter which platform you go with. It all comes down to the strategy behind how you set it up, whether you're using WordPress or Drupal or Sitecore or something else. You can set up WordPress, Drupal, and Sitecore to all do the same things. So let's cover this for a second, really, what content management means.
Dave:
Sure.
Teri Sun:
When a consumer visits your website, they're seeing your content on a page, and we call that your content is being rendered on that page. It used to be that all pages of a website were hard-coded, and so the content that someone saw on that page was physically coded into that page. But we live in a world of connected data and databases, and so the content that lives in your website is actually housed in a database. There's a table, a glorified Excel spreadsheet, if you will, that has a series of columns and rows to say, here's the title of this page, here's a paragraph of content, and all of that data is housed in your content management system. And then your front end HTML renders that to users in the beautiful web layout that we've designed.
Dave:
So basically, no matter what CMS you're using, there's that simple database on the backend where the information is, and then on the front end that data is rendered to present it to the potential client or customer, whoever's going through the user experience, so that they get it. So from a marketing standpoint, what a marketer would have to understand is more how do we present that data? As somebody looking at it, we talk about that buyer's journey, how do we present that data? Don't be so afraid of how it's going to get pulled.
Teri Sun:
The most important thing when you're trying to select a management system, is does it support your business needs, and does it support your user needs?
Dave:
So it's a true business problem you're solving, as you're building the idea of which CMS you're trying to use.
Teri Sun:
Yeah, there's a variety of content management systems out there that all do pretty similar things. A good analogy is PowerPoint versus every Mac comes with a program called Keynote. And in essence, they're both types of presentation software. You can create a series of slides and present those out to a customer or a prospect, whoever your audience is. Content management is the same. There's slightly different features from one to the next. Some come out of the box, some you have to pay more money for, but on the foundation, they all serve the same purpose. And it's about finding the one that has the right features and functions that match up to what your business needs are.
Dave:
So you might have a website that needs to be highly personalized, and there's a lot of things, there's a lot of functionality with regard to maybe in our world would be doctor profiles, how we present certain information, guiding a potential patient through the hospital website experience. You might need things out of the box for a particular CMS that another one might not have.
Teri Sun:
The way that I like to think about content management systems is on a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, you have open source solutions like WordPress that can be tailored to do almost anything that you'd like. On the other end of the spectrum, you have more enterprise solutions like Sitecore that come with a lot of the features you want, like personalization, out of the box. You can still customize a solution like WordPress or another open source solution like Drupal to have similar personalization features. It really goes back to what your personalization strategy is. So just the way that there's different levels of content management system, there's really different levels of personalization. And the higher you get in your personalization needs, the more sophisticated content management system you'll need.
Dave:
Where do you recommend the topic of CMS even comes up?
Teri Sun:
I personally think one of the worst things you could do as a marketer is pick a content management solution before you've thought through what your larger website strategy is. And I see that a lot. I see clients come and say we want to use WordPress or we want to use Sitecore. And sometimes Sitecore is way more than a client needs, and sometimes WordPress is not enough.
Dave:
Then the question becomes, from an operational standpoint, how big of a factor does that weigh in, as far as people and their interaction with it? Is it going to be managed? The whole nine yards.
Teri Sun:
Yeah, the first thing you want to do before selecting your content management system is to build out your digital roadmap. What are your needs? Not just when you launch your website, but two to three years down the line. And when you look at your needs, you want to look at not just what the functional needs are on the website, we need to support appointment scheduling or some form of registration forms, or we need this level of personalization. But what are your audience needs? How are those changing over time? Is chat something that's in your website's future? And the thing that a lot of people forget to think about, is what are the needs from a content management standpoint. These are content management systems, and your ability to have a great website is 100% dependent on how easy it is for you to actually use the system and manage your content.
Dave:
So what is the one thing that people kind of stumble on when they're kind of assessing the operational needs of the website, the functionality and the CMS?
Teri Sun:
Well, I just want to go back to that, that point you were making about getting your road map and really understanding what the needs are before you select your content management system. Because if you do all those things, then selecting the right content management system becomes easy, and it's not so scary anymore. You'll have likely one solution, maybe two solutions sort of staring you in the face, saying that you'll know, this is the right solution for what we need both today and long term.
Dave:
What are some of the things that you see over and over again people get stuck on or just mistakes in general, and they go, "Oh my gosh, we chose the wrong CMS." How do you get around that?
Teri Sun:
I think one of the biggest mistakes people can make, outside of selecting a content management system before they've done their due diligence on really what they need, is starting the process with a partner that is dedicated to a single content management platform.
Dave:
So how do you compare literally different content management solutions? What do you use when you're going through this assessment?
Teri Sun:
Yeah, so there's a few things to look at, and we actually have a scorecard, where we rank different content management systems based on these criteria. So there's the functionality, that's probably the most obvious one. How much personalization does it support? Does it have any marketing automation capabilities? Could it integrate with Marquetto? Those are all functional things.
Then there's the usability. That's the usability for the person on the back end. It's again, the success of your content management system is directly correlated with your ability to use it. And understanding if you have technical developers on staff that can easily work with a solution like Sitecore or Drupal, or if you have more business users and a solution like WordPress is going to be much easier for them to use. Again, all these solutions can accomplish similar things. You can do in WordPress, what you can do in Drupal, but Drupal requires more of a technical user.
Dave:
So it takes this scorecard to kind of flush those things out. So you already know what aspects to compare one to the other, and you start paring those down. And again, this is on the back end of the research that's been done ahead of time to help design the website wire framing, here's the functionality, here's the content we need served up. Then it goes to the scorecard, and then you look at, okay, here's how we compare the different ones. And you start to narrow those down.
Teri Sun:
Yeah, and another big thing that we look at is security. Your IT team is going to care about the security of the solution.
Dave:
I'm so glad you said that. Let's talk about that a little bit because security, no matter what you do, that's front and center. So how do you kind of address that?
Teri Sun:
So when you think about security, what you really need to be thinking about is what's the risk to the business? And there's really two things that factor into risk. First is your vulnerability. Vulnerability, meaning what are the chances we're going to get hacked or someone... what are the chances someone's going to break into my database and be able to access some of this information in my content management system?
Dave:
Do you assume that, that somebody will be able to do that? Or do you prioritize what needs to be protected, where somebody might go within that?
Teri Sun:
We live in a world where there's no guarantee on any content management system you would choose, that you wouldn't be hacked. Yes, some content management systems come with more security measures, or some are just less likely... Sitecore is less likely to have an attack on it because it's harder. Versus WordPress, 34% of companies use WordPress. Well, if you're a hacker, are you going to go after the small percentage of companies that use Sitecore and where Sitecore has put in a lot of pretty robust security features. Are you going to go after those 34% of WordPress users and really target that maybe 20% who didn't set up their installation right and aren't up to date on their plugin? So it's not so much really the solution you choose, but it's your ability to make sure you've put in the right security measures on the solution.
Dave:
So then, let's switch to risk and vulnerability. Because you brought that up, we were talking prior to this, and you brought that up. What does that mean? So talk us through that.
Teri Sun:
Yeah. So when you're a compliance officer is thinking about risks, he's thinking about two things. He's thinking about vulnerability, but also what's the potential impact. So vulnerability is what's the likelihood that somebody's going to break into the content management system and be able to access data that they shouldn't, and do something with it? The potential impact is, well, what data do you really have that someone might steal. If your website, which is pretty rare, most websites have some type of customer data stored in their content management system, but if you don't have any customer data in your content management system, there's not really harm if someone were to break in. So you really have to think about the impact, what are they able to get a hold of? And often sometimes that customer data that you really want to protect, it's housed in a very secure database that's separate from your content management system. So when you think about healthcare organizations and oh, all this patient data, and if somebody gets into my website, are they going to be getting into our instance of Epic and sealing all these patient records? If you set things up the right way, know that the Epic instance is completely separate from your content management system. And if they do talk to each other, there's ways you can make sure that happens in a secure manner. Another thing we should talk about is relative cost.
Dave:
Good point. So what does that mean?
Teri Sun:
There's a common misperception that because an open source solution like WordPress or Drupal is free and open source, that as a content management system, it's free. But those solutions, you're often customizing, which takes development hours to get them up to par with a solution like Sitecore, and purchasing plugins to help get it up to the status of a more enterprise solution like Sitecore. And you really have to be careful. And it goes back to really looking at what's your longterm roadmap. Because if you're going to have to customize Drupal so much that it's ballooning your development costs and your ongoing maintenance costs, sometimes you'd be better off just going with a solution like Sitecore. Sitecore can seem really expensive for an investment, but if you know that two or three years out, that's where your business needs to be, you're better off making that investment now, rather than trying to piece together something that you're probably going to have to swap out.
Dave:
So if you didn't look far enough ahead and identify those things, it could be a lot more expensive, even though it seems like this little content management system that you can launch, you can manage the content yourself, you can do all these things, but you're looking to grow. Oh great, now it costs me more than another one would have been to launch.
Let me just have a caveat here. We're not... Well, let's get to that. We're not, and Terry's giving me the finger at here, like stop, I've got one more thing to say. But what's important to note here is we are not advocating one over the other. We're just showing differences here. So if you're listening, and you're a Sitecore shop, and we talk Drupal, don't be upset.
Teri Sun:
I want to build on that. Just like you want to make sure you're picking the right longterm solution, sometimes that digital roadmap... We have some clients where their digital roadmap is for the first two years, they are on WordPress. And we're able to build that WordPress instance in a way that makes that migration to Sitecore in three or five years, when they know that's really when they need more of those features, it makes that transition easier. So it's not like they have to throw out everything they did it. Again, if you know where you need to get to, you can have a phased approach, where you have a more cost effective solution to start, but you really do want to make sure it's built in the right way.
Dave:
So you're actually looking at do we keep this CMS, or do we make a strategic plan to stay with the one we have, go with its full potential till it gets to the next stage in their digital growth, and then switch over, and then here's the plan for that.
Teri Sun:
And it really comes back to the strategy behind your content.
Dave:
Give me an example of that. You talked about the strategy behind the content.
Teri Sun:
So yeah, so I think we live in a world now where you go to Amazon, and you're reading about a product, and you see related products. That's because there's on the backend, all those products are mapped together. There's this sort of network of data that says this shoe is related to this shoe. And most companies are still on websites, where their data isn't connected like that. They still think of their website in terms of pages and distinct pages that... Yes, those pages relate to each other. But really we're moving towards a world... And the companies with the best personalization strategies have moved to thinking about their content in terms of these interconnected snippets of content that can be interrelated, and that you can serve up to different people at different times.
And one of the most important things as a company is moving towards a personalization strategy on their website, is to really rethink how they think about their website content. And one of the biggest tasks when you move to a new content management system that's going to support personalization, is that mapping of your content and taking the time. If you're a hospital, thinking about which conditions relate to which specialties, and which sub specialties relate to which specialties, and how those relate to different doctors, and tagging content in the right way so that it can all be served up much more dynamically on your website.
Dave:
So one of the big buzz words today is AI. Everything is AI. When you hear it, artificial intelligence this, artificial intelligence that. But truly there are some CMSs out there that can accommodate that, kind of that learning, that moving forward, it can take the data and actually make the website better, so the content relation, that sort of thing. Talk us through that and kind of `what that looks like.
Teri Sun:
Artificial intelligence and machine learning is absolutely something that should be in your digital roadmap and something you should be thinking about. And in looking at how you want to set up your content management system to support that.
Dave:
Well talk to me because we've talked about this in the past, what does that look like... we'll take something simple, so like a search, there's different ways you can do it. There's a simple search, you pull out something you get, there's an elastic search. Talk about the different degrees. Because I think that'll kind of put it in perspective for people to understand.
Teri Sun:
Yeah. So, the machine learning features that you would be looking for in search don't actually come from your content management system. There's a variety of different solutions that you hook into your content management system. And depending on what CMS you choose, depends on what sort of the best options are for you. So there are for Sitecore for example, there's three particular solutions that are really great for search, Coveo being one of them, which we're implementing right now for a client. And then if you're on WordPress, elastic search is a great option. And just like all content management systems have similar features, these search tools also all have similar features. So elastic search and Coveo, they both have something called a synonym finder, which really allows you as a marketer to say that if a patient is searching for the word cancer, that also means oncology. So if you've tagged a particular piece of content on your website as related to your oncology specialty, it will show up when that patient searches for cancer.
Dave:
Does this relate to content orchestration? Because we've talked about that also. How does AI and content orchestration kind of work together?
Teri Sun:
Yeah. The AI is what really gets you to the point of your content serving itself up to the right person at the right time.
Dave:
Which is the orchestration piece.
Teri Sun:
Yeah. Orchestrating your content to get out to the right person when they need it most. So the search tools that I've been talking about, they don't necessarily have machine learning out of the box. So the synonym tool I told you about, there's a manual way you can say, okay, oncology equals cancer, and you can put that in these tools. You can get reports on what people are searching for and add additional synonyms. The machine learning part, the artificial intelligence, is what really takes that to the next level, and it starts to figure out those things on its own. So you don't have to manage those synonyms on your own. But it will learn because if somebody searches for the word cancer and finds its way to the oncology page, and that's really engaging for them, and they interact with it, that machine learning tool is going to understand, okay, this piece of content is relevant to this search result. And you don't actually have to always tell it those things.
And that's where the machine learning really comes in handy. And again, there's different ways you can accomplish machine learning. If you're using an out of the box solution, open source like Swiftype, the machine learning, you might sort of build on your own. A solution like Coveo has machine learning built into it. So these are just some features you want to be thinking about, really asking your agency partner about, and have them help you navigate this roadmap. Because it would be really hard for any marketer to really understand all the ins and outs on their own.
Dave:
Sure, sure. So this has to do... Well, it's not just website development. Maybe this ties into the CMS, too. We always talk to clients about what it looks like with their interaction with the CRM. Does the CRM and the kind of content management system or solution that you use, are those two tied and how do they affect each other?
Teri Sun:
CRM is an enterprise software solution, and it's used for managing customer relationships. There's an interesting dynamic in the healthcare industry right now. Who are your customers in healthcare? They're patients. Where's patient information managed? It's managed in a solution like Epic in the medical record. And so CRM is different in the healthcare industry than... I love to look at how healthcare can leverage best practices from B2B. But CRM is one where healthcare is so unique in the way it handles patient data, that the CRM model, from my perspective, it doesn't really apply in the same way in the healthcare space. And I see-
Dave:
So Epic might be a CRM for somebody, whereas Salesforce or HubSpot or something like that, while it's good for business development and these sort of things, Epic might already have the data that you need to reach out to these potential patients and returning patients and that sort of thing.
Teri Sun:
Yeah, and not even just the data, the features. Epic has recently come out with open scheduling and appointment scheduling. And when you think about your content management system and the features you need there, the fact that Epic has open scheduling and it's good, they do a good job with it. Is it the best user experience? I would not say that, but they get better every day with it. And it just makes sense that, yes, why wouldn't you manage appointments in Epic because that's what's keeping track of all your patient's appointments. Yet I hear and see a lot of healthcare organizations say, well, we need a CRM because they just think that they do. They think that that's the best practice. But I think Epic and those medical records, they're borderline a CRM solution. And yes, CRM offers things that Epic doesn't offer and may never offer.
And so that's again, I think you have to get away from thinking about the solutions, and I need these solutions in my stack. Think more about what are the features I need. And you really have to look at what's the overlap of the different systems that you already have in place. Because a lot of organizations already have their medical record, or if you're a B2B organization, you may have a CMS in place that exists, and look at the features provided by that. Compare that to what you need and where you're trying to go. And then you can make more informed decisions about, are those the right systems and/or what you need to pair with them to get to the solution, not just that you need that, but ultimately your users need to engage with you better.
Dave:
That's a good point because we just walked a customer back from going with that solution. So there was the CRM option that they literally realized that they weren't using. They actually saved a ton of money by using the... I think it was Epic. I can't remember what it was. All right. So switching gears again, and this will probably be the last topic that we touch on, but so what is the definition of analytics, as you see it, and how it applies?
Teri Sun:
So a lot of content management solutions come with some form of analytics built in, but typically, you're using it in conjunction with a more robust analytics platform. For many companies that's Google analytics, and it's just making sure you have the right set up on your Google analytics to track more granular web activity. Some companies use more sophisticated analytics tools like Omniture. So it's definitely important to think about analytics, as you design and build your website. But really, most content management systems can hook into whatever you end up on and decide to go with from an analytic standpoint. So analytics needs to be part of your roadmap. It's not necessarily going to come out of your content management system, but it's absolutely something you need to think about how to best integrate it with your content management system.
Dave:
So it's not going to be user specific, but it'll be behavior specific.
Teri Sun:
Yeah, some of the things that you'll want to look at from an analytics standpoint, are you want to move beyond... Yes. You want to look at what's your bounce rate, you know how many people are coming to your site and leaving because that means they're not getting the content they were looking for. And what's their average time on the site, and what's their engagement. But more and more, you really want to be mapping back to real business results. So not just how many clicks did you get on a particular resource or button, but how many of those people actually registered for your email list? Or how many of those actually requested an appointment?
And if you put in the right analytics, you can measure those things. We've seen clients be able to contribute their new website to a 300% increase in online appointments. And being able to have that data helps prove to the executives in your business just how important the website is. Increasingly, especially, for hospitals, that your website is where people are doing business with you primarily, and they're logging on MyChart through your website, and they're coming to your website to learn about your services, and they're not picking up the phone as much as they used to. And your website is really where your business needs to transact with them.
And so the more you can help executives in your business quantify the value that that website is provided, the more investment you're going to get internally to make sure that your website has all the bells and whistles that you know will make for a great patient experience or customer experience.
Dave:
So you can tie that directly to... How folks are interacting on the website, you can tie that directly to revenue, basically, is what you're saying.
Teri Sun:
Yeah.
Dave:
So from a C suite, you're looking at this and you're saying, "Okay, I can justify this because we can track this." There's a ton of examples that are to be shared, but we've been at this for a while. I feel like we can just keep going and keep going, but I'm going to go ahead and... We're kind of up against time right now. If you're listening right now and you want to find out more about kind of what it is we're talking about, if you have more information, if you want to give us some information, maybe some things are left out, but if you'd like to just kind of connect with us, it's dave@whiterhino.com. You can reach out to Teri at whiterhino.com. Let us know where your thoughts are. Maybe we can follow up with another topic or talk to you personally.
But Teri, thanks so much for your time.
Teri Sun: Thank you, Dave.
