When we are looking at the Martech space growing with thousands solutions after years it’s increasingly important for decision makers to understand the diferences between all the technologies and the relationship between them.

Of course the DAM is the foundation for any digital transformation across the whole organisation from content creation to distribution. After years we see more and more DAMsystems with some new capabilities like brand portal management. Something we can call web portal are most of the time very limited to share a collection of assets with some custom CSS enhancement. Of course it is a good path to take to share the content of a project with your customer from the DAM and better than using Public Cloud sharing.

But is this brand portal really the best way to gather the content of a brand today as we need to aggregate the content from various data source and systems ? Not sure the right path to take

It is important to make a difference between CSM and WCM :

A WCM is a Web Content Management system. These systems are designed to provide your organization with a means of putting your business online with relative ease. A WCM, on a basic level, will offer such features as: easy content editing, versioning (revisions of your content), media management, workflow management for content approvals and publishing, template modification and an easy to use dashboard of sorts to provide you with an overview of your site(s). (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Typo3…)

A CMS, on the other hand, is a system that provides a way for multiple users to collaborate, interact with and control access to data through a common interface. While some CMSvendors may bundle their content management systems with WCM components, this is not always the case, nor is it mandatory. (Jahia, Sitecore, Liferay, EZ Publish, Amplience, Adobe…)

A CMS is the foundational software for digital identity, strategy, and engagement. A DXP is the full suite of tools powering the delivery of personalized experiences that scale and connect – across channels, geographies, and languages. A DXP streamlines engagement and provides the coveted 360-degree view of customers, across channels, and continuously updated in real time, taking the analytics of a CMS to a whole new personalized level.

In the mean time since a couple of years we see more and more DAM vendors providing connectors to CMS systems. The most well known used by nearly 85% brands across the world is WordPress .

Most Top DAM vendors have now CMS connectors like : Bynder

43.6% of the websites use none of the content management systems. WordPress is used by 34.7% of all the websites, that is a content management system market share of 61.5%.

CELUM Content Hub :

 

The Real Story Group made a survey with the right Web Content & Experience Management (WCM) foundation in place.

Of course Gartner is doing the same with his “Magic Quadrant”

In order to stay competitive is it now important for the whole enterprise to master all the digital content using technologies to enhance the customer personalized experience. CMSis the unique place to consolidate ERP informations, PIM data model, assets of your DAM. The CMS can also streamline your workflow, empower analytics and match your content in context the key for e-commerce.

We now have more entreprise CMS systems like Jahia , EZ Publish, Liferay, Apostrophe , Amplience able to support and deploy hundreds of website in the same time. I had the experience to deploy and use both Jahia and EZ publish and they are doing a great job. Jahiais a Java-based solution that emerged in the on-premise era as omnibus platforms: with some WCM, some document management and Portal-like capabilities from the very beginning. Recently The Real Story made an interesting evaluation.

Last year we saw Sitecore acquiring StyleLabs, Nuxeo unveiled a connector to Sitecore which is now one the biggest player in the industry. Nuxeo Sitecore Connector enables users to access to the Nuxeo repository from within their Sitecore web content management environment to search and browse available content. The connector also allows for the ability to copy content from Nuxeo into Sitecore. This example is the clear representationof DAM / ECM connected to a CMS.

The other leader in this industry Adobe Experience Manager is a web content management system comprised of Adobe products such as Adobe Analytics, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Solutions, Adobe Primetime, Adobe Target, Adobe Media Optimizer, and Adobe Audience Manager. AEM is comprised of five modules including Sites, Assets, Mobile, Forms, and Communities. It can be used alone as well as in concurrence with other components.

It is very important today for DAM vendors to understand this philosophy in the flexibility of the connectivity of DAM Platform to other systems. Again do not reinvent the wheel !!

Evaluate your current and future business needs

Before investing in a CMS ask some useful questions :

  • Do you want to drive significant growth in website traffic?
  • Will your existing system persist, or will you have to evolve with a new CMS?
  • How many channels will you want your content on, and in how many languages?
  • Will the CMS work with your company’s existing tech stack?
  • What features are you waiting for ?
  • Will your new CMS be stil updated for at least the next five years?

Here’s a full list of the functionalities often included in the modern CMS:

DAM connectivity: All your files, at your fingertips
From the CMS you can browse all your content from within the CMS and simply select your images, without having to go back and forth between the CMS and your file collections. You can search, retrieve your metadata For some of them like the one of FotoWare has a built-in editor that lets you resize/crop an image or apply image filters like Greyscale when exporting from the FotoWare archive. You can publish a customized version without affecting the original file, which sits safely in the DAM repository.

Improve your SEO:
Metadata plays a crucial role in a web page and directly influences rankings and click-through rates (CTR) from the search results. CMS are now fully optimized for that task using plugins and bring value to your content based on a right naming convention and the IPTC metadata.
SEO is one of the most important CMS & WCMS ingredients for web content. To get conversions going, you need lots of relevant traffic. To attract those customers, you need proper search engine optimization [SEO].

Security:
CMS include now data encryption, advanced personal identifying information compliance, and integrations with enterprise security authentication systems.

Workflow management:
CMS are proving enhanced workflow capabilities : authoring, editing, staging, approval, translation, publishing in order to get approval of the content and have the appropriate metadata.

Omnichannel 360 :
CMS make it simple to deliver content to various channels but also to future applications and services.

CMS Enterprise:
A CMS is the solution as soon as you have multiple sites across various countries with multi-sites and multi-language support. CMS supports smooth integrations with localization and translation services ( SDL , Datawords ), and regulatory compliance for multinational content.

Flexibility and performance :
The CMS has to be very flexible for ceating new websites and marketing campaigns quickly. It has to integrate with other technologies, include modern APIs and connectors, manage multiple sites from one centralized location. And of course you can deploy your CMSin the cloud.

Publishing admin :
With the CMS you should be able to edit and view content before publishing and schedule items for future publication.

E-Commerce and content integrations :
For brands content and commerce are connected. CMS has to include a unified interface for e-commerce at least a connector with Magento.

As a conclusion and based on my experience, CMS is the BRAND Portal today to provide the right customer experience. During my RFPs more and more brands beyond a great user experience wants to distribute all the content from their DAM and PIM to their Websites for B2B or B2C. It is all about assets distribution and business data model. We can say that DAM and PIM are now at the heart of the business customer experience.