Introduction
With the current pace of technological innovation, customers are demanding more out of their digital experiences. They now expect relevant, consistent and seamless experiences across all of their devices. That means delivering relevant content wherever they are, and whenever they want it. Your competitors know this, and they’re stepping up their digital game. That makes it harder to stand out than ever before.
Companies need a content platform that allows them to turn great ideas into reality quickly and meet rapidly changing market demands. A future-proof content management system (CMS) that’s prepared for those evolving demands will help unshackle your developers and empower your marketers without sending your CFO into meltdown.
The market for content management solutions, however, is vast and complicated. There’s no perfect solution, so the key is finding a CMS that’s going to fit your unique needs and specific business goals.
This guide is here to help you do that by breaking down the selection process from beginning to end.
part 1
Breaking down your CMS options
A content management system is simply a piece of software designed to help organizations create, manage, publish and update content for their customers.
However, not every content management system uses the same principles or technologies to do this. There are a multitude of ways systems are differentiated - from how they are hosted to how they deliver content to the end user.
In this section, we’ll break down the primary ways CMS solutions are differentiated and when each type of solution may be best.
cms options
CMS vs. DXP
The first notable distinction we’ll look at is the difference between a content management system (CMS) and a digital experience platform (DXP). While both types of solutions set out to achieve similar goals for organizations and have numerous overlapping features, there are a few critical distinctions to understand. These two types of systems will be broken down further in the next section, so consider this a primer.
What is a Content Management System?
A CMS enables organizations to more efficiently create, manage and publish content to websites, mobile apps and other digital channels.
In today’s digital world, marketers are continuously producing digital content featuring text, images, and videos that attract audiences and generate leads. A CMS makes this process infinitely easier by allowing them to create and publish this content without needing to edit HTML and CSS—or asking for developer support to do that for them.
Like with any software, content management systems can vary widely in their feature set but there are some capabilities that can be considered standard.
A big part of the initial stages of the selection process is navigating these different types of systems to figure out the best type of CMS for your needs. This will significantly narrow down the number of systems worth evaluating.
At a minimum, an enterprise-grade CMS provides user permissions, version control, WYSIWYG editing, content modeling and workflow features to streamline the publishing process. More advanced systems will provide functionality in areas such as translation, SEO tools and multi-site management.
What is a Digital Experience Platform?
While a CMS traditionally focuses exclusively on content, a digital experience platform incorporates content management along with a number of other capabilities critical to modern digital success like images and media, commerce tools and product information, search, and personalization.
At its core, a DXP is a set of technologies that are tied together to help organizations power their digital experiences. The key is that all of the technologies are interoperable and working together toward that ideal experience.
The goal is that no matter how and where customers are interacting with your brand, they will be served a compelling and seamless experience. For larger companies looking to create market-leading experiences for their customers, a DXP is normally the most effective solution.
Your digital experience toolset doesn’t necessarily need to be entirely provided by one vendor. For example, you could select a CMS or a DXP with strong API support, which will allow it to integrate with other platforms like ecommerce. This allows you to then work with the best technologies rather than settling for those offered by one DXP vendor.
CMS OPTIONS
Deployment options
CMS OPTIONS
Traditional vs. Headless vs. Hybrid
part 2
DXP suites or a composable approach?
While a straightforward CMS can work well at smaller scale, larger companies dealing with multiple channels, global markets or complex integrations are generally better served by a DXP. As an enterprise buyer, you have a lot of approaches available to you. The fundamental choice is whether you want to go all in on a DXP suite or take a more composable approach.
A DXP generally offers much deeper integrations with other capabilities to meet the needs of larger businesses, such as ecommerce, logged-in experiences, marketing automation, digital asset management, CRM and marketing analytics. Sometimes these products come from the same company, and are called a DXP suite or monolith, while other DXP providers provide integrations to bring these tools from another company into the single experience interface— known as composable DXP.
While many modern CMSes are highly extensible and can connect to external services, without customization they can often lead to work happening in multiple different tools and a very complex custom technology stack to manage.
With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at the pros and cons of each type of solution so you can determine which is the best route for your business.
DXP suite advantages
User interface consistency
Generally speaking, DXP will have a consistent user interface across the components of the platform. The unified interface means adoption and training for users are simplified because there’s a consistent experience to learn and utilize. Of course, this all depends on choosing a platform with a user-friendly, intuitive interface to begin with.
Streamlined vendor relationship management
If you choose a single best-of-suite solution, you’ll only have to deal with one vendor, which reduces communication and accountability to a single company. Of course, this is only an advantage if the vendor is reputable. Most of the time, suite solutions are provided by large software companies, so there’s a reduced business risk in the vendor discontinuing its service or requiring multiple migrations near-term. One vendor relationship can be advantageous as long as you’re not subject to vendor lock-in.
Ease of integration
A suite solution has a set of systems all provided by the same vendor, so they’re meant to be easily integrated. Having a multitude of vendor-provided tools eliminates much of the work for bringing in additional functionality beyond a CMS - as long as the tools fit your business needs. If not, you’ll still need to integrate third-party systems like a best-of-breed approach would require.
DXP suite disadvantages
Risk of vendor lock-in
Digital innovation is happening rapidly, and companies need to remain agile to stay competitive. Implementing a suite solution makes you reliant on a single vendor for updates and new features, and in order to migrate to the suite you may need to abandon existing products that are already meeting your needs.
Inconsistent product quality
When a vendor creates a range of products, odds are that not every one of those solutions is going to be the best option on the market. It becomes difficult, if not impossible, for a suite vendor’s solutions to outperform those of vendors who focus all of their time and attention on a single product. Sometimes companies acquire the solutions of others to add to their suite, even if it isn’t necessarily a leading product. For this reason, going with the suite approach may result in sacrificing quality of tools for convenience’s sake. Similarly, large suites are generally built by acquisition and managed by separate product teams. That means that even though they come from the same vendor, a DXP suite may still have integration compatibility issues between its different elements.
Cost vs. utilization
A significant drawback of the all-in-one suite is that your licensing costs are inflated by the tools included within the suite, whether you actually use them or not. For instance, you may end up paying for marketing automation functionality, even though you already have a preferred solution you continue to use. This is feature bloat. You are paying for extraneous functionality without actually needing to. Contrast this to best-of-breed, where you’d simply add and pay for the functionality as your needs change. Similarly, because these systems are so large and complex, hiring staff or consultants with the expertise required is very time-consuming and expensive
Composable advantages
Stronger technologies
Vendors that focus on one particular function are likely to be better at it than vendors attempting to cover the full range of digital experience solutions. The composable approach means you get the best content management system for your content management needs—you’re getting the ‘best of breed’ in each area. You can then connect it to the best marketing automation platform for your marketing automation needs, the best analytics platform for your analytics needs and so on. You’ll ideally end up with a digital experience platform made up of stronger individual components than an all-in-one suite. Of course, this requires a CMS with robust APIs to create seamless integrations to create a coherent and consistent experience for your teams.
Adaptability and scalability
Tightly-coupled integrated suites are more cumbersome to maintain and upgrade. Composable DXPs ensure your pace of innovation is not strictly tied to that of a single vendor. With separate products and services that serve a specific purpose, it’s much easier to replace individual components and adapt to a fast- changing digital landscape. The composable approach ensures your business can respond to market changes rapidly and scale your tech stack as needed. This isn’t just helpful down the line. Composability allows your team to continue working with applications they are already familiar with. This can save substantial migration costs by leveraging some of your existing services that integrate with the new CMS.
Not too much, not too little
A composable approach lets organizations choose technologies that solve the specific problems they are facing. These solutions usually have open architectures that make further extensions and customizations more straightforward. This mitigates one of the primary risks from the all-in-one suite approach, which is paying for technologies the organization isn’t even using. Using the modularized approach, you’ll be able to create a highly tailored DXP platform by using a variety of services for specific use-cases, with smaller scopes, shorter implementation times and lower costs.
Composable disadvantages
Multiple licenses
A composable approach generally means you’ll be integrating multiple elements together to create your entire DXP stack and each will require an individual license. This doesn’t necessarily mean it will cost more, but managing multiple agreements could become time-consuming or complicated. That said, the benefits of using the best available technology may outweigh any disadvantages on the vendor management side. Similarly, not being entirely dependent on a single vendor can put you in a stronger negotiating position in the long term.
Potential integration conflicts
Any time you have a modularized architecture, there’s the potential for integration conflicts. In a best-of-breed situation, you have a content management system that needs to work together with CRMs, DAMs, etc. from various vendors. The biggest challenge with this is sharing data. Applications store data uniquely, so you need to have APIs that can communicate between systems to avoid data silos. That’s why it’s essential for a best-of-breed approach that you choose a vendor with a composable DXP that prioritizes third-party system integrations. The depth and quality of integrations can vary wildly, so it’s important to fully evaluate and understand these integration approaches in the purchase process rather than just check that the logo of your preferred tool is present. Similarly, if your desired integration isn’t present, it’s important to understand the work needed to build an integration.
Flipping between applications
Going with a best-of-breed approach generally results in having to flip back and forth between various applications. You may have to first go to your analytics platform to see how a page is performing, log into your SEO platform for suggestions, then flip over to your content system to make improvements. This all adds up. However, this can be mitigated by a composable DXP that serves as a content hub, bringing data from various applications directly into the interface.
part 3
Finding the right fit for marketers and developers
Implementing a better content management solution will have business impacts across your organization, but there are two departments that will be impacted most: your marketing and IT departments.
For these teams, the quality of their work and how efficiently they get it done are heavily dependent on the fit of your CMS or DXP to what they are trying to achieve.
In this section, we’ll highlight features and characteristics that will benefit both your marketers and developers. Of course, every organization has different needs and it’s always important to focus heavily on those. But these are areas that, generally speaking, will be critical to organizations across a range of industries and business models.
MARKETERS
What marketers need?
Marketers are usually the heaviest users of a CMS or DXP day to day. It’s up to them to create, update and publish content that creates compelling digital customer experiences.
It’s critical that your CMS allows them to do this more effectively, as 89% of companies believe that the customer experience will be their primary basis for competition according to Gartner.
This will be a daily-use platform for marketers, so it’s crucial the software includes the features and capabilities that empower them to bring their great ideas to life efficiently and effectively.
“It’s important for me to be able to build campaign pages or event pages quickly and easily using our full digital toolset – and without involving a developer”
developers
What developers need?
While marketers will focus on features that improve the customer experience and efficiency, developers want software that’s easy to work with, flexible and secure.
They’re in charge of implementing, maintaining and integrating the software with third parties, and the developer experience is just as important as the marketer experience.
Think of developers as stewards of your CMS or DXP. They want to keep everything running smoothly and effectively, but they also want to be able to empower marketers enough to use the tool without running to them for help with every task.
“A powerful developer toolset starts with thorough and intuitive documentation.””
part 4
Evaluating your options: RFP, technical demo and proof-of-concept
After determining the type of CMS or DXP you need and your desired capabilities, the selection process will consist of stages – the request for proposal (RFP), technical demo and proof-of-concept (POC). Each of these is designed to help you narrow your choices before advancing to the next stage.
The request for proposal gets deep into the details on vendors’ ability to handle your needs documented in one place. Technical demos deliver answers to more specific questions as you see the capabilities play out in front of you. Finally, the proof-of- concept is the test-drive that confirms that the system will meet your real-world needs.
It’s essential that you optimize each of these phases to ensure you make the right choice.
RFP
Request for Proposal
1. Keep the list of vendors short
When sending out your RFP, you have to keep in mind that you’ll need to carefully review each of the responses, so it’s best to keep your list of vendors short. You should do preliminary research on each vendor by looking at case studies, client testimonials and public documentation. Don’t discount smaller vendors, as they may well have a solution that’s very suitable for your organization—bigger isn’t always better! Keep the list to under ten highly compatible vendors to ensure later stages in the selection process are manageable.
2. Avoid the checklist
When sending out your RFP, you have to keep in mind that you’ll need to carefully review each of the responses, so it’s best to keep your list of vendors short. You should do preliminary research on each vendor by looking at case studies, client testimonials and public documentation. Don’t discount smaller vendors, as they may well have a solution that’s very suitable for your organization—bigger isn’t always better! Keep the list to under ten highly compatible vendors to ensure later stages in the selection process are manageable.
3. Gain insight into vendor viability
When sending out your RFP, you have to keep in mind that you’ll need to carefully review each of the responses, so it’s best to keep your list of vendors short. You should do preliminary research on each vendor by looking at case studies, client testimonials and public documentation. Don’t discount smaller vendors, as they may well have a solution that’s very suitable for your organization—bigger isn’t always better! Keep the list to under ten highly compatible vendors to ensure later stages in the selection process are manageable.
4. Review the responses thoroughly
When sending out your RFP, you have to keep in mind that you’ll need to carefully review each of the responses, so it’s best to keep your list of vendors short. You should do preliminary research on each vendor by looking at case studies, client testimonials and public documentation. Don’t discount smaller vendors, as they may well have a solution that’s very suitable for your organization—bigger isn’t always better! Keep the list to under ten highly compatible vendors to ensure later stages in the selection process are manageable.
RFP template for Digital Experience Platforms
An RFP can save time and resources by identifying the right CMS vendor. It helps gather information, uncover vendor details, and assess viability. We’ve created an RFP template that will help you to build the right process for your team:
- Customizable list of 120+ questions
- 15 requirement categories
- Available for Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets
Magnolia Demo
Technical demo
Customized demo
Vendors that are serious about gaining your business will even showcase a part of your site on the platform, so you get a better idea of fit.
Depending on your needs, there may be a need for more than one demo from each vendor under consideration
During the demo
Ask for details that will have an impact on your specific implementation needs and for the presenter to show the features most important to your organization, so the demo is completely relevant to your business requirements. Don’t let the presenter dictate the demo or you’ll miss out on a crucial consideration of the decision-making process.
After the demo(s)
If the vendor and product still seem like a good fit, you should request and schedule a proof-of-concept.
VIDEO DEMO
Magnolia run-through
Discover Magnolia's key features in a 12-minute run-through with our Lead Solution Architect, Iran Campos, including content creation, personalization, WYSIWYG editor, integrations, and more.
POC
Proof-of-concept
Focus on core requirements
You want to have specific goals and use-cases at the start that the POC will attempt to validate. The appropriate stakeholders should come up with realworld scenarios to ensure the product is the right fit from marketing to IT and that no essential functions are missing. In just a few weeks, you won’t be able to evaluate all the functionality you’ll eventually use, so it’s important that you focus on the most critical capabilities for your particular business requirements.
Think beyond the content migration
While smoothly moving your content to a new system is a critical part of the process, don’t focus solely on this during the POC. You need to consider design templates, third-party integrations, content taxonomies and many other capabilities that could become a challenge as you implement the new system Integrations, in particular, can be complex and are crucial for most enterprise companies, so you should include evaluating the most critical third-party system connections in your POCs.
Identify potential development needs
Throughout the POC process, you’ll likely encounter functionality you need outside of the platform’s core functionality. This could be anything from integrations to complex configurations unique to your business. It’s essential that you determine early on what development work is required, in what tech stack and whether you have the IT capacity to complete the development requirements.
Let stakeholders test the POC
It’s not enough to have IT work with the vendor in creating the POC. You want to set up a shared environment that lets stakeholders from every department test the CMS to get an idea of how it will be to work with. One of the most important selection factors is that users can easily grasp how to use the platform. Most of the time, these environments are set up in a cloud solution like AWS or Azure to ensure the POC is easily accessible.
Decision time
At this point, you should have enough insight to choose your new CMS or DXP. Hopefully, you’ve had a successful POC and are ready to move on to a more comprehensive prototype or even a full implementation. By asking the right questions and bringing in the most relevant team members during every stage of the journey, you maximize your chances of building a long-term digital foundation for your organization.