Expectation #1: A CMS should solve the most urgent business problem at hand without regard to specific department, person or function.

We have a saying at Bridgeline, “Good politics makes bad websites.”  I think too many people go into a CMS implementation thinking it will solve everyone’s problems across the entire organization.  So rather than focusing on the most troublesome areas, people tend to open the implementation to everyone’s requests.  In the end I believe this does a disservice to your organization.  Because the truth is that while every department or group may have a need, from a more corporate/macro view those needs have different priorities.

One of the things we do first is to assess the business problems or pains of the organization.  Two key questions are asked:  What are the drivers to “want” a CMS and what happens if no action is taken?  These two very simple questions can certainly help prioritize and let organizations focus on what is truly important.

So expect to be asked these questions and be ready to juggle priorities to get work done in phases.

Expectation #2: Content owners should take control of their content.

Too often we see a CMS be implemented only to have IT still heavily involved (e.g., adding a new navigation element, search index updates, publishing schedules, etc.).  I’m an IT person at heart and I fully understand the logistics and realities of managing secure web applications.  But at the end of the day (unless you’re in an IT  business), the technology group is a business enabler.  Content and business unit owners should expect that their site is theirs.  You own it, you manage it, you add to it, you change it, etc.  If there are workflows needed for approvals, no problem.  That should be part of the CMS implementation.  But it should be everyone’s goal to not have IT part of the day-to day operations of a site.

Expectation #3: The CMS technology “tail” should not wag the user experience “dog”.

This goes along with expectation #1 above.  The CMS is a means to get to the end goal of solving a business problem or alleviating a pain point.  It is not the driver.  So expect to do some upfront user experience design before selecting a CMS.  Information architecture, design and overall user experience should always come first, then choose a CMS that is flexible enough to implement that vision.  For smaller projects without a great deal of functionality, many CMSs may be just fine.  But for larger, complex application development managed by a CMS it’s important that you understand not just written business requirements but also how that translates into the user experience and visuals (not design, but wireframe flow).  Whether internal or via a development partner, someone can help mock the user experience from a high-level to drive CMS requirements.

Expectation #4: CMS is a marathon, not a sprint.

Just like anything you buy, it needs service.  It needs to be cared for, upgraded, enhanced and managed.  As your business grows, so do your needs.  We often see people say things like “let me get the site up with 2010 dollars and then I’ll think about what to do next year”.  While it’s great to see people take action, it’s important to understand that if you leave it alone it will not be successful.  By no means am I saying every 3 months build a new web application.  But just understand your business (e.g., keeping up with competitor cycles and the overall business’ corporate goals and timelines) and expect to make continual investments.

Don’t discount the above because of its simplicity.  It’s quite often these things taken for granted and people set themselves up for missed expectations.

A CMS can be a great tool.  Make sure it’s implemented successfully.

I hoped the audience would be able to take away a tangible list of action items and at least a starting point for thinking about content personalization.  So I thought I would jot those down here for everyone.  While some folks may be well beyond the basics, I still believe these principals work for everyone.

1) Define your audience segments (understand what their intent is and what message/interaction works best).

2) Create content, imagery, messaging, branding (i.e., overall user experience) per segment.  Don’t get too granular to begin with as your website is a marathon not a sprint.  If you start too granular, you have significant risk of missing the target completely.

3) Define your site architecture (i.e., sitemap and navigation nomenclature) as well as overall design to present information in an intuitive way.  What words will resonate with your customer — not you!

4) Test and Refine: A/B testing is a very good and not complicated method for determining what content/message is working.  It involves single aspect changes one at a time to see how changes affect.  Multi-variate testing, while incredibly effective is much more costly and complex, so A/B testing may be a more appropriate place to start.

TIP: Ask your audience for only important information, and only when giving something valuable back to them.  Important information is defined as data points that allow you to help significantly enhance their experience or is absolutely necessary for your business.  Don’t ask for irrelevant information as the more you ask for the more likely they are to not answer.  Don’t ask for their full name if just email address for an online newsletter will do — again it may deter people from answering.  A “conversion” can occur over many touch points and you often don’t have to go from introduction to conversion for a visitor instantly.

TIP: You may have more information than you realize to personalize content.  Look at analytics reports to find out where they were visiting just before your site.  Did they use a search engine?  What keywords?  Are they a return visitor and did they look at the same product again? — this may indicate they can’t pull the trigger on a purchase and a coupon might help.   Did they have to register with a code or referrer information (e.g., a doctor’s ID that can tell you what type of information might be relevant to a patient based on the doctor’s discipline)?  That may tell you a lot about the person that you can interpret and use to drive relevant/persuasive content.

TIP: Andrew Hally of Unica discussed the importance of SEO and landing pages.  I don’t think his comments can be overstated.  It’s incredibly important to manage SEO properly and make sure that the landing pages (whether detailed page within a website, a microsite or a single landing page for an offer).  It really makes a significant difference in conversion to have relevant content based on what a visitor was searching for.  You have only a few seconds to hit a user with a message from an organic search engine once they land on your page.  If it’s not immediately apparent whether your content is relevant, they will leave within a few seconds.

A question that came up was “where we see content personalization tools heading”.  At this point over the next two years I don’t see a revolutionary shift in the features/functions of CMS, Analytics and eMarketing applications.  I expect that the usability of the advanced features finally means a much more wide-spread adoption of the tools.

One of the most interesting topics for me was “how much personalization is too much?”  All systems are only as good as the inputs.  Going too granular means you make more and more assumptions (either manually or through a system).  The more assumptions made the more chance for making a wrong assumption.  This means a significant risk of getting wrong content to a visitor. People also tend to be overwhelmed with managing content and message for too many audiences.  So there needs to be a balance between persuasive content personalization, risk of too much personalization and inability to manage the personalization.

I am a big fan of crawl before you walk and walk before you run.  Start smaller, typically 6-12 audience segments for most (e.g., customers, prospective customers, investors, media, prospective employees, etc.).   The one most likely to be a but more grnaular from the beginning would be customers since you may know a lot about them.  As you learn more about all audience segment behavior and can make informed, accurate decisions to further segment your audience you can do so.  It’s a marathon not a sprint.  You won’t get everything right the first time.

I know there is a lot to digest, but don’t be overwhelmed.  It’s time to start crawling!

1. Jeff Johnson – Chief Creative Officer, BigBad, Inc. (moderator);
2. Brett Zucker – Chief Technology Officer, Bridgeline Digital;
3. Scott Brinker – President & CTO, ion interactive;
4. Andrew Hally – VP of Product Strategy & Marketing, Unica;
5. Joe Henriques, Regional Director, SiteCore USA

Everyone wants better conversion and an improved ROI.  If I had a nickel every time someone promised that I would be off to a tropical island somewhere.   The promise is out there, but the problem is how do you get it in the most economical way (features, time and cost). Those three concepts are VERY important so keep them in mind.

Think about the barriers you may have experienced to successfully driving persuasive content or conversions to your call to actions (e.g., make a purchase or submit contact info).  I have heard everything from “we employ two full-time people to manage our analytics and I still don’t know what to do with it” to “can’t the system just do this for me” to “I don’t want to do this because it takes my IT department forever and costs an arm and a leg”.  Sound familiar?

Integrated analytics with content management or ecommerce can significantly help.  I won’t go too deep into it since you can follow the webinar presentation below, but from a high-level:

- Features: Integrated tools share information much better which makes helps you make your decisions based on more accurate, informative data. The interface is usually shared, which makes for an easier-to-use and more adopted system as well.

- Time: Integrated analytics usually takes care of the “page tagging” for you eliminating the the need for expensive resources spending inordinate amounts of time on creating and managing these tags.  There is no delay in taking action to change content or product information or user flow because you learn from analytics and then right there in the same UI you can do whatever you need.

- Cost: This is directly related to time.  You significantly reduce page tagging time/costs, reduce training and support costs since it is a common user interface and many times the overall pricing structure of integrated software can be very compelling.  You also have a single platform to manage which can be easier and less costly for IT.

The general themes of the questions from the webinar related to real-world examples.  So here are a few ways to think of integrated analytics in a scenario you may relate to:

1) E-commerce: A scenario would be tracking search engine keywords that brought a visitor to the site.  Easy enough for anyone.  Now track that to what they purchased to make a correlation between search engine effectiveness and transactions.  A little more difficult and time consuming but very doable.  Now track the margins of the products that were sold to really determine ROI on your SEO campaign.  Much more difficult without integrated e-commerce and analytics tools.  But that is your true ROI.  And how about driving certain merchandise to a customer who has bought before based on the manufacturer because they’ve shown an interest in their products.  Without integrated e-commerce, CMS and analytics to share behavior, content and product detail data that’s next to impossible.

2) Persuasive Content: A person is browsing your financial services site and looks at the Planning for Retirement page and then the Top Cities to Retire To.  You know a lot about that visitor — probable age, investment risk profile, etc.  Maybe folks approaching retirement age (> 50 years old) prefer personal contact vs. online forms.  Well swap out the “Contact Us” form for a large banner with a “Call Now” ad.  Reach the right audience with the right message.  Without integrated analytics and content management to track behavior and then dynamically render content based on that behavior it becomes next to impossible as well.

Now imagine both of the scenarios being managed by the content/business owner without IT intervention, without the cost or effort of page tagging and with an easier to use interface.

I understand people bringing up the argument about “best of breed” software and I have discussions on this all the time.  But remember the 3 principles mentioned above (features, time and cost).  Separate analytics typically requires significantly more upfront integration/development effort as well as ongoing maintenance, both of which translate into significant costs.  And as for features — just look at what you might need and don’t pay a penny more for bells and whistles that you won’t touch and just complicate the user interface.

So there you have it.  Integrated analytics makes everything better … I guess I have to put my own nickel in the retirement fund.

Don’t underestimate the power (or simplicity) of basic web analytics!  You don’t need to be an expert to make good use of some of the basic reporting in any web analytics package.  And it can lead to some dramatic results without much effort at all.  It’s the old adage “crawl before you walk and walk before you run.”  The same applies to web analytics.  So start crawling with some of the basics of web analytics.

I typically discuss three key areas with customers.  I won’t go too deep into the first and second, but the third is the crux of this posting.

First, you need to understand your goals. Some people call them Key Performance Metrics (KPM) or Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Let’s keep it simple and call it your “goals”. What behavior are you trying to drive with your visitors? e.g., make a purchase, fill out a contact form, pick up the phone and call, etc. Make sure to create goals that push the envelope but are still attainable.

Second, setup your content to drive that behavior. Obviously this is easier said than done, but don’t worry about making things perfect.  That’s why you have analytics — it’ll tell you how well it’s doing and you can always change it. Think about nomenclature for navigation items, page titles, images and highlights, and how they relate to driving the goals you set out. There are a lot of good resources for helping with what is called “Information Architecture”.

Third, and the heart of this posting, use basic web analytics to measure visitor behavior to understand how you are doing and more importantly how to change things to drive improved results.

Here are some simple reports that everyone should look at (and every web analytics package contains):

• Unique Page Views: Total amount of times a page was read by unique visitors. So if John Smith views the same page four times, it only counts once as a unique visitor. This will tell you what content is getting the most air time. Start to ask yourself why and if this is the behavior I am trying to drive to achieve my goals. If it is, great. Follow that trend to make sure it doesn’t change. If it’s not, start to look at the relevance and brevity of the content. Are you hitting key points immediately to drive the right behavior?
• Single Page Visits: Visitors came from an external site (e.g., search engine or typing directly in the browser), landed on that one page and left. Sometimes this is fine like in the case of a landing page from a search engine where they can fill out a contact form and leave. More often than not this indicates a user was confused by the content or not expecting what they saw. So review those common single page visits to understand how they got there and what would cause them to be confused. Refine content as necessary. Change navigation names to be more meaningful. Add more imagery and fewer words perhaps. If you are working with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) then do the keywords match the information on the landing page where people come when they click in the search engine?
• Top Exit Pages: This is what people were looking at just before they left your site. In some cases it makes sense as in a thank you form for submitting their information. That’s a natural place to leave a site from. If it’s on the product index page, you have a problem. Again, understand where people are leaving and figure out why. Is your content too wordy? Do you have way too many links and people don’t know where to go? You should modify your content accordingly.

These are three reports that anyone can understand and begin using within 15 minutes that will significantly help drive better website performance. And you can spend less than an hour a week and see dramatic improvements.

At the end of the day it’s about using content to drive behavior, using analytics to measure the effectiveness of content and then using a Content Management System (CMS) to maintain the content that drives behavior. Continually monitor and manage that cycle.

There are no more excuses for not using web analytics!