Your CMS should bring your content creation and editing processes into the 21st century. (Photo: Creative Commons License)

If your company is in the market to upgrade their CMS platform to a shiny, new model, or just beginning to research options, it’s important to compare all the bells and whistles you’ll need to keep  your web experience management (WEM) capabilities strong, relevant and fresh. There are many newer features out there you may not have even thought were available, and some that will quickly turn into favorites making you wonder how you ever survived without. Take some time here – and over the next few posts – to familiarize yourself with some of the coolest features built into the iAPPS Product Suite, and then imagine these capabilities as an intrinsic part of your content management process. Chances are that much of the intuitive basic functionality built into iAPPS holds what you’re looking for – whether you know it yet, or not.

To effectively research a solution, step away from the processes and environments you’ve become accustomed to and really look to identify the goals you’re trying to accomplish – on a daily, weekly and seasonal basis. Then, ask how your CMS can help you to achieve those goals. Too often, users take current processes – frequently and unnecessarily complex – completely for granted. This narrow view makes it hard to be fully aware of any potential new functionality that may be available that can actually make a difference. As you vet all the possibilities, be sure you’re not missing the chance to solve many of your problems with the right CMS by identifying all the options available to you. (more…)

In today’s web-covered world, everything is richer, faster, more colorful, and more relevant to each user. The old bait & hook, mass-blast marketing isn’t enough anymore, and can genuinely annoy its intended target – your potential customers. Marketers need to focus their messaging efforts now, more than ever, across multiple channels to effectively manage successful web engagement, and they need to take advantage of tools that can help them do just that. Today’s Web Engagement Marketing (WEM) strategies require an implementation that is derived from specific goals or objectives, and campaigns need to be able to be easily and quickly altered in individual channels for continuous optimization.

Goal Driven Marketing involves setting specific goals for an overall campaign and deploying a WEM strategy that exploits various channels to achieve those goals and that can be measured against benchmarks that make sense to your company. Effective Goal Driven Marketing leverages accurate, relevant web analytics to enable real-time adjustment to each channel in order to reach and exceed these goals.

You do this now. Need to fill more seats for your next company seminar? You set a campaign goal for increasing the number of registrants then associate that goal to a series of channel actions: email campaigns, banner ads, paid search, social media efforts, etc. As the campaign progresses, you keep a close eye on analytics from each channel, figure out what is and isn’t working, then make necessary adjustments to optimize for maximum effect. (more…)