5 Essential Features for Your CMS

Keep it Simple for Users

You can have a great platform full of engaging features and a dynamic design, but none of this matters if your CMS is too complicated to use. A great CMS experience starts with usability and functionality. This goes beyond the basics, such as having a user-friendly content editor for publishing content. We’re also talking about reliability, fast load /me for your content, managing user roles to provide levels of access for members of your company and security from hackers.

Scope Out the Dashboard

Does it have convenient menus that allow users to easily navigate between functions of your platform? How about publishing capabilities? Is there a content approval process built into the software to ensure that content is properly reviewed by the right employees before going live?

Integration with Current Software

You want your website to be a lead generation machine, right? It doesn’t help if your leads are misplaced before your sales team has a chance to nurture them. In order for your website be an awesome 24/7 source of leads, you need to make sure it works in conjunction with the rest of your business software. When evaluating a CMS, make sure the platform integrates with the leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions you plan on using to track your leads.

Make sure you have an API set up that sends leads directly into the workflow of your favorite solutions, like Salesforce or another pres4gious business software solutions. Ensuring seamless integration between your CMS and CRM will go a long way towards streamlining data and reporting. Nobody wants to sort through tons of spreadsheets and let those leads go cold in the process.

Designing for Mobile Devices

More than ever before, having a mobile optimized platform is paramount to your success. According to Mashable, there are now more mobile devices on Earth than people. Today, there are 2.3 billion smartphone users worldwide in 2017! Recent studies prove consumers are starting to favor surfing the web with their mobile phones and this browsing is leading to DIRECT ROI. Prepare your site for a great user experience by having a responsive design that is easily viewed on any device.

Make sure you have an API set up that sends leads directly into the workflow of your favorite solutions, like Salesforce or another pres4gious business software solutions. Ensuring seamless integration between your CMS and CRM will go a long way towards streamlining data and reporting. Nobody wants to sort through tons of spreadsheets and let those leads go cold in the process.

Track & Achieve Business Goals

When evaluating a CMS, you should explore how it can help you achieve business goals. The key here is tracking the success of your commerce and content conversions within an easy to read analytics dashboard.

Your CMS should integrate directly with Google Analytics and your leading CRM tool, like Salesforce for example. Your analytics dashboard should highlight how your visitors are interacting with your content, what pieces perform best and how each communication medium is performing so you can refine your strategy accordingly. Other information you can glean from a good analytics system is visitor demographics, location and devices used so you can identify your buyer personas.

Finding the Right Information...Fast

Let’s say you update a product and therefore need to update the related sales content on your site. What happens when you can’t find the page that needs to be updated? Over /me your website files can get buried in folders or moved around. The value of this content diminishes greatly if you cannot locate it for updates and if your visitors do not see it.

Finding the right information on a website is imperative and significant in successfully reaching business goals. The solution is a native Enterprise Search tool within your CMS. Many CMS providers will charge an additional premium sometimes amounting to as much as a third of the overall purchase price to add this function. However, we believe that it is essential to the functionality and therefore it is a valuable (and included) part of our system.