Content Management Archives

26th of June — 2023

How to Choose a Digital Experience Platform

Chris Risner

A t its core, a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is an integrated set of tools and services that provides personalized, omnichannel engagement at scale.

Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) empower marketing teams to create meaningful customer experiences that build loyalty by providing the ability to speak and listen to a brand’s stakeholders. Companies that capitalize on their powerful DXP software reap the benefits of faster time-to-market, streamlined whole-team marketing workflows, and long-lasting customer relationships. When considering a Digital Experience Platform, there are multiple factors to consider. Here are some of the most important ones:

DXP Integration Capabilities

An excellent DXP should integrate seamlessly with your existing technology stack, including your ecommerce platform, marketing automation software, customer relationship management (CRM) system, site search software and other tools. The platform should offer robust APIs and a variety of connectors to make integration as easy and straightforward as possible.

DXP Content Management

The DXP should offer a powerful and flexible content management system (CMS) that allows you to create and manage content. The CMS should support multiple content types, including text, images, videos, and other media. The CMS should also have an intuitive user interface so your team can easily create content and manage your website. It should also offer workflow permissioning so that managers can quickly and securely set user permissions.

DXP Personalization Capabilities

A DXP should enable you to create personalized experiences for your customers based on their preferences, behavior, and other data. The platform should offer tools for creating personalized content, recommendations, and promotions.

Building a more personalized connection with customers

DXP Multichannel Support

A good DXP should support multiple channels, including web, mobile, social media, email, and other channels. It should provide a consistent user experience across all channels and allow customers to interact with your brand seamlessly across multiple touchpoints.

DXP Analytics and Reporting

Digital Experience Platforms should provide robust analytics and reporting capabilities, allowing you to track user behavior, measure engagement, and optimize your digital experiences. The platform should offer real-time analytics, advanced reporting features, and integration with third-party analytics tools.

DXP Scalability and Performance

The right DXP should also be able to handle high traffic volumes and provide fast, responsive experiences for your customers. It should be built on a scalable architecture and offer reliable performance, even under heavy loads.

DXP Security and Compliance

The best Digital Experience Platforms should provide robust security features to protect your data and ensure compliance with industry regulations. It should offer features such as encryption, access controls, and audit trails to help you maintain data security and compliance.

These are just several of the factors our BlueBolt team analyzes when recommending DXP software vendors to our clients. If you are looking at Digital Experience Platforms, our veteran team of developers, designers and business analysts can review your business requirements and make a personalized recommendation for you. We also have a DXP Competitive Marketing Analysis available to download. If we can be of help, kindly fill out this connect with us form and we will get in touch with you.

21st of June — 2017

How Personalizing The Enterprise Search Experience Can Increase Performance

Chris Risner

T he need to search large amounts of data in a short amount of time has existed for decades. Code breakers during the Second World War developed warehouse sized mechanical computers to decipher incoming enemy intelligence, all in order to sort through varying algorithms before breaking the codes.

Mechanical systems are able to sift through hundreds of potential entries an hour. In modern business, an enterprise network likely has thousands, if not millions of data entry points, all of which need may need to be identified. While the complexity of search and identification has drastically increased over the decades, so too has search methods. Search personalization is one of the latest methods for improving search results. Now used within search engines, it is a tool companies need to implement in order to boost productivity by reducing search times while providing higher quality results.

Search Engines and the Development of Search Personalization

During wartime, it took massive computer machines to perform even the most basic data analysis searches. By the 1970s, computers had become an important tool inside the office. This lead to the development of inner office networks, which could connect all computer systems together. These networks formed the basic idea of the Internet. Simplistic search protocols were available with basic search fields. By the time the Internet became available to the general public in the early 90s and search engines started to emerge i the mid 90s, basic search features remained similar to that of the inner network systems of the 70s: almost exclusively keyword based (Net History, 2004).

Google did vary its search algorithms from other search engines, which in turn helped make it the most popular search engine. During the mid 2000s, Google started to look into varying ways to improve search results. In 2005, the search engine released its personalized search feature. Personalized search results were based off of varying elements, including past searches, selected results, growing patterns and location. While the company has tailored the search field since then, personalized search has become the basis of almost all Internet searches over the past decade (Tentacle Inbound, 2017).

Search Personalization at the Enterprise Level

Search personalization is not simply search engine specific. Individuals and workstations within a company network should take advantage of the search method as well. Different individuals holding varying job titles within an enterprise will likely need different kinds of information. Someone in the accounting department is more likely to need financial information while sales may need client based information. Additionally, each individual will likely need slightly different information based on their personal clients, who they work with and documentation they have input into the system. With a personalized search at the enterprise level, the time it takes to locate needed files is greatly reduced, which in turn boosts productivity and slashes employee downtime.

Search personalization is more than just a tool used by Google. It is a powerful search method designed to improve productivity within an enterprise network while providing higher quality search results.

If our team can help you leverage personalization and search results, please connect with us.

26th of May — 2017

Common Myths of Content Marketing

Chris Risner

C ontent marketing is growing in popularity as an essential strategy for driving traffic and generating leads. It is also a great way to promote your brand and establish meaningful relationships with your potential customers.

As more businesses begin to design content marketing strategies, it is important for them to be aware of common myths and misconceptions that surround content marketing. This article will highlight some of those myths and why they stand not to be true.

It Won’t Work for Your Audience

A common misconception of content marketing is that it won’t work for the type of audience that you appeal to. This is however not the case. In fact, 70% of consumers prefer to relate with a brand through their content (such as articles, videos and blogs) as opposed to being blasted with ads that are trying to get them to buy something.

Consumers want to feel a connection with your brand and to develop a relationship with it. Once you have built up that trust with your audience, they feel more comfortable purchasing your products. This situation holds true across many different audiences.

It is Too Expensive

Many companies feel that a content marketing strategy is out of their reach financially. When you look at it more closely, however, traditional methods of advertising can be much more expensive.

It is indeed true that content marketing comes at a cost (such as creating the right content, hiring writers and paying for social media ads) but these costs, when properly incurred, are actually less burdensome than other marketing strategies. This is particularly true for many advertising marketing plans such as Google and Linkedin.

It Comes At No Cost

Another common misconception is that content marketing is a cheap way to get the job done. Some businesses think that by simply putting out content, the rest will work itself out and they will automatically drive traffic to their site. This is however not true.

Businesses need to invest in the right strategies in order to create attractive and relevant content for their customers and drive those customers to their website. Such strategies involve paid social media advertising in order to give your content a boost, developing content around keywords through SEO in order to drive traffic, and re-designing your website in order to have the right landing pages. In fact, effective B2B marketers spend 39% of their budget on content marketing. It is the right channel to invest in.

It is Difficult to Measure ROI

The ROI on your content marketing strategy can be measured. You can track incoming traffic and where it is originating from, and the number of leads that you have generated through the response rate to your call to action posts on your website.

You can also measure how many “contact us” forms have been filled out or how many people have subscribed to your newsletters in order to determine how many leads you have generated. Content marketing provides many methods through which you can continuously track and measure your results.

Quantity is Better than Quality

You would think that the more content you put up, the better. However sacrificing quality for quantity can have the opposite effect on your content marketing strategy. Customers want more of what is relevant to them, not just more.

It is better to have one blog post that reaches many more people than multiple posts that are read by fewer people. When beginning your content marketing strategy, start slow, focus on quality and have a plan that outlines the goals of each piece of content you put up.

Results Come Quickly

Many businesses new to content marketing always expect quick and easy results as soon as they put up their material. Content marketing takes time and a lot of trial and error. It requires a deep understanding of your audience and the ability to create content that they find attractive and relevant.

In addition, you have to promote this content to your customers. All this takes both time and effort and it should be an on-going process, not an overnight activity.

All Content Should be on Your Website

It comes naturally that businesses would want all the content they have worked so hard to create, to be on their website. There are however advantages to diversifying where your content is located online.

Republishing your content on other platforms helps increase outreach and draw traffic to the originator of the material. Other platforms also probably have a larger audience than you may have at the moment, therefore it helps your business when you attempt to put your content on these larger brands.

The More Views, the More Success

Just because your video or blog post has been shared thousands of times does not mean that it will automatically drive traffic and generate leads. While outreach is an important first step towards successful content marketing, it is important to turn that outreach into leads for nurturing.

Your content should contain a call to action and other drivers of traffic that enables you to grab the attention of more potential customers.

It is Difficult to Compete with Other Businesses

Smaller companies or those that are new to content marketing may feel intimidated by larger established corporations which have a lot of web traffic and are dominant online. It is, however, possible to be competitive. If you strive to be unique and valuable in the content that you create, you can stand out in the face of all the material that is out there.

Implement SEO strategies that use keywords that are unique, yet popular in how often they are searched. As potential customers search online for solutions to their problems, having unique and valuable content that is SEO optimized can draw them to your site.

Content Will Speak for Itself

Sometimes content marketers create quality content and think everyone will want to read it. Quality content is not enough for effective marketing. This is because every minute there are a thousand tweets, a thousand videos uploaded on YouTube and a thousand photos shared on Facebook among other sites. Marketers need to work hard so that their content will stand out in a sea of information overload. They need content that is different and unique. Content marketers need to find what their customers want and give it to them effectively than their competitors. A business needs to consider factors like online traffic, page views, engagement and number of clicks. They also need to use customers’ feedback to analyze how well they are serving the customers’ needs. Once they have this data, they can come up with strategies that will better target their customer base.

Content Marketing Won’t Work in a Specific Business

A common myth is that content marketing belongs to some industries rather than others but this doesn’t mean that content marketing won’t work for them. Shipping companies are using content marketing to raise brand awareness. Research shows that content marketing will work effectively in the least likely industries.

Social Media isn’t an Effective Way of Content Marketing

Businesses need to be active on social media and use it as an actual publishing platform. They can build better relationships with their clients by encouraging them to follow their social media sites and interacting with them. Too many brands neglect social media maybe because they believe their customers aren’t tech-savvy or active on these sites. Almost everyone is on social media in this age of technology and failing to use it as a resource could be crippling to the business. Social media shouldn’t be ignored as a unique marketing channel. It provides multiple channels on which content can be distributed i.e. YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr. A strategy needs to be defined in order to determine how efficiently social media will be used to enhance a company’s brand and maximize user experience. The better the content the more readily it will be received by customers.

Creating Content is an Easy Process

Creating content marketing with no experience is not easy. A number of processes can be used including; using social aggregators to schedule social media posts, tailoring newsletters and emails to promote content and using analytics to predict customer behavior towards the content. However, automation should not be used completely as the end result will be impersonal and not connect with the customers. Content creation should not be automated. There are software companies that can use to streamline the process of content marketing. Businesses’ need to know that creating efficient content marketing strategies is going to require a lot of investment in time and resources so they will need to hire professionals or dedicate the time to create the content themselves.

It is Easy to Find Great Writers

Companies that are focusing on expanding the blog section of their websites and other text-heavy areas may opt to go for cheaper writers and other low-cost solutions when generating content. Simply writing something for a blog post and generating top-tier content are two different things.

Companies should invest in obtaining quality writers that are knowledgeable of the subject matter, the target audience, and can relate to the overall marketing strategy of the business. Creating professional content that your customers’ value is an important skill that should be given the necessary attention and resources.

There are Better Marketing Strategies

Content marketing is increasingly becoming one of the top marketing strategies being adopted by businesses. In fact, 72% of marketing professionals believe that branded content is more valuable than ads placed in magazines. Many of them also view content marketing as superior to direct mail and other traditional marketing strategies.

Typical ads that “interrupt” and are placed in between TV programs, magazines and other media outlets are increasingly becoming less effective at generating sales. Content marketing is more effective marketing strategy and, when done properly, will continue to provide benefits for the foreseeable future.

If our team can help you harness your content into a streamlined content and CMS strategy, please contact us.

3rd of May — 2017

Top Signs that It is Time for a New Web Content Management System

Chris Risner

I n the modern day, a successful enterprise relies heavily on the flow of digital media. A responsive and high-quality website makes a great first impression on potential customers. Likewise, company employees rely on systems to get relevant data as quickly as possible. An efficient content management system (CMS) is able to juggle both of these realms in order to keep a company running at its best.

Content management systems index and store all of a company’s data so that it can be quickly and easily retrieved by the people who have access to it. An effective CMS is capable of enterprise content management (ECM) as well as web content management (WCM). ECM is primarily concerned with the flow of data between members of a company. WCM on the other hand focuses on the flow of data between an enterprise and potential customers. Both forms of content management need to be as efficient as possible in order for an enterprise to be successful.

However, like all software, sometime a content management system simply needs to be replaced. But how does an enterprise know when it needs to purchase a new content management system?

It All Comes Down to Time

The needs of an enterprise change very rapidly. That is not to say that a new CMS should be purchased every time the needs of the enterprise shift. It does, however, mean that an enterprise needs to keep a watchful eye on their content management system for signs of a degrading service.

When considering to replace a content management system an enterprise should be asking the following questions:

How much has the enterprise grown since the CMS was first installed?
How does the enterprise needs to present itself to potential customers?
Are there any significant flaws in how the current CMS is operating?
Does the current CMS update frequently?

Growth of the Enterprise

The most simple answer for whether or not a company should invest in a new CMS is: Yes. Over time, any successful enterprise will outgrow the systems that worked for it in the beginning. This is because when an enterprise first starts out, it most likely invests in an affordable (i.e cheap) content management system. At this lower level, a cheap content management system fits the need of the enterprise just fine because it has a very low workload. However, as the company grows this cheap CMS can be strained by the sheer amount of data it has to manage.

Naturally, the larger a company grows, the more content it has to archive: transactions, payrolls, et cetera. This content is vital to the operation of the company. If the enterprise grows very rapidly, so too will this backlog of information. If there is too much content for the current CMS to operate it may no longer work as well as it used to.

All of this data inevitably piles up. As an enterprise grows it continuously needs larger and more powerful systems to keep it all in check. Record keeping is crucial to the health of an enterprise – one never knows when a year-old payroll may be needed. As such, this kind of data can not simply be deleted to make room for new data.

Changing a CMS may be more hassle than deleting old data, however in the long run it becomes an impractical and temporary solution. Eventually an enterprise has to upgrade its content management system if it wants to continue to grow. The sooner an enterprise can make the switch, the better off it will be in the long run.

Perception of the Enterprise

Functionality of the CMS

A major sign that a content management system needs replacing is if employees or customers report persistent issues while trying to access the content that the system manages. If content is frequently unavailable or if there is considerable lag while trying to access it then the CMS is likely due for an upgrade.

On the consumer side, longer wait times or frequent errors may be a result of a CMS that is desperately in need a replacement. If too many customers are complaining about long wait times they may decide to take their business elsewhere. So investing in a stronger CMS is a move that not only keeps customers happy – but it keeps the enterprise healthy.

On an employee’s end, a faulty content management system may often lose content or it may take too long for content to be retrieved. The slower the content management system operates, the slower the employee works. To keep employees working at their most efficient an updated CMS is key.

Updates for the CMS

Like all software, a content management system can be updated to improve its functionality. If the developers of the CMS are not updating it, odds are the content management system will become rapidly outdated. Content management is a rapidly changing environment and if updates are nowhere to be found an enterprise could be lagging behind.

Updating the CMS is always a preferable step to purchasing a brand new system. It will save money and hassle that come with changing the content management system altogether. However, if an update does not improve the functionality of the CMS or if there simply is no update then it is time to start looking for a new system.

If our team can help you with your CMS, WCM or DXP, please connect with us.

10th of October — 2016

Using Product Information Management (PIM) to Optimize Enterprise Search

Chris Risner

O ne major way that organizations can help enterprise search is to proper implement a product information management (PIM) solution.

Marketers are increasingly discovering that having an effective enterprise and site search is critical to customer engagement and customer satisfaction. In fact, in a recent study, Jupiter Media Matrix reports that 80% of visitors abandon sites if the search is functionality is poor. In addition, Marketing Sherpa reports that 43% of site visitors go directly to the search box when visiting a website. Because of this, the marketing department is constantly looking for ways to improve their enterprise search. This blog post discusses how a PIM solution can help optimize the enterprise search for an organization.

Centralize Product Data and Information

One of the main benefits of implementing a PIM is to centralize product data and information into one location and allows the marketing department to go to one location when they need to add new products or make modifications or updates. Enterprise search then benefits from this configuration by allowing integration to one data source for product information (the PIM) and ensuring that the PIM source continues to have access to the most recent content. Search then is always up-to-date and minimizing data inaccuracies.

Enforce Base Product Data with Workflow

Proper implementation of a PIM provides the team to establish a minimum amount of data that is required in order for a product to be released or launched. In addition, the PIM will create a workflow that enforces all the products conform to this for consistency across all products. All new products will fall under the same workflow rules ensuring that the base data is maintainted. This allows enterprise search to expect a base amount of data in the system and prevent null results and blank data points in search functions such as filters.

Create Common Taxonomy Language

A product information management (PIM) project will typically include an exercise to discuss the organization of the data including a common language for the data. This taxonomy includes product types (such as sensors or software solutions), categories, and attributes. This work to understand the structure of the data will allow enterprise search to have the data necessary for features such as parametric search functionality and filter capabilities.

Conclusion

As marketing departments look for new ways to improve the customer experience, they are looking to improve the enterprise search functionality. One main way to provide a better enterprise search is to properly implement a product information management (PIM) solution. A project focused on getting a modern PIM up and running can help enterprise search in multiple ways. Marketing teams would be wise to evaluate whether it makes sense to utilize a product information management (PIM) solution within their company. The direct benefit of the proper use of a PIM on enterprise search could provide a very lucrative return on investment.

Our team is one of the leading minds in enterprise search and smart product recommendations. If we can help you, please reach out and connect with us.