Choosing a Content Management System (CMS) can be a daunting task. Each year we are greeted with more and more, but what CMS will help you achieve your business and marketing goals? This article will help you narrow it down.
What are Business Goals?
Business goals are targets that you set for your company. These are typically related to cost-savings (process improvement, productivity increases) or business growth (launching new products, expanding to a new territory). There are numerous ways your website helps you achieve your business goals. For example, to reduce your costs of acquiring new customers, you might digitize your sales process and create an inbound sales strategy. If you’re looking to increase your market share you might create a website that focuses on what makes you different.
What are Marketing Goals?
Marketing goals help you achieve your business goals. A marketing goal might be to build brand awareness. increase website traffic or generate more qualified leads. Your marketing goals are typically very broad and achieved with several marketing activities. For example, let’s say you have a Business goal to reduce your costs of acquiring new customers. One of your Marketing goals might be to generate more qualified leads.
WordPress: The Best All-Around CMS
WordPress is massive. The CMS (as of Oct 21, 2021) commands a 65.1% share of the content management market. To give you an idea of how much of a lead this is: Shopify comes in second at 6.3%. 41% of the web uses WordPress, from hobby blogs to the biggest news sites online. WordPress has been able to amass this scale because of its flexibility. A massive plugin library (currently 58,550 plugins) extends WordPress to cover most functionality requirements. WordPress is customizable, SEO friendly, secure and capable of high-performance right out-of-the-box. Check out our WordPress Development Page to learn more.
WordPress WooCommerce CMS for eCommerce
Considering eCommerce? WooCommerce provides you with everything you need to start selling online. WooCommerce is added to WordPress as a plugin. It extends WordPress allowing you to build exactly the eCommerce website you want. The extension store allows you to customize and extend your store’s functionality. If an extension is not available to suit your specific eCommerce needs, WooCommerce provides rich documentation to customize your store. WordPress is a great solution if you’re looking for an incredibly flexible CMS for eCommerce. Check out our WordPress WooCommerce Development Page to learn more.
WordPress Industry Use Cases
WordPress is an excellent solution for most small to mid-size businesses and will scale gracefully into enterprise with careful planning. We recommend WordPress for most use cases as it can be customized to suit almost any website. WordPress is our choice for the best overall content management system. The flexible nature of WordPress WooCommerce makes the CMS suitable for product and service eCommerce.
Achieving your Goals
WordPress is a favourite among analytics and performance tools. This comes in handy not only for capturing conversions and setting a baseline for metrics but also for improving your results through conversion rate optimization. Plugins allow you to easily connect third-party tools for monitoring growth and measuring improvements. Lightning-fast landing pages give you a destination for paid marketing campaigns and robust payment processing partners provide efficient checkouts. WordPress is a performance marketer’s dream!
Shopify: A Top Contender for Product eCommerce
We have to mention Shopify now that we have mentioned eCommerce! Shopify gained popularity as a dropshipping engine and grew into a great system for most small to mid-size eCommerce businesses. The system simply connects to Google Analytics advanced eCommerce and Google Ads. If you’re into social selling, Shopify is an excellent solution. Flexible integrations make the system the perfect endpoint for social marketing and paid marketing campaigns. For dropshippers and product eCommerce marketers, the true benefit of Shopify is its simplicity.
Shopify is delivered as a Software as a Service (SaaS) package, meaning you pay a monthly fee which includes the platform, hosting & security maintenance. This can be a positive or negative point depending on who you ask. Businesses that prefer system flexibility would prefer options for hosting and maintenance. Businesses that prefer simplicity over flexibility love SaaS options.
Content takes a bit of a back seat with this system. Shopify is an e-commerce platform first and a CMS second. Stick with WordPress if you’re looking at content marketing as the main driver of traffic to your website. If you’re looking for a simple, secure system to sell your product or products, Shopify deserves your attention. Check out our Shopify eCommerce page to learn more!
Shopify Industry Use Cases
Small to mid-sized product-based eCommerce. Shopify excels for businesses with a small retail catalogue offering few product lines. We prefer WordPress for service-based eCommerce.
Achieving your Goals
Shopify simply connects with Google Analytics to provide marketers with essential metrics for achieving goals and eCommerce growth. Integration is simple for many third-party growth tools. This allows administrators to track success and quickly identify areas for growth. Shopify can do a lot, with minimal developer support once it is up and running.
Contentful: The Best Headless CMS
Contentful represents the ultimate in Content portability and development flexibility. This is a content-first platform. This means the system serves as a repository for content and content only. Contentful boasts an open API that lets you display your content in one, or many applications. It is up to you and your developers to build the system(s) that will display your content.
Contentful itself is delivered as a SaaS package, meaning you pay a monthly fee that includes hosting & maintenance. This is specific to the Content Management aspect of the platform. Hosting and maintenance for the website (or web app or in-store display, etc.) are completely separate costs.
Contentful provides teams with the ultimate system for content flexibility and performance. The only downside? This flexibility does not come cheap! Check out our Contentful Development Page to learn more.
Contentful Industry Use Cases
Mid to large-size operations looking to scale. Enterprise-level clients. Contentful is equipped to suit most industry use cases. It thrives in businesses where marketing revolves around the digital ecosystem. If you want to manage content from a single system, but display it in several locations, Contentful might be the right tool for you!
Achieving your Goals
The Internet of Things has changed the marketing landscape for businesses and marketers. Content lives on every device, screen, gadget, and appliance – everything from the Google result on your smartphone to the billboard at Times Square. Contentful allows you to consolidate several different content management systems into one. This is particularly important for businesses trying to build brand awareness or deliver the same message across many channels. Anywhere that content is displayed – Contentful delivers.
Drupal: The Best CMS for Strong Digital Teams
Drupal websites are often requested by clients that have a specific purpose for using Drupal. These reasons often include administrator familiarity, legacy system compatibility, internal support team capabilities or preference. However, there are many reasons you might want to use Drupal for your project.
- Drupal is the preferred system of many developers due to its rich documentation and development flexibility.
- Drupal also allows administrators to set highly intricate user permission sets right out of the box. This allows for the creation of multiple users assigned multiple roles each with highly specific capabilities.
- Drupal also allows users to create content types out of the box (similar to WordPress custom post types). This is important for teams that want to publish many content types or restrict editing and publishing capabilities for specific user groups.
Common complaints about Drupal are the contributed modules (think WordPress plugins) and lack of third-party support. Additionally, the cost of maintenance is typically much higher with Drupal. Major and minor version updates have been traditionally difficult to manage and will occasionally cause functionality to break unexpectedly.
Drupal Industry Use Cases
Drupal suits a wide range of industry use cases, however, it is not the preferred system in many cases. It is great for content publication websites or any website with many contributors and varying permission sets. A system like Reddit or Craiglist would be a great application for this system. Drupal is also a great high-performance solution for midsize businesses looking for development flexibility. Drupal is well suited to strong internal digital teams.
Achieving your Goals
Drupal is an extremely capable system out-of-the-box. A lightweight installation comes equipped with a built-in cache and is high-performance ready. It is capable of delivering highly visual, conversion-optimized experiences.
Squarespace: The Best Simple CMS
Squarespace is the preferred CMS for small businesses looking to launch a website quickly. The platform is delivered as a SaaS tool for website building and hosting. Users select pre-built website templates and use drag-and-drop elements to create web pages. Due to its simple nature and fast development cycles, Squarespace is a great system for proof of concept. It is typically replaced by a more robust system when it’s time to scale.
Squarespace Industry Use Cases
Small scale businesses looking for proof-of-concept. Small marketing websites that wish to track analytic data and plan for future growth.
Achieving your Goals
Squarespace provides you with an online presence quickly and effectively. The basic setup for Google Analytics is fairly quick and provides you with the essential data to make informed decisions down the line. This is an excellent starting point for businesses that want to establish a basic online presence.
Which CMS is for me?
The system you choose for content management should be closely tied to your goals and the resources you have allocated to achieve those goals. Still not sure which CMS to pick? Let’s have a chat about your business & marketing goals! Our senior team will help you choose the right CMS for your business.