Considerations when Consolidating to a Central CMS
Many enterprises today have a segmented digital presence that relies on multiple disconnected backend platforms. As brands are looking for better ways to integrate digital workflows or move to an all-in-one system, one major question to consider is what does the CMS landscape look like for your overall global brand?
Whether due to acquisitions, separate global business divisions, or historical technical needs, many brands still have multiple content management systems (CMSs) managing their broad digital experience. Consolidating to one central CMS or experience manager (usually a multi-tenant CMS is needed for larger businesses) offers substantial benefits for both processes and results. Is it the right decision for your business?
Reaping Big Rewards
Brand Consistency
Arguably one of the most important benefits of a central platform is more control, oversight, and alignment with brand consistency. Consistency is critical for a global brand—it helps:
Create trust
Leave a lasting impression
Reinforce the brand identity and values
Improve brand recognition with your audience
Spread brand awareness
And all of these big benefits mean… brand consistency can lead to increased revenue.
A unified platform gives you the ability and structure to standardize branding elements—components, style guide, process frameworks, content structure, consolidated integrations—helping ensure that digital teams are using the same foundation to create what they need for their region, market, or sub-brand. There is still substantial room for flexibility and localization of content but with needed guardrails and easier oversight.
Operational and Cost Efficiency
Putting together content, translations, authoring, development needs, integrations (just to name a few) for multiple websites is labor-intensive and usually redundant. That means higher costs too. A central platform should dramatically reduce the complexity and time needed for website administration and maintenance.
Content and Campaign Collaboration
With a central platform, collaborating and repurposing components, content, and campaigns becomes more straight-forward and accessible across teams. If one team creates a new component or asset or campaign, then that framework has been built within the platform and is accessible for other teams. Depending on their needs, they can make adjustments—personalizations, translations, segmentations—and launch quickly with faster processes and less roadblocks.
Traffic Increases
Multiple domains means split authority in terms of overall traffic and specifically organic traffic rankings. Consolidation means your marketing strategies can focus on one content infrastructure—and consolidate into fewer domains and subdomains. Additionally, search engines privilege large websites with high domain authority, which means possibilities for large increases in rankings and overall traffic.
Website Consolidation and Migration Considerations
Preparing for this kind of move—where you’re migrating to one centralized CMS—is a large project for enterprises but well worth it. When done wrong, the process takes longer than necessary and can cause some major business, IT, marketing, and sales problems. However, you can make your migration approachable and as clean as possible. Successful website consolidation requires a strong strategy and careful execution. What are some of the first steps to consider?
Strategic Planning: Define the goals and objectives of bringing together different websites into one centralized platform. Ensure why and how this aligns with broader business strategies and future digital goals.
Data Analysis: Analyze your data! We collect it for a reason. Your data should be able to tell you what areas are critical and need to be migrated carefully, where major traffic hotspots are, what regions need support, and pinpoint potential issues. Be thorough and see what your data tells you.
Current Website Audits: Review and assess existing websites and all content and assets. Identify valuable resources, eliminate redundancies, and ensure you have everything in the scope of the project identified.
Technical Assessment: Evaluate the technical infrastructure—hosting, integrations and APIs, analytics—of all sites included in this project. Evaluate if your centralized platform can meet all new needs for the new, larger landscape and what adjustments need to be made from a tech stack perspective.
Information Architecture: Just because you have one centralized platform does not necessarily mean that you have a single navigation or experience. At this level, we would expect centralization to occur with a multi-tenant CMS. They are an excellent way to have shared infrastructure and consistency but with data and experience separated where needed. However, you should review what the existing architecture is both behind the scenes and for navigation/wayfinding within the websites. What architecture changes are needed? Do you need additional architecture to support that experience? Audit what exists and where you are headed, so you have a strategic plan to guide organization.
User Experience Design: Closely tied to information architecture is the broader area of user experience design overall. How will the overall user experience be impacted? What considerations need to be accounted for and what work needs to happen in the early stages to have a UX-strategy to guide the project.
These are just a few of the key steps when approaching a website consolidation plan. Although a large project, it’s valuable and can be taken step by step. A smart, careful plan and roadmap can help ensure success. It all starts with a clear assessment of your current landscape and business goals.
Assessing Your CMS Landscape?
Do you need help assessing the value of a website migration? Or the initial steps to lay out the strategy, roadmap, workflow, and resource needs? We can help.