What is a content management system?

Content isn’t just king. Content today is king, queen, and benevolent dictatorship all rolled into one. Ask any content marketer: In a recent survey, 81% said they successfully used content marketing to create brand awareness. At its most effective, content helps organizations to make a huge impact on their customers and users.

But content gets even trickier to manage as your business grows. You'll need more of it! You'll also need to organize and access it efficiently, adjust it, and deploy it across the right channels at the right times. In short, more content means more complexity. 

Content management is like gardening. It might be easy enough to take care of a single potted plant by yourself — a website, for example — but if you want to set up multiple flower beds or grow more elaborate plants — digital experiences that are tailor-made for various audiences — you're going to need some guardrails and a bit of expertise. 

That's where a content management system (CMS) comes into play. The same study shows that 33% of marketers believe their organization hasn't acquired the right content management technology. Yet another 32% said they have the technology but aren't using it to its full potential. So, let's talk about CMSes and how to choose the right one for you.

Content management systems defined

What is a CMS? A CMS, or content management system, is a software application that allows content creators to manage, edit, and publish content to a website (or other channels such as phones, in-store displays, printed media, etc.) from a user-friendly interface. The traditional architecture of the CMS is an all-in-one or "coupled" enterprise content management system that pulls digital assets into one place for managing and publishing content.

In everyday terms, we can define content as any digital asset—including text, images, video, and audio files—that an editor might want to retrieve and use online, from authoring blog posts to building web pages to crafting email newsletters or social media posts. 

In the context of digital content, the fundamental purpose of a content management system is to cover:

• Site management: The CMS is a centralized hub that controls and organizes all content within a digital environment, including its presentation on websites and other channels. 

• Roles and responsibilities: The CMS can assign roles and responsibilities to individuals within the content workflow, including administrators, and set permissions for accessing, creating, modifying, and publishing content. 

• Content creation: The CMS includes native tools that allow users to create, edit, and update content, including text, images, and other media, often within pre-built templates, for presentation on web pages and other digital channels.   

• System updates: The CMS can deliver rolling updates that enable new features, fix bugs, and harden security. 

• Workflows: The CMS facilitates all workflows in the content lifecycle, from drafting and creation to review, publication, and archiving.

• Integrations: The CMS can incorporate plugins and integrations to extend its functionality or create new experiences for the audience.     

Circling back to our imaginary garden, using a content management system is like hiring a gardener to help your team organize your space. You decide what you want to plant, and your gardener provides not only the various pots, trellises, and flower beds that you need to make things look nice, but also the tools to do all that tricky maintenance as things grow: nurturing, pruning, weeding, and so on. 

With correct implementation at scale, content management systems can unify content workflows across an entire tech infrastructure and transform how organizations manage their online presence and communicate with audiences.  

Why do you need a content management system?

Let's phrase the question another way: Why wouldn't you need a content management system? Practically everything we publish online, whether personal or professional, is mediated by a content management platform of some stripe. The only other option is to roll up your sleeves and do some coding by hand.

Content management systems empower people with little to no web development experience to manage content: they can create, upload, and publish to their channel in moments. The CMS handles technical requirements, while a templated presentation layer can take care of the format and appearance of the content. 

Today, even the smallest businesses have ongoing digital content needs, whether ecommerce product pages, blog posts, social media profiles, or email marketing campaigns. However, those content needs also tend to change, and when they do, it's important that the CMS keeps pace.

Not all content management systems are created equal in this respect. Platforms like WordPress and Drupal have a one-size-fits-all approach (where plugins can provide some additional functionality). Legacy CMSes like these can work well for smaller businesses and individuals but struggle to scale with growing teams, campaigns, and projects. Moreover, technical performance and maintenance issues can prevent teams from realizing their full potential.  

What are the benefits of a content management system?

Let’s go deeper into the specific ways that a CMS can change your digital content game:

Content creation

A CMS lowers the skill barrier for web content management, meaning that non-technical teams don't have to rely (entirely) on experts with advanced coding knowledge to manage their websites. Instead, a CMS can nudge content creation, editing, review, and publication to within the capabilities of non-coders and non-developers, streamlining content workflows from end to end, and helping managers focus more on strategy and customer experience than technical limitations. 

Cost and efficiency

A CMS can help businesses reduce the cost and time required to maintain their websites by eliminating the need for extensive coding interventions and web development tech infrastructure. Similarly, the speed with which an editor can take content from the draft stage to publication on web pages (or wherever else it needs to appear) represents a potentially significant productivity benefit. 

Collaboration

A good CMS enables writers, designers, and marketing teams to collaborate on content at every stage of the production process — from writing and designing to editing and reviewing. Marketing teams and other content owners can add permissions to documents, facilitating secure access for different teams and departments and external third parties. Meanwhile, closer collaboration increases your business's collective capability to maintain content quality and consistency.

Templates

Do you need to deliver and manage content across multiple channels, such as desktop, tablet, phone, and so on? Content platforms — especially the headless variety — remove this conundrum by decoupling the front end from the back end. Structured content slots into predesigned templates for correct presentation on the relevant channels. Templates remove the need for coding interventions, save time when a site design needs a refresh, and help businesses explore omnichannel marketing possibilities. 

Easy updates 

A good CMS can help organizations respond to unexpected events and changing market demands in an evolving business landscape. You may need to recall a product, capitalize on a suddenly popular keyword, edit a blog for breaking news, or correct a typo. Your CMS should enable you to make those changes or update existing content relatively painlessly. 

Tagging

Tags are tremendously helpful. CMSes help teams organize and manage content by establishing taxonomies so end users can filter vast content libraries quickly. For example, grouping ecommerce products by category or price; alternatively, sorting blog posts by subject, geographic location, or date. 

Scheduling

CMSes have to support the timed release of content via scheduling tools. You can schedule the release of regular content, such as daily or weekly blogs and product reviews, and periodic content releases, such as new landing pages, social media posts, and emails that support marketing campaigns or holiday sales events. 

Search engine optimization

A good CMS has to accommodate best practices in SEO so that content is always visible on search rankings. Other features can include customizable metadata, XML sitemaps, optimized URLs and breadcrumb navigation, and 301 redirects for obsolete pages. And if a CMS provides tools to speed up page load times to enhance user experiences, so much the better. 

Security

A CMS provides businesses with a tested, verifiable means of securing and protecting content. In addition to cloud-based security measures, such as dual-factor authentication, organizing and cataloging content assets helps businesses monitor their information and understand its value.   

Centralization and standardization

The most significant benefit of a CMS is its capacity to define the content process within an organization's infrastructure. A CMS represents a centralized platform where all content passes before end-use and a hub for all content workflows. To that end, a CMS can become a single source of truth for content creators, enhancing version control, ensuring consistency of voice, and standardizing the processes required to take content from draft to publication successfully. 

What kind of content management system do you need?

Here comes the fun part: Consider how important your CMS will be for your business over the long term. The better your CMS is aligned with your organization's needs—now and in the future—the smoother it will be to scale up your content production to support your growth. Let's look at the different types of content management architecture currently available.

Monolithic CMS

In a traditional, monolithic CMS, technical backend content management is tightly coupled to the frontend presentation layer. These types of CMS are packaged and delivered as all-in-one solutions. Because the entire content process — storage, management, and presentation — is confined to a single system, development is locked to that system's capabilities. 

Since a monolithic CMS is a solution provided by a single vendor, users might find it more convenient to access technical support and implement updates. The downside is that there is little scope to customize functionality for your organization's needs. And if the CMS doesn’t make use of open standards, you might end up in a vendor lock-in situation down the line, making migration of your content to a new platform an expensive proposition.

Headless CMS

The headless CMS is an evolution of monolithic solutions. In a headless CMS, the back and front ends are decoupled, and an application programming interface (API) handles interaction between the two halves. Decoupling untangles the website's presentation from its code and gives you greater freedom to present content visually.

While headless content management systems offer much more flexibility by introducing a degree of modularity, you can take that modularity even further by leaning into the possibilities of composable content.

Composable Content Platform

While a headless CMS decouples its back end from its front end to increase customizability, a composable content platform extends that customizability to every component in the tech stack. 

Here, “composable” refers to the possibility of swapping or adding components into the stack like building blocks to craft a unique content experience. This modular architecture allows businesses to build their tech stack as an ecosystem of different microservices stitched together via multiple APIs. 

The Contentful® Composable Content Platform, for example, is a new way of thinking about and working with content that gives businesses complete control over their digital assets. It allows companies to use and reuse content across brands, channels, regions, and campaigns, and scale quickly to meet business growth.

The bottom line

Content management systems have come a long way since their earliest iterations. There's no single perfect content management platform that applies to every industry or use case. While specific features may enhance content workflows, the collective operational impact of content management often depends on the architecture of the CMS solution you choose. 

A composable content platform is an evolution of the headless CMS (which, in turn, was a breakaway from the monolithic CMS). It provides a way to optimize your business's content workflows through modularity: you could integrate personalization from one vendor, analytics from another, document management services from another, and so on until you have a solution that fits your business profile perfectly.

In Contentful's composable ecosystem, businesses gain access to an array of modular tech integrations designed to help meet specific content goals. Our approach gives creators, editors, and marketers the space, opportunity, and tools they need to optimize their content workflows, hone brand images and voices, adapt to challenges, and deliver seamless customer experiences.  

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