MakeOwnWebsite.net

At the end of the 90s, research forecasts of online retail sales were aiming for a modest $15 billion by the end of 2003. Compare that with recent figures from Forrester Research indicating that online retail sales in the US alone reached $175 billion in 2007, up 21% from $144.6 billion in 2006. And what’s more, despite a predicted slowdown as the industry matures, it will still add on approximately $30 billion in revenue every year for the next five years.

Unfortunately, online marketing doesn’t come in a pre-packaged kit with friendly do-it-yourself instructions. There is only one really important rule for online marketing: the best content that’s most accessible earns the most, which is why a content management problem is one of the most serious obstacles to a revenue-generating online presence.

What a good Web site can do for your business

The business benefits of a good corporate or sales Web site are pretty much old hat now. But considering how many organizations ignore these basic principles, it would do well to go over them again:


It’s the one advantage that has made the Internet the best thing since sliced bread: time and space become irrelevant. Thus, your Web site is able to reach out to many more customers than your brick-and-mortar store ever could. This becomes particularly relevant when you consider that 210 million Americans alone went online in 2007, and by 2012, over 1.2 billion people are slated to go online.


The returns from an online presence shouldn’t always be measured only in terms of online sales. As one study discovered, 51 % of customers surveyed researched products online before buying them offline. Thus, the study pegs the dollar value of offline sales influenced by online research to rise from $400 billion to $1 trillion in the next five years.


Two key measures of an effective Web site is how many leads it generates and how much it helps build a brand image. Consider the results of a survey by Forrester Research: 42.1% of respondents felt that online marketing was an important marketing tactic for generating quality leads, next only to in-person events, trade magazines and public relations. For online branding too, the tally for online marketing stood at a strong 40%. 

Online advertising and marketing spending is expected to undergo a compounded annual growth of 27% over the next four years, reaching $61 billion by 2012. An idea of why this is happening comes from a study by the Target Corporation which found that in terms of ROI, internet advertising performed two-and-a-half times better than magazines and 15 times better than television.

So, does your Web site have a content management problem?
Although most organizations understand the fundamentals of content production, there are a number of problems that occur due primarily to bad content management. To discover if you have a content management problem, just answer the following questions about your company’s Web site:

If you answered “yes” to all or most or even some of these questions, then there is definitely a need for a quality content management solution.

What your CMS can do
What a CMS solution primarily does for your organization is to introduce a certain amount of automation and workflow structure into the content creation and publishing process, thus removing all the errors that come from ad-hoc publishing routines that occur in a plain-HTML process:


The primary advantage of a CMS system is that it puts content creation in the hands of the subject matter experts, who are usually non-technical business users. This means that it is much easier to put the content creation responsibility in the hands of a wider pool of employees, without requiring a technical team to constantly be on hand to make changes or updates. This also ensures that all content is timely and up-to-date.


Putting content creation in the hands of a larger pool of contributors also requires greater vigilance about content and brand consistency. Quality CMS solutions ensure that all common parts of any message such as the information about products, services, company profile, logos, and so on are single-sourced; thus ensuring that every message going out is properly representative of the organization.


An important contribution of a quality CMS solution is the improvements on information architecture it can provide. This contributes directly to the quality of user experience on a Web site as well as decreasing the time required for information retrieval.


The back end of content management not only involves ensuring that content is authored by the right people but also that it passes through the right approval channels and is auditable. In Web environments working on HTML, the lack of expertise makes the review and approval process more haphazard and cumbersome. A CMS, on the other hand, brings some of the rigor that is commonly associated with print publication, ensuring that every piece of content passes through all the correct approval channels. Also since Web content is so ephemeral, every version of any published content must be captured in order to minimize liability of the organization. Content management systems provide just such a trail.


One of the most difficult aspects of the current information explosion is the tightrope walk between keeping up with competition while ensuring regulatory or other compliance. Here a CMS helps by ensuring that all updates and deletions of content are consistent across the Web site, thus preventing liability from stray pieces of content.

The business benefits
There are a number of significant business advantages from the quality and workflow improvements delivered by an efficient CMS system: