Your CMS Is NSFW

Marketers have a secret -- we hate our CMSes.

Research from HubSpot found that the vast majority of marketers are unhappy with their CMS, with an NPS of -65.

No, that’s not a typo. Let that sink in -- negative 65. What’s going on?

When businesses are just starting out, website management isn’t prohibitively difficult. CMSes designed for very small businesses allow marketers to own their company’s online experience without a developer or IT team’s help.

But as businesses grow, our needs -- and our organizations -- change. As we expand into new markets, launch new products, and introduce new brands, new challenges emerge. Marketing leaders must coordinate with developers and IT teams to manage their website’s ecosystem, while ensuring frontline teams can make content updates and build pages. Layered on top of these considerations are a plethora of new technical requirements:

1. We need to connect our website with an ever-growing array of tools and technologies, via integrations, plugins, and custom development.
2. We need to use roles, permissions, and content partitioning to create clean workspaces for our teams as they become more specialized.
3. We need to ensure that site performance does not degrade as more visitors and more content expand our website’s footprint.
4. We need to personalize a rich end-to-end online experience for all of our website visitors, with capabilities like membership logins for customers, contextual content for leads, and ungated content for customers.
5. We need to be confident in our website’s security, incorporating functionality like SSO, SSL, and custom configured CDN to keep our business’s and our customers’ data safe.

The sheer weight of balancing these different priorities, teams, and workstreams makes it incredibly difficult for organizations to be as proactive in evolving their websites as they should.

Traditional CMS Is Failing Us

We need the CMS we’ve invested in to make our lives easier. But we’re consistently left disappointed. Not only do our systems fall short of supporting us as we scale, they often exacerbate the pain of website management, and in the most extreme cases, bring site evolution to a screeching halt.

Systems designed to be usable by marketers often lack the technological advancement scaling businesses require. Systems that do possess this functionality are limited by restrictive tools that make it remarkably difficult for marketers to make simple changes, and rigid processes that limit what's possible for developers to build. And let’s not forget about IT teams, who are responsible for website maintenance and fixing broken site elements after other teams make edits, despite having their own projects to look after, according to research by HubSpot.

This tweet from co-founder and technical director Stephen Kenwright of SEO agency Rise at Seven sums it up all too well:

Marketing leaders are often forced into an impossible choice.

Should your IT team spend time on site fixes and maintenance, at the expense of integrating new apps with your site?

Should your marketing team test new content and risk creating problems developers need to fix later, or should they wait in a weeks-long queue to make simple changes?

Should you delay a go-to-market play because it will take months to implement and test within the limitations of your CMS, or should you move forward knowing your processes are incomplete?

These are tradeoffs you should never have to make.

You shouldn’t have to choose which part of your customer experience you’ll have to neglect just to keep the trains running on time.

Any successful leader has to make big bets to grow their business. Some will pan out, and some won’t -- that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. What’s frightening about traditional CMSes is that the way they’re built transforms website management itself into a big bet.

Marketers at scaling companies are being locked out of their CMSes -- and that’s a huge problem.

The Necessity of Nimbleness

When we lose the ability to manage our CMS, we lose the ability to manage our customer experience.

Ten years ago, businesses won by selling products that were 10 times better than the competition. But it’s not what you sell, it’s how you sell. Today, businesses win because their customer experience is 10 times better than the competition. In fact, companies that build hyper-relevant experiences deliver 11% higher shareholder returns than their competitors.

Customer experience is anchored by your website -- it’s what ties it all together. According to HubSpot Research, 90% of consumers expect immediate responses to marketing, sales, and service queries on your site. But companies have allowed their systems, not their buyers’ behavior, to dictate their customer experiences -- the average lifespan of a website is 2 years, 7 months, a lifetime in marketing. Painful CMS management has created a massive gap between consumer expectations and the experience businesses are actually able to deliver.

You deserve a CMS that can support you and your customers. It should be easy to rapidly iterate so tomorrow’s website looks and performs better than what you have today, to continuously use data to improve your site, and to adopt new technologies and tools.

Your CMS can’t be a system you do battle with daily, just to ensure your business can function. It’s time for marketers to take back control of their websites and the customer experience.

Introducing CMS Hub

We don’t think any growing business should have to choose between power and flexibility. That’s why we’re launching CMS Hub Enterprise, a scalable CMS that takes the pain out of website management, so you can spend less time solving for your software and systems and more time solving for your customers.

Website page creation and management tools enable marketers to focus on creating amazing content, not managing the content creation process. Developers can create flexible content structures that give marketers the ability to make quick updates and optimize performance.

Other capabilities, like multi-language and multi-domain support, lay the foundation for growing companies to scale their brands across new product lines and regions.

Finally, the things that you need to make your site secure and reliable come built in — automatic SSL provisioning, 24/7 security and threat monitoring, and permissioning and audit logging so you have full control over the teams working in your CMS — so you can focus on improving the customer experience.

CMS Hub is for rapidly growing companies that are tired of being held back by their content management systems. It enables marketers to customize and personalize their site experiences, allows developers to work the way they want, and gives security teams peace of mind.

Because your website should adapt to your brand and your customers’ expectations, not the other way around.

CMS Hub is now available in Professional and Enterprise tiers.

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