Marketing executives who oversee their firms’ websites are responsible for selecting the best content management system (CMS), selecting the best digital asset management (DAM) solution, and implementing them.
I will discuss why you need both a CMS and a DAM, and then will focus on how to select the best CMS and the best DAM. Finally, I will address what steps you need to take to successfully implement a CMS and a DAM.
What are examples of six types of websites?
The seemingly simple request to “implement a website” is more complex than it appears, because different firms have different website needs.
HubSpot has identified 23 different types of corporate websites. While some of these, such as “real estate websites,” are industry specific, here are six different types of websites, and their purposes.
- Business websites. These serve as the digital presence for a company.
- Ecommerce websites. These sites also allow prospects and customers to directly purchase goods (such as baseball caps or even a Tesla Cybertruck) and services (such as WordPress or other entry-level website hosting) from the site itself.
- Special interest websites. These include food and recipe websites, entertainment websites, wikis, directories, and job boards. They attract readers interested in the topic.
- Nonprofit websites. Nonprofits design their sites to raise money or awareness, usually for a particular charitable cause.
- Government websites. Unlike sites that make money or raise money, government websites provide services to improve the lives of residents, from driver’s licenses to travel advisories.
- News and blogging websites. These can be dedicated sites if you wish, or they can be a feature on one of the websites listed above. They provide topical information to the reader.
But are these website types really different?
While these seem widely disparate, these six website types all have a common purpose in presenting information to prospects and customers, and often in receiving information from their visitors.
And each of these websites contains different types of assets, including the following:
- Text.
- Images.
- Audio.
- Video.
How do you manage these assets, both for the website and for the firm itself?
Why do you need both a CMS and a DAM?
A content management system (CMS) and digital asset management (DAM) solution serve two different but inter-related functions.
The CMS governs the content that you display on your website. The text, images, audio, video, and everything else on the website—the CMS handles it all and intelligently presents the content to your prospects and customers.
But where does that content come from? Firms don’t only market via websites, but also market via email, text messages, voicemail, sales sheets, and many other avenues. Ideally your firm should manage all these items via a single unified DAM. You don’t want one piece of content on your website and a contradictory piece of content in your outgoing emails.
But how can you select the best CMS and the best DAM for your firm’s needs?
What are the top five attributes of the best CMS?
Here are some items to consider when selecting a content management system.
- Ease of use. Website creation shouldn’t be too laborious. Your CMS should ease the process of creating your firm’s website, ideally via a modular approach that lets you assemble your site via intelligent building blocks.
- Customization. At the same time, you don’t want a CMS that forces your firm into a “one size fits all” solution. You don’t want your website to look exactly the same as your chief competitor’s website. This is why you need intelligent building blocks, so that you reflect your firm’s branding throughout the website.
- Security. Websites manage valuable data, not only the credit card numbers processed by ecommerce sites, but also all the other data such as prices, discounts, and firm processes. Your website is of no value if hackers can retrieve or alter private information.
- Speed. If your website takes too many seconds to load, your prospects will head elsewhere. Ensure your site loads quickly and intelligently.
- Scalability. Ideally, a firm wants more and more people to visit its website over time. Or the firm may want to expand to new product lines and/or geographic regions. Can the CMS scale to handle firm growth?
What are the top five attributes of the best DAM?
Some of the top five attributes of the best DAM are similar to the best CMS attributes.
- Ease of use. Just like the best CMS requires ease of use, the best DAM requires it also.
- Customization. Similarly, you must be able to customize your DAM to meet your firm’s specific needs.
- Security. Again, security is paramount.
- Workflow considerations. The DAM must support the complete asset creation process, including not only the storage of the asset in the DAM, but also the creation of the asset and the necessary approvals.
- Omnichannel capability. Your marketing materials don’t only appear on your website, but also in your emails, sales sheets, and everywhere else. Any change to an asset for one channel also needs to be reflected in all other channels…in a dynamic fashion.
And one more thing…
Even if you select the best CMS and the best DAM, there’s one more critical aspect: seamless integration.
The CMS and the DAM have to work together.
- As you manage your digital assets, you need to ensure that the proper assets are available in your content management system for display on the web.
- If you update a digital asset, such as the style of a car or the price of a baseball cap, that update needs to be reflected throughout the firm’s marketing channels, including its website.
- You need to intelligently analyze prospect and customer data from your websites, email, and other channels to get a complete picture of your prospects and customers.
For these reasons, your CMS should support integration with your DAM, and vice versa.
If you have decided that Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) offers the best CMS and the best DAM..
…your choice is understandable.
- AEM fulfills the best CMS requirements above,
- AEM fulfills the best DAM requirements above,
- Finally, AEM Sites (the CMS) and AEM Assets (the DAM) not only work with each other, but also with other Adobe products such as Adobe’s creative offerings. This designed compatibility enhances collaboration between creatives and marketers.
But the advanced features of AEM Sites and AEM Assets lead to implementation complexity, and the need to intelligently manage both the business and the technical aspects of an AEM implementation. I recently surveyed AEM users via a LinkedIn poll, and I discovered that over half of the respondents were frustrated with the lack of or improper developer help.
You can ensure that your firm enjoys PROPER developer help by working with an experienced Adobe Experience Manager team. KBWEB Consult is an experienced AEM development agency that can provide the proper assistance, having supported similar firms customers in the past.
To get started with your AEM CMS and DAM implementation, schedule a free, confidential 30-minute consultation with KBWEB Consult. You can book a meeting on our Let’s Talk page.