Last year, research from Accenture revealed that poor customer service in digital channels resulted in 53 per cent of UK consumers switching brands in at least one industry. Today, customers serve themselves, primarily through brand websites. And brands, to serve their customers well, don’t have just one website, but many –sometimes hundreds or even thousands of sites. Managing all of those sites and all of their associated channels and touch points well, as the research revealed, is crucial to satisfying and retaining your customers.
As organisations become savvy about developing separate digital experiences in their brand stable to entice their specific markets, managing this ever-growing portfolio of content can be a real issue.
If implemented badly, multi-site management can slow down marketers’ ability to respond to external and internal demands to develop new digital properties. More often than not, the sites are run on a number of different content management systems (CMS) that often use different technologies. To further complicate matters, these multiple CMS platforms are managed by different internal and external teams and in legacy environments.
The complexity of this multiple-system model dramatically increases the cost, as more skill sets and time are required to operate the platforms. In addition to suffering from the confusion of mixed messages and siloed websites, organisations are not benefitting from the economies of scale that centralising on one content management system (CMS) would offer.
This legacy of confusion and added cost raises the question of how brand owners can effectively manage multiple sites across numerous regions and products, keep content and branding consistent, whilst retaining complete creative freedom?
To restore control and reduce unnecessary costs, marketers must invest in a central platform that offers the powerful functionality needed to quickly build mobile-ready brand, campaign and franchise websites. Having the power to create more content, collect audience data and respond quickly to market demand, across of portfolio of brand assets is not a nice-to-have, but a necessity in today’s digital environment. Managing the many necessary sites from a single dashboard and utilising a single platform is crucial to returning control of the brand and enabling implementation of a well-organised marketing strategy.
Warner Music is a great example of this. As a major global record company, it had over 300 sites across a number of different labels, products, events and locations. Many of these sites had been built on different technologies and platforms. Warner migrated all these sites over to a central platform. Now Warner can scale, secure, host and manage all their sites centrally. There may be two very different artists that attract very separate audiences, yet the web sites for each can be developed on the same template and retain a very different look and feel.
Organisations want to be able to manage everything centrally, but have the agility to deliver a set of web experiences that target specific channels, audiences and markets. Each site needs to be highly customisable and able to handle spikes of traffic. From an enterprise perspective, a “master” IT approved website is able to produce different experiences across multiple sites, all with centralised governance.
The demand for multi-site management is coming from all industries, but we have noticed a particular peak in the media, entertainment and publishing sectors and the consumer packaged goods industry. Organisations that have to comply with significant regulatory demands are also beginning to better plan and control the management of multiple digital properties. It’s imperative to brand reputation that all brand and regulatory requirements are met before going live. Managing content deployment through a central platform certainly helps to ensure that all the sites achieve this.
The Holy Grail for brands is to be able to rapidly launch new experiences, but with no duplication of effort or cost. This ability to minimise the IT burden, streamline the development process and increase both team productivity and the quality of application design really delivers to the bottom line. Marketers can then have the confidence to devise and follow ambitious digital strategies that will enhance the reputation for all of their brands, and deliver the optimal customer experience.
By Martyn Eley, General Manager UK at Acquia.
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