All content management systems (CMS) have certain limitations. If you’re going through a stage of rapid growth, or predict this will happen in the near future, you need to set up the right infrastructure for your website to handle the increased traffic you will be receiving. Trying to scale in a hurry causes problems so be prepared before any issues emerge.
You will also need to carefully consider how your CMS will provide a practical hub that allows your marketing and editorial team to perform a number of all-important actions across your different channels – if your scaling process will impact them, you may have a problem. This is especially the case if you are a media publishing organisation that is about to increase the amount of content you push out online.
Much of this comes down to the specific infrastructure and management processes you put in place with your CMS. If you have the right architecture in place, then you won’t need to worry as much about how growth will impact your website performance.
Ultimately, your CMS will not help you scale your brand on its own, but having a plan for how to scale will stop it becoming a problem. It will make the process smoother, as you introduce new functionality, handle greater traffic volume or integrate new pages onto your site. We’ve outlined some important ways your CMS can help, as your traffic scales up.
What do we mean by Scaling?
In most cases when people talk about scaling a website, they specifically mean scaling the traffic, or increasing the capacity that the site can handle before it reaches its limits.
There are other aspects to think about as well, such as how does your website CMS handle your business scaling? More people. More content. More changes…and more stakeholders fighting over priorities.
Why is your Website important for scaling your brand?
Your CMS will handle a number of important processes for your brand. At the centre of your digital business, it is responsible for standardising your workflow and making sure that information is effectively delivered, stored and reviewed. If you are a publishing agent, it will be the interface in which editorial or other media content is uploaded, reviewed and delivered.
All this is to say that as your brand grows, your CMS will remain a central facet of your online marketing processes. To drive conversions and connect with users, you will need a reliable system in place, to handle the various actions your marketing team will need to make, as your organization evolves.
During growth periods, you may simply be dealing with greater volumes of content, but perhaps the very nature of your organisation may shift too. Media formats, advertisements, subscriptions, data collection and a whole new editorial flow may be the product of your organisation’s expansion. And all this requires a CMS that can adapt to the challenges.
Here are just a few functions that your CMS supports:
- Content Storage
- Information indexing
- Internal searches
- Content revision and approval
- Publishing and media management
Learn more about supporting the growth of your organisation with custom-built WordPress themes and bespoke CMS designs from Powered By Coffee.
Supporting the publishing process
A crucial component of your website is how it showcases relevant content to your audience. The way you source and curate this content will have a huge impact on the way people perceive your brand and their likeliness to purchase your products or services. Quantity alone means nothing if your content isn’t on-point.
To make sure that you avoid random or irrelevant content and only publish the most relevant information for your audience, you will need to pay a great deal of attention to how your CMS supports and reinforces your editorial policies. Your business may have started with a set of individuals handling the publishing process in person.
However, with the expansion of any group, it becomes harder to dedicate human resources to certain tasks, when there is so much to do.
Your CMS can help ensure editorial consistency, by ensuring that certain things have been done, as well as providing a streamlined, easy-to-use and practical system that your marketing team can utilize. Whether it’s developing and uploading posts; adding links, images or video; or enabling your site’s editor to quickly review and approve content, a well-built CMS can save your marketing team huge amounts of time.
Larger companies may also use a number of junior marketing executives, with little digital technical ability, to handle different tasks behind the scenes. Making sure that these actions can be performed by individuals without the need for extensive training is important. Also, segmenting the way your marketing team manages online content, with tiered access profiles, will prevent mistakes being made across different sections of your website.
The goal is to build a CMS that will allow your team to keep up with timely and relevant publishing of content with relative ease and flexibility – regardless of the size of your enterprise.
Adding alternative functionality as the business case changes
As you grow, you may find that you need your website needs to function differently or that certain areas need more attention. Whether it is greater security measures, e-commerce features, editorial workflow or search-engine optimisation (SEO) integration, a CMS that can accommodate to the changing nature of your business will undoubtedly support its success.
Have actions that were once performed by an individual have become too time-intensive and need to be automated? With custom made plug-ins and bespoke CMS designs, these functions can be integrated, to offer simpler ways of achieving the same results – freeing up the time of your marketing team.
For example, you may need a more comprehensive way to gather and respond to customer feedback than your existing model. Your CMS can be designed to make it easier to review this kind of information and direct your sales or customer support team to the relevant information quickly – regardless of their technical skills.
A CMS development project with proper change management, version control and deployment processes can make a world of difference in how easy and straightforward it is to modify the system.
Managing brand integrity
It’s hard to ensure your brand is represented effectively online while going through a period of growth. If you are releasing a new platform, delivering more content online, or if team members who once managed your branding step away from the role, your CMS can help you to retain brand integrity. It can standardise certain actions and enforce a visual style, ensuing content is delivered consistently in-line with the style guide.
This helps you protect your company against brand erosion. If you have recently hired a new team of marketing professionals to handle your digital presence and oversee various publishing functions, an effective CMS will help them fall in-line with your brand identity. Images, fonts, animation and downloadable attachments can all be centrally stored and accessible to avoid individuals straying from the guidelines you set out.
Also, if your system for categorising and linking to internal content is well-structured, then you will be less likely to frustrate users who visit your site. Things like meta tags, links and suggested content can all be monitored carefully through your CMS, giving your marketing team a better handle on the experience that is being provided to your online audience.
Find out how to improve the user experience of your e-commerce visitors with a custom-built CMS and WordPress theme from Powered By Coffee.
Additional channel distribution
Content doesn’t need to stay locked up on your site. A good CMS will help you to distribute it to other places, increasing its amplification. Due to new developments such as REST APIs, your WordPress site can be used to connect to the broader digital world and various applications and platforms that will enable you to distribute your content further.
Essentially, the way your CMS is set up can help your marketing team access a broader multi-channel marketing network. With your CMS at the hub, content can be easily distributed through a number of different channels, such as through smartphone apps, email newsletters, internal digital platforms or social media.
Integrations such as Google AMP will also offer you a way to deliver stripped-down versions of your current web page to mobile users. Sites that don’t adapt could end up being left behind when it comes to ensuring competitive loading times.
All this cuts down on the need to switch between different platforms and fiddle around with complicated access information to each individual system. Saving your marketing team huge amounts of time, content can be efficiently reused or adapted easily for its specific application. The thing to remember is that platforms like WordPress can be adapted to do more, allowing your media brand to thrive online while it continues to grow.
Workflow addition
At the heart of successful digital marketing is automation. Taking your brand to the next level will require your marketing team to develop effective processes for reaching and engaging a mass audience, with minimal effort. To do this, fully utilizing the power of your CMS is essential. By streamlining and automating various actions, a more seamless workflow can be achieved, aimed at improving the experience your customers or loyal readership deserve when interacting with your brand.
Your marketing funnels and user journey can be optimised through a dynamic integration between your CMS and your marketing campaigns. This includes things like timely posts to social media platforms, easy access to digital assets, sophisticated cross-linking opportunities between your channels and SEO tools. Things like mail newsletter distribution to your subscribers can also be automatically actioned if you have the right infrastructure in place.
At times when your organisation is growing, fine-tuning your work flow and making sure you can sustain the same kind of marketing campaigns to larger audiences can be achieved with the right CMS.
CMS configurations that support your scalability
Creating a scalable website to support your business depends on a number of factors, including the nature of your organisation. Depending on how your site functions within your overall digital marketing matrix and business operations, you will need to consider how things like increased traffic and the need for added functionality can be supported through your CMS and website.
A comprehensive assessment of your organisation’s size and future goals should be carried out to determine how your CMS should be set up to support the scaling of your business. It is always wise to speak to specialists who can advise you on your options in terms of scalability.
At Powered By Coffee, we perform a full analysis of a company’s current and future site requirements before building and implementing effective solutions to help support their growth.
