Chapter 4: CMS Marketing

Let’s be honest: You cannot have a successful marketing campaign without good content. It’s what gets people to pay attention to your brand and what informs them about various updates, such as new product launches or existing product revisions. Knowing the value of content is pretty darn important, but it’s also vital to understand what the term means. It’s not just about blogs, articles or social media posts. That’s why CMS marketing is so critical. In the world of marketing, content can describe everything from videos and tutorials to full-size e-books. It helps build exposure for your brand, share a little about your goals and engage customers. Creating useful how-to videos about your products, for example, may keep your customers checking back frequently for more updates. In addition to the many different forms of content, there are just as many channels where it can be shared or published. Nothing is more important, however, than your company or brand’s official website. That’s exactly where CMS marketing, or a content management system, comes into play.

What Is CMS Marketing or a CMS Tool?

A content management system is a piece of software that simplifies the content creation and publication process, specifically for a website. It is a package that includes all the backend coding for a site, including many common functions and components. WordPress, for example, is a popular CMS. There are many others available too, like Drupal, Squarespace, Acquia, Wix and more. It makes the content production process much easier, even for people without a programming and development background. You can add text, images and page elements like buttons, and also theme the entire site from an administrative dashboard. It’s like working with the Microsoft Office Suite or comparable software instead of Notepad. The CMS handles just about everything you’d need to manage on your own, simply and efficiently. You can add hyperlinks with the click of a button, instead of typing out the HTML code. You can upload and add images. There’s so much you can do with the help of a CMS that you likely couldn’t with plain code, at least not without the appropriate experience. CMS marketing, on the other hand, is simply an offshoot of using the tool. You’re relying on various features and functionality the CMS software provides to improve your website and content marketing efforts. You can install a plugin, for instance, to handle SEO on your site.

The Small-Business Conundrum

CMS marketing is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses. That doesn’t mean larger organizations can’t take advantage of it, but smaller companies stand to benefit the most. To understand why, you have to consider the common challenges small-business owners face. For starters, smaller businesses tend to have less capital and smaller marketing budgets. That translates to fewer resources — fewer that can be invested in things like content marketing or website development. Most CMS tools are free or relatively inexpensive, and they’re easy to install and maintain. Next, they make it possible for the layman to operate and modify a website. Unless you have a strong background in development or programming, as well as some visual design and graphic arts skills, you’re going to have a tough time building a site. A CMS alleviates these issues by providing just about everything you need. All the basic functionality of a website is there, you’re working from templates with highly customizable themes, and you can install plugins to effectively add functionality. Finally, content management systems are designed to handle all the necessary practices for updating, modifying and editing content. Without a CMS, if you edit a URL or slug, you have to revisit every single reference of that link across your entire site or you’ll end up with broken pages. With a CMS like WordPress, when you make a change for a URL — even just on a single post or page — the edit is pushed sitewide. That’s just one feature of many. The CMS makes it possible for a small business with limited resources and time to create, maintain and support a website. Beyond that, it makes it possible for the company to launch a self-maintained content marketing campaign that would otherwise be out of reach.

CMS Marketing: Content With Style

When you produce content in any form, you are left with the raw file or materials. When writing an article, for example, you just have bland, default-styled text. If you want it to use bold or italic styling, upgrade titles to actual headers, or even change the color of the text, you would need to know HTML and CSS. A CMS allows you to make all this happen with a simple visual menu or GUI. You highlight the text you want to modify and select the bold button or select the font color option and choose your color. It’s that simple. The whole point of marketing is to garner attention, so you want your content to be colorful and captivating. A content management system makes this possible, even if you have no knowledge of HTML or CSS styling. 

You Need a CMS Marketing Plan

At this point, it’s quite obvious you need a CMS installed on your website—if you don’t have one already. The software will help you produce, update and maintain your content marketing channels. More importantly, it will help you keep everything looking clean and attractive while letting you create it via an easy-to-use interface.

CHAPTER 3: Conversational Marketing        CHAPTER 5: Brand Marketing

The Small Business Marketing Guide: Introduction

Chapter 1: Successful Viral Marketing Campaigns
Chapter 2: Influencer Marketing
Chapter 3: Conversational Marketing
Chapter 4: CMS Marketing
Chapter 5: Brand Marketing
Chapter 6: Scarcity Marketing
Chapter 7: Transactional Marketing
Chapter 8: FOMO Marketing
Chapter 9: Neuromarketing
Chapter 10: Close Range Marketing
Chapter 11: Guerrilla Marketing
Chapter 12: Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Chapter 13: Target Marketing
Chapter 14: Diversity Marketing
Chapter 15: Undercover Marketing
Chapter 16: Cause Marketing