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Content Management System CMS for Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Content management system introduction: use cases and benefits you should to get more customers.

You’ve probably read a lot about why you should invest in content marketing, but rarely do any of those posts go beyond the basics of Content Management Systems (CMS) or explain why you need it. Let’s get to the bottom of it. Content marketing is an insanely valuable tool for businesses of all sizes and in all industries – but what exactly is it? Quite simply, CM helps you communicate with the customer you want to reach. But we all know that “communication” involves much more than just sharing words to read on a page or screen. It means taking on the challenge of providing reader-friendly text and making it interesting enough so that your visitors remember you fondly again and again.

First and foremost, what is content?

Content is the conversation you have with your customers.

More specifically, it is the collection of content: Text, images, recordings, and videos that customers consume to engage with your brand.

This blog post? Is a piece of web content. That Instagram story you just viewed? The icon you clicked to schedule a virtual visit? Also content. Browsing the latest products on your favorite e-commerce sites? That’s content, too. News articles, banner ads, posts on social media, and even something as simple as the logo on a mobile app are content.

But when we talk about content in the context of customer engagement, it usually refers to some form of digital text, images, videos, or audio recordings.

So what is a CMS for Salesforce?

A content management system (CMS) for Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a technology platform that allows you to create, edit, produce and customize digital content, usually for the web and specifically for SFCC (former Demandware). Today, most content management systems offer more than just basics, supporting indexing, search, and SEO. The basic use of a CMS is simple: creating and updating digital content for internal or external publishing.

Why is a CMS important?

A CMS app does more than just manage your content. A content management system leverages your content to build better relationships with your target audience and customer. Businesses want to create, manage and deliver the right content to the right customer in the right place, across the entire customer journey – from marketing to purchase to support, loyalty and beyond. This can provide tremendous benefits to businesses.

For example, content can engage users or customers and recommend or launch new products. Additionally, it can guide customers on how to use your product in different ways or replace parts by themselves. By doing so, content improves service overall.

In our increasingly digital world…

… content can help bring a brand experience to life when an in-person visit is not possible. Content can drive sales, generate leads, and increase customer and partner engagement.

The key to content success: know your goals to create a compelling, end-to-end journey for your customers, and know what content will keep them engaged along the way.

Content management cloud in action

Consider this blog post. A blog post is one of the most common content types found in a CMS. Within that one blog post, there are several sub-contents (content within content!): a publish date, an author, a title, a banner image – even the image that appears at the top of the page – and the text. If you look at the entire page you’re reading, you’ll find even more content, such as related blog posts, industry reports, or even embedded videos.

Blog posts are just one type of content you can create with a CMS and prepare for publishing. There are countless other content types, including product catalogs, FAQs, press releases, and news articles … a complete list of text- and image-based content is beyond the scope of this article. And many CMS can also provide even more complex content types, such as podcasts or videos.

What is Salesforce Commerce Cloud?

Commerce Cloud is the world’s leading B2C and B2B commerce solution. Commerce Cloud is a multi-instance, cloud-based commerce platform that enables brands to create intelligent, unified buying experiences across all channels – mobile, social, web and in-store.

What does Commerce Cloud do?

Commerce Cloud is designed to help brands launch fast, grow fast, and reach more customers. Our technology leverages the power of the cloud to create innovative customer experiences that convert visitors into buyers and drive brand loyalty. With next-generation artificial intelligence infused into every aspect of the platform, we enable 1-to-1 personalization without the need for data scientists. And with our robust technology partner ecosystem and team of industry experts supporting you from planning to launch and beyond, you can focus on your growth.

CMS: A brief history

In the early days of the Internet, you couldn’t publish content unless you knew HTML or had a developer on hand. As you can imagine, both content creators who had to share updates with customers and developers who had to deal with non-stop content requests found the process frustrating.

Over time, various CMS tools appeared that solved this problem and made content development easier for anyone, with or without a computer science degree. These tools allow non-developers to create, modify, and publish content to a web audience, typically with a WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) editing tool.

Available CMS types

Today, we are in a “post-web” era where customers interact with brands across many digital touchpoints. With this, CMS technology has also evolved to support content delivery across all channels – more distribution channels, types of content, and content development processes. If we look at the current market, we find three main categories of CMS: