We’ve all had that feeling of disappointment when a piece of content we've put so much time, effort and resources into, underperforms. But don’t be too quick to say the problem is the content itself. You need to think about the experience.

As marketers, we’ve all used a content management system (CMS) at one point or another to manage our content. In fact, lots of us still only use our CMS today. But modern buyers expect their content to be personalized and relevant to them, and this isn’t something a CMS can easily support.

This week on Frequently Asked Fridays, Mike Waldron, VP of Marketing at Uberflip, discusses the important differences between a CMS and a content experience platform (CEP), and why it matters to you.

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What is a content experience?

Content experience allows marketing and sales to engage audiences at scale with relevant content, by focusing on the environment within which the content lives, how the content is structured, and on compelling buyers to engage your content. Where a CMS will deliver a static experience, CEPs deliver a dynamic experience to your buyer that is relevant to them. Below are a few key differences between the systems.

Personalization

With all the digital noise out there, sending buyers to generic landing pages or destinations just doesn’t cut it anymore. No matter how good the content is, chances are the audience won’t engage if it isn’t hyper relevant to them. To scale content creation and publishing in order to keep up with this demand through a CMS is not manageable. However, a CEP will dynamically choose relevant content based on intent signals and audience attributes, meaning marketings can create these personalized experiences with minimal effort.

Content recommendations

Where a CMS might use tags to suggest content based on the current content being viewed, a CEP looks at the buyer itself and suggests content relevant to them. That’s an important difference, and it leads to increased engagement which, in turn, speeds up the buyer’s journey as they consume more of your content and build trust in your brand faster.

Time to market

If you’ve ever used a CMS, and we all have, you’ve likely had to rely on a web ops team to create campaign destinations and launch content. Depending on the scale, this delay can cost you weeks, or sometimes months, which you can’t afford. A CEP is designed to allow marketers to publish content and create these experiences fast, without any outside support. In a market where mindshare goes to the brand that launches their campaign first, this is a powerful advantage for marketing teams.