Best Practices in Content Management: IT Edition

As an IT professional, you’re charged with enabling teams to deliver great customer experiences. In fact, Adobe research found that providing better experiences through new technology deployment is the most important aspect of an IT pro’s job.

Managing the content needed to create these impactful digital experiences is particularly challenging. In many organizations, content developers work in different systems than front-end developers, slowing time to market. Teams have to create multiple versions of the same content just to fit different screens. And IT spends precious hours on tedious tasks and updates at the expense of innovation.

A modern content management system ( CMS) can change all that. With an agile, integrated, secure digital foundation, IT teams can deliver value faster, use data to drive experiences, and empower content developers to create the experiences their customers expect.

Find out how companies of all sizes — including Raiffeisen, Costa Crociere, and Constellation — are creating and delivering the most relevant content across touchpoints at scale. All while still giving IT room to innovate.

Modern experiences begin with a modern CMS

Realize value faster than ever

Consumers won’t wait around for the perfect digital experience. That’s why you don’t have time to juggle multiple systems or create new content for every endpoint. You need a secure, unified CMS that helps content developers and front-end developers use production-ready components, templates, and style sheets to quickly create, deliver, and reuse the content that consumers demand. And not only for your web properties and mobile apps, but any modern app, at scale.

Merge data and content for spot-on experiences

Understanding which content to serve up to whom and when is a shot in the dark if you don’t have a complete view of your customers’ online behavior, what they’re interested in, or how your content performs. That’s why both data and content are equally important in providing unforgettable, personalized content experiences. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can help you make sense of your analytics and automatically serve up the best text, layout, and experience based on consumer needs.

Empower teams with a scalable CMS

If your IT team spends too much time responding to content edit requests rather than allowing content developers to self-serve edits in a governed environment, it’s time to make a change. An advanced CMS gives content developers the power to reuse core components like pre-made navigation and breadcrumbs, as well as to edit single-page application (SPA) content while keeping IT in control of the code. Front-end developers win too, as HTTP APIs help them pull content directly from a repository and deliver it anywhere as JSON.

Realize value faster than ever

• Ann Arbor, MI
• Supporting hundreds of websites with a lean IT staff.

The web team for the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) at the University of Michigan supports 130 department and program websites and more than 500 class and research websites. Because they had no common code or design guidelines, each site presented a completely different experience, which made it hard for IT to keep up with code discrepancies.

In order to provide web visitors with a consistent experience, the IT department chose Adobe Experience Manager Sites to scale their small staff and resources to support all 130 department websites. While IT creates the website framework, templates, and components, more than 400 content developers use these building blocks to quickly drag and drop components to create experiences. Flexible APIs make it easy to integrate course information onto pages. And with all departments on the same platform, IT now rolls out code improvements and bug fixes all at once, saving valuable time.

The team has also off-loaded administrative work with the help of Managed Services, freeing them up to create more innovative student experiences.

University of Michigan was able to support — along with consistent code and design — scaled to 130 websites with less than a dozen staff.

• Irvine, CA
• Speeding up deployment with fewer IT resources.

Cylance protects more than 100 organizations around the world from cybersecurity threats, running their technology on 10 million endpoints. To support their growth and attract new customers, they needed a way to provide a consistent, engaging website experience across their global properties with efficiency and speed. But they didn’t want to tie up their IT teams with managing multiple sites.

Using Adobe Experience Manager Sites, they streamlined web development by creating more than 70 reusable drag-and-drop core components for content editors, including navigation, page layouts, image fields, text fields, carousels, and forms. Not only did these components help them shorten deployment time, but they also provided a consistent look and feel across sites. And because Managed Services handled site security and administration, developers were free to focus on building new functionality and integrations for better digital experiences.

Cylance accelerated website deployment from 6 weeks to just hours.

Click here to read their story.

Merge data and content for spot-on experiences

• St. Gallen, Switzerland
• Personalizing every interaction across every channel.

To defend brand share in a world of increasingly mobile customers, Raiffeisen knew they needed to treat each of their 3.7 million retail banking clients to the same personalized experiences — whether visiting a local branch or browsing a regional website.

Because their growing customer base expects relevant web experiences, Raiffeisen chose Adobe Experience Manager Sites to help them redesign the site experience through a flexible, scalable model. Using APIs to feed third-party data into Experience Manager, the bank was able to dynamically create 267 localized versions of the Raiffeisen website, while still maintaining consistency across branches.

And with their Adobe Analytics integration, they can combine real-time website behavior data with customer and third-party data to better understand which customers to reach with specific messaging. This allows them to improve the customer experience across web, email, call centers, and in-person meetings.

Raffeisen Bank experienced a 300% increase in conversions with more precise targeting.

• Genoa, Italy
• Scaling just-right experiences based on customer preferences.

Costa Crociere operates cruise holidays for more than a million travelers per year. In the competitive travel market, they constantly search for ways to provide memorable, personalized experiences to their customers, whether they’re first-time cruisers or seasoned travelers. Because the company was tasked with rolling out a new web design in 12 different languages, they needed a scalable structure and governance model to keep a consistent online presence.

With the help of Adobe Experience Manager Sites, the travel brand was able to quickly build and localize pages with reusable templates and core components. Plus, rather than making creative decisions based on designer preferences, they’re now using customer preference data from Adobe Analytics to determine which design will enhance the customer experience and prompt people to book cruises.

Costa Crociere scaled personalized web experiences to reach customers in 19 markets and 12 languages.

Click here to read their story.

Empower teams with a scalable CMS

• Princeton, NJ, and Houston, TX
• Managing content with the flexibility of a hybrid CMS.

NRG is an energy company that serves more than 3 million homes and businesses across the United States. In the midst of a digital transformation, NRG needed to more effectively supplement their face-to-face marketing channels with digital channels like web, social media, and mobile apps. They chose Adobe Experience Manager to form the foundation of their digital transformation, which included revamping their website and using personalized content to connect with online visitors.

Because Experience Manager Sites is a hybrid content management system, NRG uses its headless capabilities to flexibly manage and deliver content to any channel, like websites, single-page applications, progressive web apps (PWAs), mobile apps, and others like email and social media. This gives content developers the ability to reuse and republish content, saving them valuable time.

NRG also has the option to use the platform as a traditional CMS. Because their CMS has cloud-native capabilities, IT no longer has to worry about managing infrastructure and maintaining the solution, freeing them up to work on more innovative projects.

NRG achieved 5x more engagement with personalized homepage content.

Click here to read their story.

• Baltimore, MD
• Reducing IT burden through managed services.

Constellation is one of the largest energy providers in North America, serving millions of homes and businesses across more than 16 states and Washington, D.C. To help them continue building strong relationships with customers, regardless of channel, the energy company needed a solid digital infrastructure. But their existing CMS was too complex for content developers to use without technical help.

Once they adopted Adobe Experience Manager Sites, their content developers were easily able to take over content creation without pulling IT away from their other work. In addition, to streamline IT workflows and speed time to market for new websites, Constellation worked with Adobe Experience Manager Managed Services. With Adobe managing the IT layer and configuring systems to comply with complex energy sales regulations, the company’s marketing and product teams were able to focus on creating memorable experiences for their customers.

Constellation empowered content developers and reduced IT burden by using a distributed authoring model.

Click here to read their story.

Convert content into exceptional experiences

Brands around the world have discovered that the key to delivering innovative experiences across touchpoints and throughout the customer journey is a scalable, secure modern CMS. By building an agile digital foundation, you can help teams deliver value faster, use data to drive experiences, and reduce the burden on IT.

With all of these elements in place, enabling great digital experiences won’t be so challenging after all.

Adobe can help

Adobe Experience Manager Sites is a cloud-native, hybrid CMS that provides IT and marketers out-of-the-box capabilities to quickly create content with reusable components, layouts, and templates. With APIs and Adobe Sensi AI technology, our digital foundation is extensible and automatically adapts experiences for different channels and screens based on customer and content performance data.

Natively integrated with Adobe Experience Managger Sites, Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target use the power of AI and Machine learning to provide insights that help you deliver targeted experiences for higher conversions.

Discover how we can help you transform your business.