Large companies want to manage and deliver content efficiently and effectively. Enterprise-level businesses aim for a top-level communication strategy, but achieving it without the right tools is challenging. And the right tool for these large entities is a headless enterprise CMS.
Let’s now delve deeper into what an enterprise CMS is, why your organization should be using it, and what are the main factors to consider when choosing the enterprise CMS that is right for your enterprise company.
What is an Enterprise CMS?
A CMS (Content Management System) is a software application that provides your business with everything it needs to create, manage, and deliver content. This piece of software represents the crucial hub for content management, and its effectiveness heavily influences your communication strategy. Since communication plays a key role in the success of your organization, picking the right enterprise CMS for you is crucial.
In detail, an enterprise CMS is a content management system that is designed for large entities and comes with all the features and capabilities they need. This means that an enterprise CMS is also what supports your organization and empowers it to deliver a successful enterprise content management (ECM) strategy.
If you are not familiar with this term, think of ECM as a set of defined strategies, tools, and processes that enables an organization to retrieve, manage, store and deliver critical information efficiently and effectively to its stakeholders, customers, and employees. In other terms, an enterprise CMS is everything a large organization needs to tackle all the tasks related to content management, both internally and externally.
So, let's expand into the reasons why your organization should be using an enterprise CMS.
Why Adopt an Enterprise CMS?
Big companies and small companies have different needs, especially when it comes to managing data and information. Consequently, the size of a company also influences the applications it requires and what features these should have.
In particular, enterprise organizations must target a vast amount of customers. But the ability to reach many customers depends primarily on the effectiveness of the communication strategy. And this represents a challenge that can be met only with a CMS especially built for enterprises.
Also, an enterprise-level business should be efficient. And as you can imagine, using a content management tool specifically designed for large entities helps employees follow best practices. In fact, we accomplish tasks based on how the application we are using guides us through them. Therefore, an enterprise CMS also leads to increased business productivity.
5 Aspects to Look For When Choosing an Enterprise CMS
Choosing the right enterprise CMS for your organization is not easy because there are many factors to take into account. Let’s take a look at the 5 most important ones.
1. Scalability
Building websites and applications take a lot of time and money. Ideally, you should build them once by relying on a CMS application that is able to grow with the pace of your company. In other words, the ideal enterprise CMS solution should be scalable. And when it comes to scalability, nothing beats a headless CMS.
This is because a headless CMS acts as a single source of truth and equips you with everything you need to manage content. Then, your websites, applications, or services will be able to retrieve the content they need from that source through APIs. Thus, the headless approach is also the perfect solution to multi-site management, a crucial aspect for large and international companies. Learn more about how a headless CMS can support your multi-site strategy here.
Since a headless CMS is an application entirely designed for content management, it does not come with the compromises applications with a holistic approach to technology have. Also, it gives you the ability to easily define roles and permissions based on the roles your organization has. This is also something to consider when it comes to scalability.
Therefore, an enterprise CMS should be a headless CMS.
2. Performance
The faster, the better. This is not conjecture, as Google proved in this study that 53% of mobile visitors abandon a web page it takes more than 3 seconds to load. So, if you want your digital products to thrive, they must be fast. Consequently, an enterprise CMS should provide quick load times.
Typically, multimedia files like images and videos are what affect the load time the most. So, your enterprise CMS should support lazy-loading and automatic resizing of images. Learn more about images API optimization here.
Another performance-related metric is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). So, an ideal enterprise CMS should have features to support your SEO strategy and help your web pages rank better than those of your competitors.
Also, performance is about being online and not keeping customers waiting. Thus, the company behind your enterprise CMS should guarantee competitive uptime SLAs (Service Level Agreement).
3. Security
If you store all your content in one place, this must be extremely secure. You cannot afford to lose data or data leaks. In other terms, an enterprise CMS must be secure. This also applies to all the services that depend on it because they need to appear secure in the eyes of users and potential customers.
In fact, security has become one of the most concerning aspects for companies, especially the larger ones. This is because organizations are more likely to require storing sensitive information from a countless number of customers.
So, an enterprise CMS should depend on reliable infrastructure providers and support data encryption through secure connections, complex passwords, automatic backups, 2-factor authentication, and role management.
4. Omnichannel Content Management
Your organization is likely to have several websites, applications, services, ecommerce stores and run a multitude of marketing campaigns. In such a scenario, the ideal situation would be to have a platform to manage the content used by all your channels. This is what omnichannel is about.
That platform should be your CMS application. So, your enterprise CMS should be an omnichannel CMS. In this case, you could use your CMS to handle the content displayed and used in your websites, ecommerce platforms, web applications, mobile apps, smartwatch apps, IoT interfaces, Alexa Skills, or anything that can connect to the Internet. Such a platform should also allow you to deal with multi-language content.
Since not all CMSs are omnichannel, you need to choose wisely. Again, a headless CMS is a perfect solution when it comes to adopting an omnichannel strategy for content management.
5. Composability and Extensibility
In recent years, composable architecture has become one of the most popular trends in the tech industry. This is particularly true when it comes to enterprise companies. In fact, large entities must be able to evolve quickly and adapt to the market.
The best way to do that is by embracing best-of-breed solutions that are easily integrable into your software architecture through APIs. Consequently, the ideal enterprise CMS should embody this paradigm. Also, a good enterprise CMS should be extensible through plugins.
DatoCMS: The Enterprise CMS You Were Looking For
DatoCMS has all the aspects described above as well as many others. This makes DatoCMS an excellent enterprise headless CMS that is ready to scale with you.
In detail, DatoCMS natively supports several hosting services and enterprise applications. This is because it was designed with enterprise needs in mind, such as security, scalability, and composability. Also, performance and omnichannel goals will no longer represent a grueling challenge with DatoCMS.
Conclusion
In this article, we learned what an enterprise CMS is, why large businesses should adopt one, and the main aspects to take into account when choosing the right one for your enterprise-level company. The needs and interests of your customers are changing rapidly, which is why employing an application designed to help large companies keep up with this is critical. Specifically, an enterprise CMS should be secure, extensible, omnichannel, and provide great performance, just like DatoCMS.
Thanks for reading! We hope that you found this article helpful. Feel free to reach out to us on Twitter with any questions, comments, or suggestions.