Whether it’s moving into a new market or pivoting to meet changing customer habits, businesses must have a content creation strategy that lets them deliver digital content fast to compete.

An agile CMS is the best solution for brands marketing on a range of digital channels and looking to scale their digital content because it allows content creators to develop content efficiently, publish it quickly, and iterate on the results intelligently.

Democratizing the editing and publishing process

Customers now discover, research, and ask for help from your company online, and each of those interactions demands more content. However, industry trends, world events, and internal changes mean all that content is always subject to change.

To meet the demand for agile content, publishing tools need to be accessible to more people and teams company-wide, no matter their technical skills or expertise. A creator-friendly and familiar agile CMS democratizes the publishing and editing process, making it easier for more people to be involved in content creation.

Because WordPress powers over 40 percent of the internet, many content creators are already familiar with it. For content creators who are not, WordPress is easy to learn and easy to use, with many tutorials available online. This makes rapid training of new creators easy for companies. Non-technical staff can build, publish, and edit content in minutes without asking for technical assistance.

Putting these tools for publication in creators’ hands means less lag time between idea and execution, according to executives at Kaiser Family Foundation who made the switch to a more agile CMS.

“In the past, the staff didn’t touch the CMS. They wrote things in Word, sent it to the production team, and they put it online,” said David Rousseau, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation. “With WordPress, that workflow is changing slowly and dramatically. We’ve trained many of our content creators in the CMS. And, the closer the content creators are to it, the more creatively they are able to think about it.”

Creating content once, publishing it everywhere

Customers don’t just interact with a company website anymore. Modern companies have digital conversations with their customers on an average of 5.2 channels, including devices like voice assistants, smart speakers, wearable devices, touchscreens, phones, and more.

The right agile CMS is built with this multichannel reality in mind and makes it easy to reuse content. WordPress is open source and features a massive library of APIs and plugins so content developers can integrate new tools and channels into their marketing stack.

This makes it easy for content creators to then build a cohesive digital experience, no matter what device or channel a customer uses to interact with the company.

Freeing developers from being the content gatekeepers also lets companies deliver content faster and use resources on other business initiatives.

For example, Capgemini switched from Drupal to WordPress. After the switch, developers didn’t have to worry about the CMS anymore. That gave developers more time to tackle bigger engineering challenges. It also opened the floodgates to faster content creation; the company published more than 20,000 pages in more than 10 languages across 38 individual sites.

Making beautiful content design quick and easy

It’s not enough to publish content on a web page fast; the design must keep the customer experience in mind and accurately represent the company’s brand.

The right agile CMS makes it easy for content creators to build those digital experiences without depending on designers and developers, which means faster publication.

WordPress’ Gutenberg is a visual editor that allows nontechnical creators to design a page piece by piece and see the results as they build. The editor lets creators define a style for different types of content, like headers or images, which can then be reused. This makes it faster to create consistent, branded content across different channels.

WordPress also comes with a robust library of prebuilt templates, themes, and assets for fast plug-and-play creation. Creators aren’t tied to a preset look because everything can be customized. Marketers can exert full control over how content looks to customers because an agile CMS doesn’t box you in with proprietary code or rigid templates. The ability to make rapid edits and design changes on multiple pages at once makes quick pivots in content strategy easy.

The Democratic National Convention Committee (DNCC) needed to be able to make swift changes to content as it navigated the pandemic while engineering the first-ever virtual political convention in 2020. With the world suddenly going digital, an agile, easy-to-use CMS was a requirement to innovate on the nearly 190-year-old political tradition.

To make the convention happen, the DNCC assembled a temporary team of more than 200 people in just four months. The DNCC chose the WordPress VIP CMS because it allowed them to train hundreds of content creators fast and build consistent digital experiences quickly for more than 15 channels.

Ultimately, 35 million viewers watched the event.

Learning what content is working in real time

For too many content teams, content analytics are complex and cumbersome. The best agile CMSes put data in the hands of content creators, so they can understand what is, or isn’t, driving performance and make decisions fast without waiting for that information from a data analyst or building reports themselves.

Collapsing the distance between the hypothesis, experimentation, and iteration of content results in a faster path to better-performing content.

Instead of manually crunching datasets, content creators can prove value with automatically generated reports on conversion, attribution, time on page, and other data. Automating analytics helps creators use their time effectively to do what they do best: creating content that will resonate with audiences.

Agile CMS is an indispensable tool to stay competitive

Don’t settle for a legacy CMS that’s not flexible enough to publish content fast and across multiple channels.

Enterprise organizations need to move faster to stay competitive, and that means harnessing the power of an agile CMS.

Learn how WordPress VIP was designed with speed in mind and built to scale as your business grows.