In today’s challenging business climate, organizations must accomplish more online than ever. Consumers now increasingly expect rich, highly-relevant content as well as immersive community features from the websites they visit, even as meeting key business goals such as controlling costs and driving revenue has become more essential than ever. Accordingly, business must meet new demands for increased scale, scope, and speed online. Updates, for instance, can no longer wait in a queue for days before appearing on a website, and marketers and other business users must be empowered to manage content directly in order to create the highly targeted Web content and campaigns needed to succeed with online audiences today.

Fortunately, comprehensive solutions are available to help organizations meet these new challenges. Web Content Management (WCM) software platforms initially emerged to ease the process of maintaining a larger-scale Web presence. But as consumers demand ever-higher expectations for personalization and interaction on the Web, organizations must respond by deploying and management a greater, richer, more engaging Web experience, and Web Experience Management (WEM) has emerged as a broader set of capabilities built on the WCM foundation to help them achieve precisely that. So what is WEM?—and what can it do for your business?

Taking control of Web content
To better understand the role that WEM can play in managing your Web presence and meeting your business goals, it’s important to consider how it was developed. WCM solutions originally emerged to address several of the basic challenges created by having a website—namely that building and maintaining a website was expensive, error prone, and slow. Previously, websites were updated manually by a staff of IT administrators and developers; business users were required to rely on this staff to implement even the most basic changes, leading to slow response times and an increasingly overwhelming job for the IT department. Full-featured WCM tools can significantly reduce the need for manual coding and reduce the drain on IT resources by automating several key tasks required to publish content online, including:

• Author: Easy-to-use interfaces should allow business users to directly create new content items, such as articles or product descriptions, place them on the website, and edit, change or delete content, without any programming knowledge. These capabilities speed the process of maintaining the website and free IT from manual content update tasks. Integrated workflow processes can also ensure all content is appropriately reviewed prior to publishing. 
• Design: Site administrators should be able to create templates for Web pages then be able to edit the layout of the site within the given templates, to ensure that content always looks its best while deployment times are kept to a minimum.
• Publish: To further expedite site updates, business users should be able to push content from staging to live, with tools that ensure no dependencies are broken—for example, preventing users from approving a page if assets on that page are not yet approved—to minimize errors. Interfaces should provide administrators with a transparent view into these essential processes.

These features provide important benefits to most organizations over manual site updates and maintenance. By placing content contributors directly in control, WCM enables faster time to market for new content and even new websites. It also creates significantly greater productivity for both IT and business users, leading to fresh, up-to-date Web content as well as lower operational costs. Other advantages of adopting WCM include improved brand consistency as well as improved ability to leverage and reuse existing content.

However, as consumer expectations have grown for interactive and personalized websites, the capabilities provided by traditional WCM solutions are no longer enough. While basic WCM may have eased the process of creating content and launching new sites, today organizations are finding that their Web presence is playing a central role in their marketing strategies, and that they need to deliver personalized content and advanced social networking capabilities in order to connect with customers across multiple sites in multiple languages around the globe. Accordingly, organizations must evolve their capabilities for managing their websites from simply managing Web content to managing the Web experience.

The next step: managing the Web expxperience
In this new environment, organizations cannot focus solely on managing Web content—instead, they must manage the complete experience that audiences have on their websites—a critical capability for increasing customer loyalty and sales and driving operational efficiencies. To achieve this goal, organizations must empower marketers and lines of business to create and optimize targeted content and campaigns online, and also create vibrant online communities. WEM builds on the foundation provided by traditional WCM to provide additional capabilities, including:

• Target: Providing highly relevant Web content that is targeted to individual users’ needs has become essential to connecting with customers and prospects and providing engaging and personalized service. Web Experience Management solutions enable marketers to easily create and manage audience segments and build targeted online campaigns.
• Deliver: Quick response times, even for sites with personalized, dynamic content, are another important component of online success. WEM solutions that can support rapid delivery of Web content for dynamic pages that are assembled on the fly, while scaling to meet the needs of the largest organizations, are essential. Increasingly, delivery to additional platforms such as mobile devices is important, and should be an integrated module within the WEM suite.
• Analyze and Optimize: Tracking the success of Web content is critical to ensuring that targeted campaigns and content are resonating with audiences. WEM solutions thus must include the ability to analyze success on a highly granular level, so marketers can optimize accordingly. Ideally, data should be analyzed for specific content assets and specific target audiences, since page-level data offers relatively limited value when individual users are viewing personalized content. 
•  Participate: Customers increasingly expect that corporate websites will allow them to communicate both with the company and with fellow customers. Therefore, collaboration capabilities such as comments, product reviews and rankings, polls, user-generated content wikis, and blogs have become essential to enabling companies to build a community around their products and services and convert customers to brand advocates.
• Conceptualize: Social networking features also need to be used by teams to collaborate within the organization and to facilitate the creative process with partners and other stakeholders. Accordingly, a collaboration solution that is integrated into the WCM system is critical for empowering Web managers by giving them easy access to output of creative teams.

Combined with a traditional WCM solution, these enhanced capabilities allow organizations to fully harness the power of the Web as a business and a marketing channel. By allowing marketers to truly make customers the focus of their Web vision—and deliver a uniquely compelling Web experience to each site visitor—WEM enables organizations to meet business goals, including increasing customer loyalty, sales, customer satisfaction, and repeat purchase rates, in addition to realizing significant business process efficiency gains. 

Making the move to WEM
So is it the right time for you to implement WEM? Since growth and change are the only constants online, organizations of all types and sizes may wish to consider WEM strategies in their Web planning. Since these capabilities can be implemented incrementally over time, based on individual needs, virtually any organization can benefit and achieve value from these solutions.

To get started, you first need to look within and assess your organization’s needs. What is your business strategy and differentiation from the competition? What are your business goals? How can the Web help you achieve these goals—both today and into the future? How can you improve on the rudimentary WCM system you have in place now? And on the efficiency side: What process issues have been holding back your business and IT teams online? What tasks are difficult and costly today with respect to your customer and prospect interactions?

In addition to assessing current needs, it’s important to plan for future scale needs such as increased content, additional sites, sites in new geographies, additional content contributors, greater traffic volumes, and more, as well as desired enhancements such as personalization, community capabilities, rich media management, and others.

Once you’ve determined your requirements, it’s then time to evaluate potential solutions. A broad variety of WCM and WEM solutions are available on the market. Smaller organizations may prefer a hosted or SAAS (Software as a Service) approach, while mid to large-sized companies will likely want to install a more comprehensive and scalable solution that can support dynamic content, a global scale, and advanced site features.

Finally, it’s also important to remember that if you make the step to WEM, your people and processes will play a critical role in determining its success. In order for it to succeed, your executives, marketers, content contributors, and IT staff all need to be serving the same customer—they need to realize that the Web is their tool for interacting with customers, prospects, partners, and employees and for helping to achieve their business goals. With aligned objectives, your organization can start now to capitalize on its full Web potential—starting with your most pressing needs today, and building over time towards the Web presence that will provide a platform for your future success.

Elaine Chen is the director of marketing at FatWire Software, an industry-leading provider of Web Experience Management solutions, where she is responsible for corporate marketing and online marketing. Elaine has over 12 years of experience as a technology marketer and journalist and can be reached at 800) 801-8504. FatWire Software (www.fatwire.com) provides Web Experience Management (WEM) solutions that enable organizations to deliver a rich online experience to users and simplify management of their Web presence. FatWire is headquartered in Mineola, N.Y. and serves over 500 customers from offices in 10 countries.