By Janus Boye
Improving your digital content, understanding what parts of your digital marketing actually works and also what content you might be missing, have so far been mostly manual labour, tricky to solve and often low on the list of priorities.
New projects seem to always get the attention, and while there’s much talk about quality over quantity, it’s fair to say that many corporate websites remain bloated and with plenty of room to improve the experience.
With the acquisition of Idio in late 2019, Episerver now wants to take on content diagnostics to quickly perform content audits, improve content marketing, and understand which keywords and content topics perform best. Sounds great right? Let’s take a closer look to better understand the problem and the solution that Epi is offering.
From sticky websites to meeting the increasingly high customer expectations
First the problem: About two decades ago, the holy grail was to keep people on your site, to make them consume more content on your site, and so to speak to make them stick.
To say the least, the assumption that sticky was desirable was misleading to quite a few digital projects. Along came a focus on solving the task at hand, cleaning up outdated and unused content and delivering quality over quantity. Sticky was not necessarily a good experience as expectations kept going up.
A key problem remained: How do we build digital at scale? How can we tie content engagement to goals and conversions? We can’t just keep adding more tools that doesn’t work well together, keep creating more campaigns, adding more features and just throw more people at the problem. It gets too expensive, too complicated and unmanageable.
Then the solution as offered by Epi: We saw a live demo of the Content Intelligence offering at the recent CMS Experts meeting in London. The demo went way beyond any “time on site” and “# pages view” type metrics. It showed how you can actually create more of the content that drives the very purpose of your website.
This is the Idio product which has become baked into the Epi platform and it clearly caught the attention of the group.
Joey Moore from Episerver on stage in London at the recent CMS Expert group meeting with an impromptu live demo of the content diagnostics tool
With an impressive dashboard, Joey Moore from Episerver was able to show the volumes and quantity for different content topics. That’s clearly helpful and the initial response among our members have also been quite positive.
As Deane Barker wrote in his brief note about the Idio acquisition:
“The goal is clearly increased conversions, but also the surfacing of poorly-utilized content in large repositories”
To put things in perspective, I turned to digital policy expert Kristina Podnar. To quote:
“The tool appears to be based on targeting issues and not solving the underlying problems pre-production. Organisations also need to address the root of governance problems, including the majority of content issues that cannot be directly resolved (or even measured) by a tool.”
To be fair, Kristina have not looked at the tool in detail, but she has a good point. No tool can solve all the underlying issues that you might be facing, like organisational structures or skill shortage. There’s also practical considerations like maintaining content consistency across large collections, creating content that matches personas, or even information overload.
Still, it’s a novel approach by Epi and it clearly addresses a real problem. As Joey Moore from Epi said:
It solves one of the greatest issues, as it actually provides guidance on the topics that visitors are finding valuable so you know what you should actually be producing.
A final comment on the solution: I couldn’t find anything about the tool in the Episerver User Guide, but as a part of their offering, you’ll get an initial workshop to answer any questions. In slides that I’ve seen, here are some examples from the Content Diagnostics dashboard:
A) Real-time understanding of your overall content landscape at a granular level:
How many pieces of content did I publish?
How many pieces by asset type?
What topics did I cover?
B) Real-time understanding of visitor engagement at a topical level:
What sections are driving engagement?
What topics are driving engagement?
How do these metrics change over time?
C) Understand topic gaps within your content strategy:
What topics should you focus on by type?
What topics should you focus on by channel?
How do these metrics change over time?
How does this fit in the marketplace?
While traditional CMS vendors have focused more broadly on digital experience in the past 10 years, they’ve added many features, but to be blunt, few have actually put the spotlight on content. More attention has been paid to other shiny areas like e-commerce, personalisation and delivering an outstanding experience. Yet, content is at the heart of all of this.
This has led to the rise of software vendors, which you could say essentially solve a CMS problem that CMS vendors have overlooked:
- GatherContent, which originally described themselves as pre-CMS content, but is now positioned as a content operations platform
- Little Forest, for web governance and digital success management as they call it
- Siteimprove, which started with fixing broken links and misspelled brand names, but now broadly targets SEO, accessibility, analytics and GDPR. Many vendors, like Ibexa (formerly known as eZ) have integration with Siteimprove. Epi also has packaged integration with Siteimprove for accessibility, SEO, and analytics,
Episerver has been around since the early days and focused on CMS since 1997. Building on a strong Scandinavian home base, Episerver has long been known for doing well when it comes to a usable and slick editor experience.
In 2018, Episerver was acquired by Insight Venture Partners for more than $1 billion and the acquisition of Idio shows a continued willingness to invest in improving the offering.
Learn more
Episerver has created a free version of the Content Intelligence tool. This isn’t just for Episerver customers as it’s designed to be easily implemented (a single tracking script) on whatever platform your site is running.
You might also enjoy some of these related posts:
Ashley Budd from Cornell on We Can’t Rely On The Content Strategy Of The Past
Katie Del Angel from Shopify on Content Strategy Meets Product Strategy
Rob Mills from GatherContent on How To Adapt Your Content Marketing To An Unexpected Shift
David Hobbs is a real expert on the topic of content migration, content audits and has written about Rules for Content Migration and Large Scale Improvements: Panning for Gold. He’s even created a simple set of questions to help you select the right content inventory tool.
You can also get out from behind your desk and join one of our peer groups or upcoming Boye conferences. This blog post is in particular relevant for the CMS Experts or digital leadership group members.
Finally, do feel free to leave a comment below to continue the conversation.