Choose the perfect MarTech solution: CMS, WEM or DXP?

Have you ever been intimidated in the electronics store by the sheer number of new devices designed to improve your life in previously unexpected ways? Marketing technology (MarTech) can feel just as confusing. Especially when you have to think about how all the new tools and platforms communicate with each other.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), the explosion of data and rising consumer expectations can make choosing the right marketing platform as important as it is daunting.

The stakes are high. If you make the right decision, you could change your entire business. To help you make that choice, we're embarking on a journey into the maw of the MarTech beast. Along the way, we'll explore the following:

The future of content management is waiting for you. Fasten your seat belt!

As the habits of our target audiences are constantly evolving, any marketing strategy must include not only innovation but also the technological flexibility to future-proof your business. Since the advent of AI and ML, the public agrees: advertising needs to run practically on autopilot from now on.

A report by Ascend 2 from 2023 shows a significant increase in marketing automation. Email marketing and social media management saw the biggest increase from 2021 to 2023.

This often raises the question: When is a new software solution worthwhile?

New tools offer new opportunities, but they often also create new problems. For example, the variety of data sources and formats across different channels means that it can be a challenge to extract meaningful information. But you need this to tailor personalized experiences to a well-thought-out target group.

According to Forrester's predictions for 2023, the biggest challenge for leaders in the near future will be to articulate value. This in turn means that insight-driven companies will take the lead, not only in analytical tasks that feed into content strategies, but also in designing a consistent user experience across different platforms.

A lack of reliable data often leads to misguided or hesitant marketing measures. Delayed campaign launches and slow responses to your customers' requests can be costly. This is often due to the limitations of the technology editors use to manage digital experiences across multiple channels.

And if analyzing demographic data or user behavior is already a challenge for your team, this problem will only get worse as your company grows. As your business grows, the applications that may not be delivering full value now will cause problems and hinder your growth.

In the meantime, your team will be trying to incorporate the latest AI innovation into these tools to meet the expectations of your customers. In doing so, they will need to consider whether they can trust the new AI to handle customer data and what new privacy issues might arise from its use.

As if all these tasks weren't challenging enough, they also need to be aligned with comprehensive sustainability and social responsibility strategies. With all these ever-changing requirements, it is becoming increasingly complicated to accurately measure the financial added value for each tool or strategy, let alone break it down for your clientele.

If you've been involved in digital marketing tasks in recent years, you've most likely worked with a CMS solution. Before these simplified the process, marketers had to know HTML and CSS to edit a website.

Organizing and updating content was tedious because you couldn't rely on templates or collaborate on a website. We're not saying a CMS isn't helpful, but it's just the first step in streamlining your digital presence. With the introduction of mobile platforms and the growing number of marketing channels, marketers are faced with the new challenge of making their messages consistent across different formats.

To solve these problems, WEM solutions extend the functionality of typical CMS systems. They enable advertisers to adapt their content to the preferences of different population groups and achieve individualized results instead of copying uniform content.

A WEM solution offers various advantages compared to conventional CMS systems:

Compared to conventional CMS, WEM systems clearly offer additional options and a holistic perspective on your data.

For example, a WEM system may lack seamless integration with the enterprise software your team uses behind the scenes, such as a CRM or marketing automation tool. And while they allow you to publish content to multiple platforms, they may not support all channels or provide a truly unified experience.

Depending on which WEM tool you use, it may not even be as future-proof as you had hoped. Either because it's not scaling with the growing volume of data you're processing, or because it's not taking full advantage of technologies like AI and ML for predictive analytics and automated personalization.

A DXP goes one step further to solve all these problems. It allows you to bring data and content together in a single interface for reuse and customization, and to create personalized experiences tailored to each channel and persona.

Of all MarTech categories, from commerce platforms to data management, digital experience and content platforms saw the most growth at 34% in 2022, according to a report by chiefmartech.com and MarTechTribe, and for good reason.

Below, we explain how a DXP can help your marketing team personalize experiences for each audience segment, while adapting to the format requirements of different channels and integrating seamlessly with your chosen applications.

By connecting your CRM, e-commerce and analytics tools with your marketing automation platforms, a DXP allows you to create personalized digital experiences by leveraging a 360-degree view of your customer base, driving visibility and access to your customer base, according to AdAge.

Deep, cross-channel integration allows you to adapt to the individual expectations of your customers and the format requirements of different platforms when working on your marketing materials.

Many WEMs lack the separation of backend and presentation layer that would give marketers more flexibility. So even if you switch to a DXP solution, you may lose some of the versatility you were hoping for because many very different products fall under the term "DXP".

To understand this, it is important to distinguish between a standardized DXP suite and a composable DXP. Similar to an office suite, a DXP suite gives you multiple tools from a single source. At first glance, it seems like a good idea to use a platform on which different applications work together seamlessly. However, these suites are usually developed through acquisitions, which means they don't provide the integration you're hoping for or don't interact as "seamlessly" as the vendors would have you believe. At the same time, with a suite, you are tied to the applications that come with the platform.

Depending on your company, e-commerce integrations may be more important to you than social media functions or vice versa. With a suite, however, you always get a rigid set of tools. This means that some teams will have a market-leading solution, while others will have to make do with a laggard solution. It also means that you are most likely paying for many tools that you are not using at all.

There is a certain irony in the fact that marketers, who are expected to create increasingly personalized experiences for their customers, are forced to work with one-size-fits-all tools. Composable DXPs address this problem, even though the underlying philosophies of each vendor will lead to different approaches.

A composable platform allows you to make a customized tool selection from the best providers in each category. It also adapts effortlessly to changes in budget, marketing strategy or new applications, ensuring that your solution is always aligned with your current requirements. At the same time, it provides a powerful and consistent interface for content marketing teams.

A Composable DXP closes the circle. You enjoy a consistent user interface for creating and managing content across different channels and target groups, creating great digital experiences.

At Magnolia, we create solutions that meet the challenges of everyday life. Real composability, real collaboration, and real commitment. You won't find tools that don't promote this here.

To learn more about how Magnolia's Composable DXP can help free up your marketing team and optimize your budgets, download our latest whitepaper.