This post originally appeared on the Pyxl Blog.

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The ability to quickly create, market, and drive leads to your content is the basis for successfully implementing an effective Content Marketing strategy. Integrating your content creators into a well developed content management system (CMS) is the keystone of being able to get content created, scheduled, and ready to post. Here are 5 tips that will help your organization when planning for the roll out of a new CMS:

1. Ease of Use

If the CMS isn’t easy to use, your content marketers won’t be able to get maximum productivity when creating new content.  Making sure the CMS you choose is user friendly is paramount to reduce confusion. Selecting a CMS that has all of the features you need will provide the tools needed for your content marketers to do their job more effectively. Some of the minimum basic requirements we usually look for in a CMS are:

• Ability to create drafts – This not only gives content marketers the ability to keep all of their work in one central location, but also allows anyone else on the team to jump in and help review that content as well.  Drafts also give you the ability to view the content in a live view, without having to actually publish it.
• Ability to schedule publishing – Creating a workflow so that your content can be scheduled ahead of time will give you the flexibility to craft the content, set it, and forget it.
• Multiple levels of user permissions – Naturally, content should be edited after it is written, so having a CMS that allows that separation of duties will make it easier to manage the permissions necessary to accomplish those tasks. Having such roles as contributors, authors, and editors are the CMS roles we tend to use the most.

2. Flexibility

Selecting and developing a flexible CMS ensures that it can scale to a higher number of users, and higher scope of content. Making sure that the CMS is designed in a way so that end users can easily add new modules, extensions, or plugins without developer help will save money in the long run with reduced development costs in the long term. Being able to add new features will guarantee that you won’t outgrow your CMS, and can continue to benefit from the original investment made.

3. Organization

Organizing the content inside the CMS ensures that any content marketer or approver can jump in and contribute without trying to find what they are searching for. We suggest organizing content into appropriate post types and organizing images into folders that are easily readable and logical in their naming convention. Content marketers are then able to easier find and edit content they need without sorting through a jumbled mess.

4. Documentation and Training

Having appropriate documentation and training will allow your content marketers to be experts in utilizing the CMS without developer assistance. The documentation will also help onboard new hires and provide refreshers for marketers that haven’t been in the CMS recently. Pyxl provides CMS or application documentation training for applications in order to provide concise instructions and walkthroughs on the different parts of your site.

5. Support

Though you may provide great training and documentation, new issues can arise. When the time comes that you need help solving a problem, implementing a new feature, or need a refresher on the CMS, you’ll need access to good development support. There are many ways this support can function:

• Warranty period – Support like this usually comes in the form of a period of time after launch where the developers will help with questions, fix bugs, and generally help with anything in the scope of the project.
• Retainer support – This support can be setup multiple ways – from monthly to yearly, or any combination of the two. In simple terms, this support pre-buys support hours that can be used for any number of services. You can benefit from this support by knowing you are guaranteed those hours and don’t have to go into the developer’s queue of work.
• One-off support – This support is a single scope of work, to fix a particular problem. The benefit of this support is that you are paying for exactly what you need at the time you need it, instead of just having hours available. The downside is that you will usually have to wait until the next opening in the development schedule

As you can see, having the right CMS can ensure your Content Marketing strategy is successful. Making an easy workflow for your content marketers to produce content, push it through the CMS and publish, should be the key functional progression that you should look for when planning out a CMS. Remember to make sure that your CMS is flexible for future scalability, and keep it organized so that marketers can find what they are looking for. Ensure your development partner provides documentation, training, and provides support, so that you will always have help when you need it. At Pyxl, we can help you create a content marketing strategy that works smoothly and has a wide reach. Interested in learning more about what we do and how we help our clients achieve results? We would love to hear from you — give us a shout today!