Crisis drives rapid change. Across industries, we’re grappling with a communication challenge in real time. Commerce leaders face a unique need to keep a mountain of content current – all while their content teams work from home. You and your content team may feel it’s impossible to respond fast enough. But refining the way you use your content management system (CMS) can add speed and agility to content workflows.
What the Ideal Looks Like to Customers
Commerce companies are doing an amazing job of delivering needed content to customers.
For example, cosmetics retailer Lush provides prominent links to COVID-19 information on its homepage. Plus, it connects customers with a handwashing how-to article from its homepage. The article even includes an overview of how soap works.
Mecca – we’re stuck on skincare and cosmetics here – now uses its homepage carousel to link to COVID-19 FAQs about store closures, newly launched virtual services, shipping and return information, and more. Customers used to an in-person experience get fast information about the retailer’s online shopping experience.
But Workflows Are Under New Pressure
Behind the scenes, many commerce teams that contribute content are struggling to keep up. Marketers, PR and merchandisers all have more to share than ever. And executive approvers have more to review. They’re all facing an unprecedented need to keep customers connected to the latest product, shipping and return information.
Getting content published – even a straightforward return policy update – can take many steps and approvals. During a time of crisis, are you trying to carry out too many steps at a faster pace than ever before? Streamline some of the CMS-based processes you use to create and share content, especially product and other customer-facing content.
Use these five tips as a starting point.
1. Empower the Right People to Update Content
The people who create content should be able to update it. Train them to update content themselves with your CMS, and align approvals and workflows to support them. Cut back on the number of people who need to approve minor changes. Do you have a copyeditor proof the content on your staging site before going live? Keep that step – it adds value by catching errors without taking much time.
2. Simplify Product Page Design and Update Workflows
If your product page design and update workflows are multi-stage back-and-forths between merchandisers and frontend developers, look for opportunities to remove handoffs. If possible, let product teams update templated pages or page components themselves in the CMS.
3. Reuse Content Across Channels
Your CMS may support publication to multiple channels, and you may not be taking full advantage of that capability. Being able to reuse content like banners across your storefront and in emails can be a huge time-saver, especially when you need to communicate with customers quickly.
4. Keep Employee-Facing Content up to Date
Your team needs to keep up with the latest developments too. That means empowering your HR and training teams to update content themselves.
5. Share Timely Stories and Expertise Relevant to Your Customers
As Mecca does in this article about great books to read in isolation, you may want to share information that’s not transaction-related but shows you know your audience and what they are dealing with now. Your blog is the perfect place to do that, especially if you’ve trained the right people to update content. Consider giving in-store staff who are now at home an online tutorial in blog writing. Your empowered content editors can help polish and publish insights from people eager to keep contributing from home.
Overcome CMS Complexity
If your content flows through more than one CMS or requires a frontend developer to publish, you might be thinking the above steps don’t apply. They do – you just might need to tweak them to your systems and capabilities. Just reducing one approval cycle or increasing the reuse of content (even if you have to cut and paste between systems) can save days.
Content is the conversation you’re having with customers. Understanding your CMS can help you make the conversion smoother and allow updates to happen in near real-time.
For more advice and expert how-tos for leading your businesses or team through COVID-19, check out the ‘Leading through Change’ series.
Leading Through Change
Helping business manage in crisis.
