Updating websites or apps and uploading new content is no longer a task reserved for developers. Now, less tech-savvy individuals need to be able to quickly go in, make changes and get out again, without breaking anything – here's why we believe Hippo CMS is the perfect tool for that job.
When you're pursuing digital transformation your end goal will always be providing your customers with everything they need, regardless of how and when they want to access it.
Obviously, this is a huge undertaking and extensive planning is required. One element that seems to be overlooked particularly frequently is ensuring employees have access to all the tools they require to better the needs of customers along the much expanded omni-channel customer journey. For example, identifying the need for a comprehensive content strategy without providing content creators with a platform that makes it simple to post and edit content.
The Power of A CMS
A content management system (CMS) was originally just a tool that made it easier to upload content and images to the internet. Effectively, developers had more important things to do than post blogs, so businesses integrated CMSs into their infrastructure – empowering the people who were creating the content to also upload it.
Then the digital revolution truly began, and businesses scrambled to adapt to the new digital-first marketplace. CMSs suddenly had huge potential beyond simply saving developers time – they were now a vital element of sales and marketing processes alike.
Now, enterprise-level CMSs provide so much functionality that it would be difficult to extract them from a business without causing great damage to almost every department. From creating content and monitoring performance to managing communication channels and automating workflows, CMSs have a hand in the vast majority of day-to-day activities of any business that sells or markets itself online.
Hippo CMS
Even before it became obvious that the gap between marketing or sales staff and tasks traditionally performed by developers, needed to be closed, Hippo was embracing this paradigm shift. As the age of digital transformation got underway, the Hippo team was already working on a platform that would combine a CMS and sophisticated marketing analytics technology.
In 2014, while big names in the industry were still getting to grips with customer experience (CX) and multi-channel customer journeys, Hippo were working on their Hippo DX (digital experience) platform.
Every year, as the rest of industry caught up, Hippo CMS built up a cult following and then exploded onto the mainstream – catching the eye of high-profile software analysts like Gartner. Recently, Hippo was bought out and became a part of BloomReach’s digital experience (DX) platform.
Hippo’s CMS platform is still available though, and here are just a handful of the reasons why we so often recommend and implement Hippo for our clients:
The Benefits of Hippo CMS
Compatibility and Adaptability
Hippo CMS has always been open-source, which means it’s very good at playing nice with other software and allows seamless integration with an enterprise’s IT infrastructure.
There’s almost endless opportunity for expanded functionality on top of Hippo CMS, as well as it integrating naturally with popular third-party systems and applications – on top of this, individual elements of Hippo are available as plug-ins. If you want to integrate Hippo with your sales tools, you can. If you want to integrate it with your e-commerce systems, you can. If you want to integrate it with your HR infrastructure, you guessed it, you can!
This isn’t just important because of the added functionality though. It’s unlikely that a business will scrap their entire IT systems and start tabula rasa, so it’s important that any new technology is evaluated to see how well it will integrate into the current infrastructure.
Because of Hippo CMS’s adaptability, it’s faster to implement, less costly to customise and ultimately will see a quicker time to market.
Of course, any business pursuing the integration of new technology should seek the help of experienced systems integration experts, to ensure there are no negative consequences.
Personalisation
As mentioned earlier, Hippo was very much at the forefront of intelligent CMSs and pioneered the use of AI to optimise UX and CX depending on who was looking at the site, not just the device that was accessing it.
The powerful personalisation features currently offered by Hippo use a visitor’s browsing history to change the content they’re shown and prevent them from seeing any that isn’t useful to them – a strategy that’s been shown to increase traffic, drive conversion and even boost revenue.
Streamlined
There’s no doubt that Hippo’s easy integration with other systems has been vital to its success because of how convenient the compatibility is. It’s also meant that developers at Hippo have been empowered to create a product that focuses on what it does best.
Rather than having to broaden its functionality, Hippo CMS concentrates solely on delivering value by meeting the needs of its users and providing features they need on a daily basis – happy to let other software provide anything else that might be required.
Not only has this enabled an extremely streamlined and easy-to-use product, it’s also remained relatively inexpensive compared to broader competitors that might offer more functionality but less day-to-day value. Essentially because you aren’t paying for anything you’re not going to use.
Easily Navigate All Channels
By now, all businesses should be up to speed with the idea that customers want to be able to access your content from whatever device they wish to use, whenever they want to use it – and still only see what's relevant to them.
With new channels for customer engagement emerging regularly, ensuring that you have quality content that is optimised for all channels is crucial to success. Having a reliable CMS empowers a business to support and nurture customer engagement throughout the customer journey without running into the barriers associated with a siloed organisational approach.
Hippo CMS makes it easy to manage all your communication channels from one place, walking the perfect line between treating all channels as a single homogenous means of communication and keeping them completely apart from each other.
This empowers you to take advantage of each channel’s unique strengths and mitigate its weakness, while sharing relevant customer data. And when you need to add a new channel, it’s simple to do so and integrate it into your existing network.
Anybody Can Use It
As we’ve said often, the development of CMSs has arrived in lock-step with the broadening of what we’d call “digital skills”.
As businesses are enabling more employees to make changes to their website or communicate with customers via digital channels, not all of them going to be developers, social media experts, or even particularly IT-literate – so CMSs are needed to provide easy access to all of them.
Hippo CMS does just that, it considers the different skill-lets and competence-levels that need to be catered to and creates an intuitive tool that anybody can use.
It being open-source means developers can get a good look under the hood and customise it to meet a business’s unique needs. As we’ve also mentioned, this creates a huge opportunity to integrate Hippo with other tools and systems.
For less code-literate employees, Hippo presents an extremely user-friendly interface that empowers them to dig deep into the software and make wide-reaching changes, without ever having to worry about understanding what’s going on at the back-end.
In short, Hippo CMS is a tool that provides extensive control over what customers see at the individual level for every step of the customer journey – without having to worry about learning to code.
However, for a CIO to put their neck on the line and propose a new piece of technology for board approval, they need to know it’s not just going to deliver the right results but it’s the right tool for the for the organisation.
This necessitates a technology evaluation, and Hippo is likely to pass with flying colours. Its extreme adaptability means that with a little work it can seamlessly integrate into any system and work peacefully side by side with nearly any piece of software you can imagine.
The basic solution may look lightweight compared to competitors but look closer and you’ll realise that’s just because you’re not used to seeing software shorn of any padding. Hippo provides only the essential functions a business needs in a CMS on a day to day basis.
Technology evaluations allow you to better understand if a new tool is the right for your business. If you’d like to learn more about how we perform our evaluations, check out our new ebook.
