Hippo Takes an Intelligent View of Web Content Management

Hippo is not gearing up its own Marketing Cloud. Instead, the Amsterdam based WCM vendor, is focusing its attention on building the next generation web content management system, one that is intelligent and focused on content performance.

Forrester has told us that WCM is the backbone of digital experience management. We knew that. But what Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer, CMO and Founder of Hippo told me, is that WCM is much more than that.

Hippo spent two years refactoring its WCMS from the ground up. A new architecture and management layer (along with a US acquisition) enable it to provide organizations with the next generation web content management. This Java CMS supports the needs of marketing – where agility is critical, as well as other departments within an organization (think WCM for the entire customer lifecycle).

So if Hippo doesn’t want to offer up the next marketing cloud, what is its primary focus? What does a best of breed web content management platform need to offer today?

Brenninkmeijer’s answer is creating relevant digital experiences through the right channels. It’s knowing your customers and prospects by leveraging all the information you might know about them from the persona they match, to their history and current situation (taken from external sources) and then building the best experience possible across whatever channel/device is necessary. This is something every WCM vendor is doing. And while it’s what Hippo is doing today, it’s not the end.

What is the next big thing for Hippo? It’s all about content performance.

Here’s a question to consider: How do you know which content performs for each persona? And how do you start to engage your visitors before they even become known to you?

Imagine a prospect moving along the customer journey from anonymous to engaged to known. There is a lot of different content you need to deliver across this journey and it’s not only different for each stage in the journey, but also for each persona. But you also need to provide content to visitors before you can even match them to a persona.

In Hippo, you can develop your personas and map the journey for each, assigning the type of content required at each stage in the journey.  But what if you could measure the performance of this content directly within the WCM, enabling real-time insights into content performance for visitors even before they become known by opting into a marketing campaign?

Visitor to Lead Management

Brenninkmeijer calls this “Visitor to Lead Management” and it’s what the next version of Hippo is going to support. Brenninkmeijer told me that the right web content management system can help with turning visitors into leads. But to do it, that WCM requires not only great targeting and personalization capabilities, but also the ability to tell how well the content is performing, providing the actionable insights needed to improve the effectiveness of your content.

 

Basically what Hippo is going to do is “bring the feedback loop into WCM.” This content performance capability offers things such as:

• Editorial effectiveness – which editors/authors are creating the best content.
• Identifying content gaps -what types of content are missing that visitors are looking for by attaching content to goals.
• Persona trends – which personas like which content and when in the journey? and which personas might not be getting addressed. You can also create personas from leftover visitors and use it to improve their customer journey.

Content performance, Brenninkmeijer said, makes content marketing more accountable (and as a result provides proof the WCM is being effective), taking it from likes and shares to demonstrating real ROI.

Some of these metrics are found within marketing automation platforms, but they aren’t attached directly to the content marketing performed. By creating these metrics directly within the WCM, Hippo is making its WCM intelligent, and intelligent not just for engaged and known customers, but also for the elusive anonymous users for whom much content marketing needs to hit to help generate the initial awareness that moves them along the customer journey.

This is not something that WCM vendors are talking about. Most of the well-known players are working on their marketing cloud strategies, not on direct improvements to the WCM platform itself. We see a lot of focus on mobile, mobile apps, integrating marketing automation and other marketing technologies (like analytics), but we aren’t seeing this kind of functionality built directly within the web content management platform.

It’s not that other WCM vendors aren’t looking at the performance of the content they serve, but they wrap it more around a combination of technologies of which analytics and WCM are two important ones, and it’s harder to figure it all out and ensure the right content is created for the right persona at the right stage (and it might not give deep insights into anonymous visitor content performance)

Intelligent Web Content Management Is the Future

But it’s not exactly the first time I’ve seen this done. MindTouch, whom I wrote about recently, also provides a content intelligence engine to its content management platform. But MindTouch is not content marketing/marketing focused. MindTouch is focused on providing great product experiences through intelligent content, focusing instead on service and support (including self-service). It’s not identical functionality but it’s the same idea – that intelligent content drives better experiences.

There are also content marketing platforms available that enable the creation of content, but not the delivery, so you can’t get the direct content feedback loop needed to ensure the right content is getting created.

So I am left wondering – is this what the next generation of the web content management will look like? We know that the basics of web content management (the creation, management and delivery of content) are a given, and we know that web content management is the backbone of digital experience, but what does that mean web content management needs to provide today and tomorrow? What does that backbone look like?

That is the subject of a paper I am working in and I am looking for organizations who have figured it out and/or are trying to figure it out. If you are interested in sharing your real-world insights, please . I would love to hear from you.

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