The two terms, Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and Content Management System (CMS), are often used interchangeably. But, whenever businesses talk about optimizing their digital presence, providing the best digital experience takes the front seat than simple content management. Both the terms are interlinked but are different from each other.
Let’s see first what each term means.
What is a Content Management System (CMS)?
Content Management System (CMS), provides a single central interface to multiple users to work on the same content together. It helps organizations to create, manage, and track content for their websites and applications. These content can be in any form of media files like images, videos, or written content. With CMS, you can keep your global voice and image consistent across all digital platforms.
Key Features of CMS
- Easy content management and administration
- Customization without coding
- Powerful publishing tools
- Reliable security
Since the early 2000s, CMS dominated the web, but with time, the customer’s experiences evolved in terms of size, expectations, and reach. CMS evolved to be a Web Content Management System (WCM) wherein it not only created and managed content but also published it.
Compared to Joomla, Mambo, OpenCMS, WordPress gained popularity as an open-source solution for delivering blog content and letting third-party add customizations. But as the need for content personalization, market analytics, and omnichannel marketing arose and gave birth to DXP.
The evolution from CMS to Digital Experience Platform (DXP) happened in two folds
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The need raised for a connected experience, where customers can interact with any touchpoint, and it can be fed back to optimize the next interaction.
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DXP became more capable of keeping up with emerging technologies to handle complex tasks than CMS.
What is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP)?
Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is an integrated software framework that manages your online content and delivers a personalized experience across channels, geographics, and languages. Its goal is to create a seamless experience across platforms so that all your digital systems are in sync.
It encompasses all the ways your customer and team members engage with your digital content. From an e-commerce shop, or landing page, to your company website and chatbots, Digital Experience Platform (DXP) manages everything to provide the most desirable digital experience to your customers.
You can use DXP to create, expand, and continually develop websites, portals, mobile apps, and other digital experiences. LifeRay DXP, Sitecore, Adobe Experience Manager, Coredna are some of the best DXP platforms.
Key Features of DXP
- Seamless integration with various platforms
- Improved performance
- Automated migration
- Multichannel publishing
How are these two concepts interlinked?
Both CMS and DXP intend to maximize the user experience by understanding their expectations. Broadly saying, if DXP works towards end-user solutions, CMS is the engine behind it that builds it in the first place.
CMS creates and manages the content, and DXP forms an integral part of customer experience, affecting how people shop, browse, and connect with business (both online and offline).
By now, you might have got a basic idea about both the concepts. If your goal is to enhance end-user digital experience, you must have a clear understanding of the fundamental differences in CMS and DXP.
What is the difference between DXP and CMS?
1. Primary Focus:
“An impeccable content is a foundation for a good digital experience.”
The primary focus of CMS is content creation and delivery of the content. On the other hand, the primary focus of DXP is to have a holistic approach to the end-user experience. It builds upon CMS by enabling quick delivery across multichannel like apps, websites, IoT devices, and more.
2. Large Scale Content Management:
In comparison to CMS, DXP can handle extensive scale content management. It’s ability to manage, sync, and push content over the web, IoT devices, digital billboards, in-store kiosks makes it stand apart from CMS. It also optimizes the customer experience at all these touchpoints rather than just on your website like CMS.
3. Multitenancy:
A powerful Digital Experience Platform (DXP) can help you with multitenancy if you need to launch an e-commerce project, manage multiple microsites, or create intranets for your brand. In contrast, a traditional CMS would struggle to do it, without substantial investment and development time.
In contrast to CMS, DXP also makes it easy to manage your digital assets. With multitenancy, DXP can use the same digital assets across multiple clients or tenants for cases like software upgrades and consistent brand messaging.
4. Better Personalization:
With CMS, you can only upgrade the content on your website based on projected customer needs. Whereas, DXP helps you contextually personalize your omnichannel campaign, as it connects with the internal operating system of all digital channels. Further, it enables in giving a unified 360-degree view of customer needs by capturing, processing, and profiling customer data.
5. Learning Curve:
CMS is beginner-friendly. File sharing and content management can be done quickly with CMS. If you are a developer, you can dive right in and build custom tools (like in WordPress, add custom CSS through the theme customizer,) to make your website unique.
On the other hand, DXPs has a steeper learning curve. You need to understand multichannel integrations and data unification. Unless you learn it, you cannot get a centralized view of customer needs, for optimizing the digital experience.
6. Organizational Silos & Productivity:
CMS can promote work integration on a particular project, but DXP can take away organizational silos. With DXP, employees can access information or data at any time, especially in multilingual or multinational organizations, which can help in boosting employee productivity.
Conclusion
Overall, CMS can allow you to create content based on the user group, but to narrow it down to one-to-one customer personalization, you need DXP.
Furthermore, as more and more businesses are searching for their work purchases online, DXP can become a big game-changer to modify B2B buying behavior. Apart from supporting the B2C market, DXP has the potential to transform the B2B business segments by creating a smooth customer experience through connections and loyalty.
As a brand, if you are looking to meet the ever-changing needs of your customers and enhance your brand’s digital experience, Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is the best option for you. If you are a startup business, you also need to learn about growth marketing.
Read more about it here: Growth Marketing Strategy For Startups