In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, data has become the new oil to build brand rapport, engage customers, and drive growth. From getting crucial information about your target audience’s preferences to predicting the success of your marketing campaigns, data drives modern businesses. However, this data won’t get you anywhere unless you leverage it to reach the right audience. You can accomplish this goal by churning out and managing relevant and engaging content. Since you will be producing a huge amount of content, you will also need to manage it effectively, and here comes the support of ECM vs CMS.
Efficient management of crisp content can both increase the traffic to your website, increase customer interest, and drive sales. For this purpose, you can either opt for the best content management system or a reliable ECM. In this article, we will explore the advantages and disadvantages of both in detail. This will help you decide the kind of management system that is right for your business.
What Is a Content Management System (CMS)?
This software is used worldwide to effectively manage digital content. It allows the users to perform a range of operations from creation to editing on a single platform. Users can also store content on it and later review, modify, delete, or publish it to suit their needs.
It frees the users from maintaining a printed repository of content that is very prone to theft and loss. It also makes managing access easier for managers. Users can access the required documents anytime, anywhere. They don’t have to ask for permission every time they need to read a document.
WordPress is a classic example of CMS online. It has a very user-friendly interface and allows employees to create, edit, assess content against a range of metrics, and publish content easily. Employees don’t need to be tech experts or be on-site to use this platform.
What Is Enterprise Content Management?
It is another common tool to manage and organize content. It is quite similar to a content management system in most of its functionalities. Users can create, edit, check, store, and publish content through it. It helps employees easily access documents and improves productivity.
However, it is different from the other software in the sense that it can enable employees to store and modify even unstructured data. Whether it be simple images or excel files, an enterprise CMS is capable of storing and sorting a range of data.
DocuShare and eFileCabinet are some examples of ECM systems. The best part about these systems is that they allow users to customize the software according to their needs. So, enterprise we presence can drive the most value of their content without wasting much time on the technicalities and complexities.
Similarities Between CMS and ECM:
CMS and ECM share a lot of similarities. That is why people often confuse these two terms with each other. Below are some of the common similarities discussed in detail:
Efficient Project Management:
Both of these software offers innovative and effective tools to manage various operations involved in a project. From content creation to approval, users can take care of various functionalities through these tools.
Friendly Interface:
Both of these tools contribute towards enhanced user experience through a user-friendly interface. Users can navigate through the software and find tools quickly to create and edit easily.
Easy Integration:
Integrating any new system with the existing systems can be a big hassle for enterprises. But both ECM and CMS allow easy integration with other systems. This saves precious employee time integrating between applications.
Differences Between ECM vs CMS
Although their interface and tools are quite similar, ECM vs CMS differs in a variety of ways. These include:
Types of Content:
The two systems allow easy handling of different kinds of content. While CMS allows users to manage Microsoft Word or other work documents, ECM mostly allows easy handling of pictures, audio, and other visual kinds of content.
Amounts of Content:
CMS platforms usually work much better for slightly smaller and medium-sized enterprises. This is because these enterprises don’t produce content in large amounts. So, CMS is generally a much better tool to handle small to medium-sized amounts of content.
On the other hand, ECM allows enterprises to process and manage huge amounts of data easily. This is because it offers a range of tools and capabilities to manage content in a quick and efficient manner.
What Should Your Enterprise Choose?
Now that the similarities and differences between the two systems have been covered, it is time to decide which system you should opt for. Before making a decision, you should consider a range of factors which include your business size, content type, and content size.
Business Size:
The number one factor that you should consider while considering a content management solution is the business size. If you have a small business, you might be better off with a CMS online. This is because small businesses don’t need to produce huge amounts of content.
Since they don’t churn out huge amounts of content, hence they can easily manage their content with fewer tools and capabilities offered by CMS. Also, different kinds of businesses can easily customize their management system to suit their specific industry needs. For instance, healthcare enterprises can integrate tools to ensure compliance and search top healthcare professionals’ profiles into their CMS.
But if you have a large or medium-sized business, you should opt for an Enterprise CMS. This is because you would be producing a lot of content every day. And to manage this amount of content, you will require advanced tools that offer a lot of customizability and flexibility. So, even if you have a medium-sized business, you should go for the ECM route. Therefore, your own enterprise size can give you a lot of clarity regarding the kind of system you should opt for.
Content-Type:
Next is the type of content you want to publish. If you want to generate and publish articles to attract traffic or website content, then you should opt for CMS online. Publishing content via this management system enables you to do so without any coding experience. A single content repository allows users to access content anytime, anywhere, and without any need to seek permissions.
Content Size:
Finally, content size is another thing to consider when choosing the kind of management system. If your enterprise deals with massive amounts of unstructured data like images, videos, excel sheets, small content pieces, and silos, then ECM might be the right choice for you.
This is because ECM offers a lot of flexibility in terms of managing unstructured data. It neatly converts unstructured data into easily organizable and accessible silos. However, if your content is mostly structured, then CMS might be the right fit for it.
Conclusion:
Each of the two systems discussed above has its own capabilities, merits, and demerits. Therefore, before choosing any of them, you should consider your enterprise needs. Investing in a complicated ECM might offer you more flexibility, but it can also make it complicated for users to manage various aspects of content production. Therefore, enterprises should consider a variety of factors to manage content easily in the long run and improve the user experience for their employees.