
As the customer journey grows more complex in 2025, organizations need a best-in-class martech stack to deliver a seamless, data-driven experience across multiple channels.
A critical component of this stack is the content management system (CMS), which must address key challenges businesses face today:
A CMS is vital in creating personalized experiences and connecting customer touchpoints across all channels. It “enables organizations to collaboratively manage the creation, aggregation, orchestration and delivery of content to omnichannel touchpoints,” according to Forrester.
An ideal CMS should effortlessly manage discovery, experience, engagement and conversions, ensuring your digital presence remains optimized for AI-driven search advancements. It should automate fixing website health issues, reducing the need for ongoing technical SEO work.
Let’s explore key considerations when selecting or upgrading your CMS, focusing on the four pivotal stages of the marketing journey:
Content discovery and visibility across different search results are major challenges for organizations. With content spread across multiple platforms, it’s hard to maintain consistent visibility. Many brands rely on paid ads to make up for poor organic discovery, even though consumers trust organic content more.
Your CMS should support content discovery by:
A CMS with built-in discovery features is even better. It should support protocols like IndexNow for notifying search engines of site content changes.
Prioritizing SERP saturation and discovery features is essential for any brand.
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Search is now multimodal, with consumers engaging via images, videos, text and audio. To stay ahead, centralize, optimize and distribute your assets across all channels.
Once your content is discovered, the next focus is user experience. Personalization and A/B testing shouldn’t be afterthoughts.
Your CMS should offer an easy-to-deploy solution backed by a framework that improves experience and drives conversions.
In 2025, the customer journey will be more complex as users interact across various channels, such as images, videos, LLMs, social platforms, text and voice. Web traffic from traditional search engines may drop by 25%, Gartner predicts.
To ensure a seamless journey:
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Traffic from traditional search engines is declining, especially among younger generations. Gen Z increasingly turns to platforms like TikTok and Instagram for discovery, with nearly 40% bypassing search engines.
Brands that provide personalized, data-driven answers engage users better, driving loyalty and conversions. Effective personalization relies on:
Personalization includes location-based, channel-based, and behavioral approaches, with AI enhancing visitor segmentation, journey prediction, and content creation.
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Customer journeys are increasingly complex, requiring flexible, scalable solutions. A “best of breed” architecture, built on composable, cloud-native SaaS and microservices, aligns with MACH principles and promotes growth.
This approach improves user experiences, shortens development time, lowers costs and makes systems scalable and robust, unlike rigid, monolithic systems. A CMS should offer:
After discovery and experience, focus on conversions. Key elements include:
To ensure seamless execution across all channels, your CMS needs to go beyond content management and allow for scaling and consistency.
Content creation in a CMS has evolved. Businesses need enterprise-wide taxonomies and metadata to align content with brand voice. A centralized hub breaks silos, enabling shared resources, better collaboration, and faster content production.
Does your CMS support industry-specific tools like travel apps, mortgage calculators, event calendars, or marketplace integrations?
Research developer communities and vertical applications to ensure the CMS meets your business needs.
A robust CMS should integrate site and campaign performance analytics, delivering real-time insights across channels.
This has become the foundation for building a resilient and adaptable tech stack.
Secure cloud hosting with micro-container architecture is essential for high availability, disaster recovery, and backups. A good CDN ensures fast website performance.
Multi-layered security with firewalls, intrusion detection, secured code, and DDoS protection provides robust defense. GDPR, CCPA compliance and ADA conformance enhance user trust and experience. Google has offered best practices for developers to ensure website users’ experience is secure and offers a safe browsing experience.
AI automates content creation, handles site migrations and resolves technical SEO issues. A CMS with built-in business insights, segmentation and A/B testing streamlines workflows and optimizes results.
CMS-enabled AI agents can play a significant role in providing content to various AI agents (i.e., chat agents and search agents). This will:
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When evaluating systems, focus on tools that deliver a seamless customer experience. A CMS is central to marketing success, connecting workflows and all stages of the customer journey.
A good CMS should minimize time and costs with features like editable pages, reusable components, templates, built-in analytics and AI-driven automation. Developer support is equally critical.
Ensure the CMS provides comprehensive documentation and scalability for easy adoption, quicker time to market, and long-term business growth.
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