CMS Personalization for Manufacturing: Why One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Some things are fine as one-size-fits-all products: Socks, rain ponchos, baseball caps. Maybe they don’t truly fit every person, but when they don’t, the stakes are pretty low.

Now, take that inevitable poor fit for somebody using a generic product and magnify it with countless layers of complexity. Raise the cost by thousands and thousands of dollars, too. Suddenly, the risks of grabbing an off-the-rack option become a lot higher. That’s what it’s like for a manufacturer choosing a monolithic content management system (CMS).

Let’s take a closer look at why a personalized CMS is so crucial for modern manufacturing success.

Personalization in manufacturing: who is it for?

Personalization is essential for your customers. It gets them the most relevant content at the most opportune time. This tailored experience leads to increased engagement and higher conversion rates.

But in the bigger picture, personalization is arguably most important for manufacturers themselves. To provide a personalized experience for your users, you need a CMS that’s fine-tuned to your objectives and needs.

It needs to do exactly what you require without any extraneously paid-for features or clunky workarounds – and in an industry this complex, an all-in-one solution just can’t do that. Fortunately, a composable one can.

3 reasons why one size doesn’t fit all in manufacturing

Let’s take a closer look at why CMSs for the manufacturing industry need to be easily customizable.

1. Product and document management needs vary

Manufacturing is often a document-heavy industry. The contents of these can vary wildly even in similar providers. As such, it’s no surprise that each company has different ways of organizing and using this documentation.

The best technology to optimize these processes will depend on those unique requirements.

For example, monolithic systems tend to have basic digital asset managers (DAM). It might not be robust enough to meet a manufacturing company’s specific organizational needs.

With the freedom of a composable system, users can pick the exact technology needed for the job. Thanks to the API-first nature of such a CMS, users can also easily scale up as document needs increase, or add on omnichannel channels as audience demands evolve.

2. Localized content delivery is crucial

Operating across multiple regions brings a lot of opportunities, but it’s not without its challenges. There are plenty of complexities to consider: local usage regulations, different languages, and cultural differences – all of which get only more complicated as regulatory compliance issues come into play.

An all-in-one system is unlikely to come with out-of-the-box functionality to support all of these nuances. It might even make users feel like they need multiple CMSs just to stay on top of it all, which can lead to problems of its own such as content silos and inefficient budget spending.

However, personalization makes it easy to serve these needs. The modular structure of a composable system means that users can easily and independently update regional compliance modules without impacting the rest of the CMS.

This also enables users to add on resources easily as they expand to new markets, customizing user interfaces and content delivery methods as they go – all without struggling within a predefined system or resort to multiple CMSs.

3. Efficiency looks different for everyone

Being efficient with resources often means tailoring choices to whatever your industry’s key needs are. Take an enterprise-level automotive parts creator vs. a manufacturer of highly customized plane parts, for example. They may both be manufacturers, but they’ll need distinctly different technical setups to fully optimize performance for their niche.

An all-in-one-system isn’t designed to account for that level of nuance. It may be a fast out-of-the-box solution, but that ease is a double-edged sword. It also makes any technical innovation or personalization a struggle, increasing time to market and ironically decreasing efficiency.

Even if you do find a way to create a work-around, problems can still occur. Since the whole system is one unit, a mistake anywhere in the technology - the risk of which is heightened when you’re trying to make it do something it’s not built to do - can impact the entire system, potentially bringing all operations to a screeching halt.

In a system with easily personalizable, swappable components, you don’t have any of those hoops to jump through. You’re free to innovate with minimal downtime to find the most efficient tech stack to fit your unique needs. Your CMS adapts to your needs, not the other way around.

Key Takeaway: does one size ever fit all?

Monolithic, non-personalizable CMSs certainly have their uses. But these tend to be simple, predictable cases: small businesses with minimal tech needs. Think of a mom and pop shop or a personal blog.

But these kinds of systems are rarely the answer for a sophisticated industry like manufacturing.

You can’t perform your best if you don’t have hand-picked tech to support your unique needs. A personalizable CMS is an indisputable requirement for any successful manufacturing organization in the modern age.