By my count, the Web Content & Experience Management (“WCM”, or sometimes “CMS”) marketplace is approaching 30 years old, making this function something of a oldster in most MarTech stacks. It should come as no surprise that most enterprises have spent those decades increasing the level and sophistication of investment in their WCM platforms.

Yet, changes in customer behaviors and a profusion of engagement channels have shifted websites from the center of the MarTech stack to just one among many important touchpoints.  This means that when we talk about “phases” of WCM development, the latest level actually represents a step downward in level of effort.

That’s a good thing! It means a transition to faster, more agile tooling, and the long-awaited demise of DXPs.  For more details, read on...

Four Levels

At Real Story Group (RSG), we isolate four phases of WCM evolution.  It’s partly a historical tour for many of you, but even more so, it’s a spectrum of sophistication and adaptation to evolving needs and possibilities.

Click to enlarge.  Source: Real Story Group

Phase 1: Page Publisher

In this phase, your WCM platform focuses on publishing primarily static content, likely with an emphasis on long-form content.  Content managers can curate some page experiences within fixed templates, but mostly this is for publishing unstructured content.  Pages live in a single location under some sort of tree-based navigation. 

Most enterprises started this way, and the model can still work well for some use cases, for example certain news media properties, or firms whose principal content production consists of things like case studies and press releases.  The persistence of WordPress – which always excelled at this phase, even if it can do somewhat more now – proves that this model still holds situational value.

Phase 2: Content Catalog

Phase Two introduces several related innovations, including componentized web content, taxonomy-driven organization, and dynamic page assembly and delivery.  This allows for greater separation of content and presentation, as well as “placeless” content that can appear in multiple different locations and experience contexts – including web and mobile applications.

To support this functionality, nearly all WCM vendors evolved to offer some sort of ”headless”  architecture option, and a new crop of headless-only solutions emerged.  This model also better supports content-sharing across sites, heralding the new wave of European WCM vendors who grew up supporting multi-lingual, multi-site platforms.  Many enterprises remain at this phase, and when mastered, it can serve them well.

Phase 3: Site Personalization Manager

This phase begins to seat WCM as an important service in a broader MarTech stack, emphasizing integration with a wide variety of other engagement platforms.  Access to customer data (even if it’s just behavioral data that the WCM platform collects itself) enables some degree of personalized website experiences.  Growing sophistication in adjacent capabilities -- like Digital Asset Management, Optimization, and Analytics -- allows for even more sophisticated experiences.  GenAI offers potential for speeding and enhancing content creation and publishing processes.

Phase Three represents a substantial step-up in cost and effort.  Returns on those investments have not always borne out as promised, especially around content personalization.  WCM implementations in this phase tend to become heavy, where small changes can beget significant developer effort.  As the dust settles from pandemic-inspired “transformation” programs, savvy enterprises are asking more pointed questions – questions about the nature and relative importance of their increasingly pricey website channels amid a widening and deepening engagement stack overall.  In short: is our WCM overkill?

Fig 2.  A Phase 4 WCM is simpler to deploy and manage.  Source: RSG

Phase 4: Inbound Experience Director

This phase represents a fundamental shift in approach, as the WCM platform now becomes fully “legless.” By legless I mean that the system incorporates re-usable marketing content components, customer data, and personalization logic from lower-level systems of record that aren’t coupled to any single channel. 

This narrower scope still has the WCM platform managing long-form, web-specific content.  But the larger role now becomes directing inbound experiences on your site, where the most important information and decisions come from elsewhere.  This means your WCM becomes simpler in scope: less of a decision-maker and more of an order-taker.

This architecture finally realizes the long-held dream of “headless” content, but the most important marketing content doesn’t reside in the WCM; instead it originates in a more sophisticated, multi-asset component management system that RSG labels an “Omnichannel Content Platform” (OCP). OCPs are spin-offs from the Digital Asset Management (DAM) marketplace.

Implications for You

For enterprise Digital and MarTech leaders, there are three major implications for this down-shift.

Playing nice with your stack
The WCM platform of the future needs to explicitly recognize its predicate place in the broader MarTech stack.  That means being open to a broad set of informational / event / AI services that originate from a wide variety of other vendors’ platforms  Note that this is the opposite trajectory of most longstanding WCM platforms on the market, which have tended to bloat themselves with a variety of adjacent services, either bundled in or cross-sold by the vendor, which brings me to…

Death of DXP
DXP was always a crap term, invented by analyst firms to provide cover for failing portal vendors, then adopted by WCM vendors trying to juice their product portfolios with adjacent tools that their licensees never wanted.  Any self-styled “DXP” vendor today is inviting you to waste ever-more resources on a messed-up dream from the 2010s, when you should be prepping your stack for a very different 2030s. 

Get simpler!
This is the best part. You have an opportunity to right-size your WCM investment and prep for the stack of the future.  In recent years RSG has counseled numerous enterprises on how to trade-in their aging Adobe, Oracle, and Sitecore estates for a lighter model. 

I won’t call this “downshifting,” because it actually represents an upshift in potential for better customer experiences across your inbound digital properties.  Agree?  Disagree?  Let’s pick up the debate on LinkedIn.

Meantime, you can download a free sample of our WCM evaluation research here.