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 CMS, which must address key challenges businesses face today:
Achieving visibility in multimodal search.
Establishing a presence in large language models (LLMs).
Managing total cost of ownership.
Leveraging AI opportunities.
Why is the right CMS a critical building block for establishing a solid foundation?
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:
Discovery.
Experience.
Conversion.
Performance.
Discovery
Content discovery and SERP saturation
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:
Managing crawl budgets efficiently to ensure indexing, crawling, and rendering of all high-quality content.
Allowing easy addition and editing of schemas based on content architecture.
Automating key SEO tasks like redirects, URL updates, sitemaps, breadcrumbs, and page speed optimizations – especially during site edits, migrations, or deletions.
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.
Dig deeper: Future-proof your SERP presence: 6 areas to focus on
Optimizing your digital assets for enhanced discovery
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.
Experience
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.
Omnichannel experiences
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:
Use a CMS that supports automated, personalized workflows for different audiences.
Establish a centralized information hub with a separate data layer for flexibility.
Automate rendering and publishing based on specific channels and audience needs.
Dig deeper: Future-proofing digital experience in AI-first semantic search
Personalization
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:
Using customer data.
Connecting the customer journey.
Streamlining content workflows.
Personalization includes location-based, channel-based, and behavioral approaches, with AI enhancing visitor segmentation, journey prediction, and content creation.
Dig deeper: How to boost your marketing revenue with personalization, connectivity and data