The web has evolved.  Customer expectations have changed.  New channels like mobile and social media have emerged.  Video is becoming the most important content type for visitor engagement.  Yet for many companies, Web CMS remains a simple web publishing tool when it could be so much more.  Often companies are hamstrung by legacy (or homegrown) Web CMS tools which don't meet the current business needs of implementing a multichannel customer engagement strategy.

Here are four reasons you should consider moving beyond your legacy or Web CMS:

1) We can't deliver mobile sites

Gartner famously predicted in early 2010 that by 2013 mobile devices will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device.  By all indications, their prediction is coming true, perhaps at a faster pace than originally expected.  For example, the iPad 2 sold somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 units within the first three days of availability.  Consumers are starving for more ways to engage with their favorite companies and brands via mobile devices yet most sites treat the mobile channel as a 2nd class citizen.  Web CMS vendors have spent the last few years significantly enhancing mobile capabilities in preparation for the inevitable shift to mobile computing.  Now, you can easily detect different device types (like feature phones vs. smartphones vs. tablets), and serve different web experience to each.  You can even detect device capabilities like Flash support.  If your legacy Web CMS does not support mobile as a primary channel, it's time to find one that does. 

2) Our sites are one-size-fits-all

It's been said that on average you have less than seven seconds to engage a visitor on your site.  You're content is only relevant to a visitor if it matches the context of their visit.  The greatest opportunity to drive business outcomes on your site is to match the intent of the visitor to an experience designed (and refined) to match their intent.  It all comes down to context.  Traffic source and search keywords provide important insight.  Onsite behavior like clickpaths and search keywords indicate preferences.  Watching video and adding user generated content, like comments, signals engagement.  Your Web CMS should be able to match content to context, personalizing the experience based on the unique needs of each visitor.

3) We can't effectively manage and deliver video

Video has become an important customer engagement tool, across every industry vertical.  For example, retailers use video to increase conversion rates.  Publishers use video to increase viewer engagement.  Non-profits use video to create emotional experiences to drive donations.  Video isn't just another content type, it's perhaps *the* most important content type, especially for engagement.  Legacy Web CMS tools provide support for managing and delivering traditional content types like text and images yet video remains a significant challenge, especially on the delivery side.  While video is a powerful engagement tool, it can also be the source of a poor customer experience due to factors like bandwidth and mobile device limitations.  Video is best left to leading delivery platforms like Brightcove, but integration with your Web CMS is critical.

4) Our website is not connected to our CRM

According to Marketing Sherpa, the top two challenges faced by B2B marketers are generating more leads, and higher quality leads.  The corporate website should play an important role in your marketing automation strategies.  Today, marketing automation tools primary engage with customers via email.  But in an inbound marketing world, we know that customers often find our products and services via search engines or social media, with the primary engagement point being the website.  So, the opportunity is to take lead nurturing and marketing automation principals that work well with email campaigns and apply them to the corporate website.  Your Web CMS should be able to score visitor behavior based on the implicit and explicit actions they take while on the site.  Once the visitor shows the right interest level, they should be automatically added as a lead in your CRM, typically Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics.

Those are four common limitations I often hear customers talk about with regards to their legacy Web CMS tools.  If you'd like to learn more about the imperatives for next generation Web CMS, please join me for a webinar with Forrester Research and Valassis on Evolving Your Web Strategy.  The webinar will lay out the business case and drivers for next generation Web CMS.  

I'd love to learn more about the challenges of your legacy Web CMS in the comments.