How manufacturers can transform digital marketing with advanced CMS solutions.

As digital maturity becomes a competitive currency, many brands find themselves constrained by legacy systems that struggle with complex product data, siloed marketing, and limited integration capabilities. The result? Missed opportunities, fragmented customer journeys, and slow response to market demands. But with the right CMS strategy, tailored for manufacturing’s unique needs, your business can transform from a product-centric operation to a dynamic digital platform, ready to scale and innovate at speed.

This article shares some of the key challenges and how forward-thinking manufacturers can leverage an advanced CMS solution to overcome the key challenges holding back your digital maturity. Complex product and vendor data management, nuanced personalisation, seamless eCommerce integration, scalable architecture, and robust governance.

Discover how a unified or composable best-of-breed approach, featuring platforms like Xperience by Kentico and Storyblok can empower you and your marketing team to drive engagement, loyalty, and measurable growth, while future-proofing your digital ecosystem for tomorrow’s opportunities.

Content challenges are often cited by marketers

Marketers face several distinct content challenges and stem from both the unique needs of the manufacturing industry and the evolving digital landscape.

Outdated or non-user-friendly content

Many struggle to update content regularly, leading to poor user experiences and outdated information. This makes it quite difficult for prospective customers to find relevant product details or trust the brand. Solutions can become overly technical, dense, or poorly organised content can overwhelm visitors, causing them to leave and never return after a bad experience.

Low conversion & misaligned content

A significant portion of content fails to convert visitors into leads or customers, often because it focuses too much on product features rather than addressing buyer pain points. Clear calls-to-action (CTAs) are frequently missing, which limits the effectiveness of the website as a lead generation tool.

Lack of fresh & relevant content

Stagnant content not only hurts user experience but also negatively impacts overall SEO rankings, making it harder for potential customers to find the site. Regularly updating the website with fresh relevant content, such as news, case studies, and industry insights, is essential for maintaining visibility and engagement.

Difficulty proving ROI & measuring impact

Marketers struggle to demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of their website and content efforts, making it challenging to justify budgets and improvements. 

Challenges extend when choosing a new CMS

Selecting a new CMS can present significant challenges from managing complex product, variant, and vendor data to enabling advanced personalisation and seamless system integration. Scalability, flexibility, robust user experience, and governance are equally vital, ensuring the CMS can support evolving needs while maintaining efficiency and compliance.

Resistance to change & legacy system issues

Many manufacturers often still operate with outdated, monolithic CMS platforms that struggle to keep pace with modern digital demands. Transitioning away from these legacy systems can be costly and complex, often met too with internal resistance to change. The current system may not support advanced content management or integration needs, leading to inefficiencies and data inconsistencies.

Complex product & vendor data management

Manufacturing businesses frequently handle complex product catalogues, multiple variants, and numerous vendors or distributors. A new CMS must support detailed product information management and filtering, version control, and easy updates across all channels. Traditional CMS platforms often fall short, resulting in inefficiencies and unstructured data silos.

Nuanced personalisation & unified marketing

Delivering tailored experiences to different customer segments, especially in B2B manufacturing requires advanced personalisation tools. Many CMS platforms lack the depth needed for nuanced segmentation, unified marketing campaigns, or consistent messaging across all touchpoints.

Integration with eCommerce & enterprise systems

Seamless integration with eCommerce platforms (such as BigCommerce) and enterprise systems is essential for real-time inventory updates, order processing, and vendor management. The CMS must offer robust APIs and ecosystem support to avoid silos and manual data entry, which can be a significant bottleneck for innovation and efficiency.

Scalability & flexibility for growth

Manufacturing businesses grow and evolve rapidly. The CMS must be scalable, supporting new product lines, markets, and digital channels. A composable architecture maybe the answer, where best-of-breed solutions are integrated, ensures businesses can adapt without costly re-platforming.

User experience & governance

A user-friendly CMS empowers marketing teams to manage content efficiently, while strong governance tools ensure compliance, security, and collaborative workflows. Features such as multi-language support, granular permissions, and audit logs are crucial for large, distributed teams.

Evaluating & choosing the right CMS

It is essential to invest time in both researching and assessing which platforms are best suited to support and accelerate your digital maturity, deliver the key features you require, and meet your business objectives as well as your expected return on investment. However, this process can be highly exhaustive, with your initial business requirements capture, vendor demonstrations and agency selection being particularly time-consuming. These steps often involve multiple rounds of evaluation, detailed discussions, and careful consideration to ensure the chosen solution truly aligns with your organisation’s needs and digital transformation goals.

The thoroughness required means that what might seem a straightforward selection can become a protracted and laborious task, especially when balancing feature requirements, jargon, technical compatibility, and budgetary constraints. In practice, the cumulative time spent on demos, meetings, and contract negotiations can add up, making it important to plan accordingly and allocate sufficient resources to this process.

Supporting a unified or composable viewpoint

Embarking on your selection process can sometimes feel daunting and it’s perfectly natural to seek a bit of extra support along the way. Whether you’re considering streamlining your digital infrastructure with an all-in-one content management system that encompasses marketing and personalisation tools, or opting for a fully composable, API-first approach made up of independent, modular services, each handling a specific function such as content modelling, delivery, search, personalisation, analytics, or media management. The range of options can seem vast and extremely complex.

Whichever pathway you are considering, remember that you don’t have to go it alone when it comes to validation. However, to fully unlock the full advantages of an advanced composable architecture, you’ll typically need much more upfront planning, technical know-how, and ongoing management, challenges that can truly benefit from the helping hand of a trusted agency.

A reliable partner agency can offer expert guidance for both, they'll share industry best practices, and provide hands-on support to help you navigate these nuanced complexities. They’ll work closely with you to assess your requirements, design an architecture tailored to your business goals, and ensure a smooth implementation. In this way, a trusted agency helps you maximise the value of your chosen approach while minimising risk and disruption.

Two excellent platforms that can help you accelerate and narrow down your initial MarTech vendor consideration offer both a unified and fully composable pathway with even a hybrid approach too are Xperience by Kentico and Storyblok.

Unlocking your marketing power with a unified platform

Beyond its core content management strengths, Xperience by Kentico offers an excellent suite of unified marketing features that empower manufacturing businesses to drive engagement and loyalty:

• Marketing automation & campaign management - Automate routine marketing tasks and orchestrate cross-channel campaigns from a single platform. Marketers can build workflows, trigger personalised emails, and execute A/B tests without developer intervention, resulting in faster campaign deployment and more effective targeting.
• Personalisation at scale - Deliver tailored content and recommendations based on visitor behaviour, preferences, and segmentation. This level of personalisation helps manufacturing brands build stronger relationships with key accounts and improve conversion rates.
• Data-driven insights - Collect and analyse customer interaction data to inform product development, marketing strategies, and customer service improvements. Kentico’s integrated analytics provide actionable insights, enabling continuous optimisation of digital experiences.
• Omnichannel content delivery - Create content once and deploy it across websites, mobile apps, social media, and digital kiosks using Kentico’s hybrid headless capabilities. This ensures consistent messaging and a seamless customer journey regardless of channel.
• Unified customer data - Centralise customer data from multiple touchpoints for a single view of each customer. This unified approach supports more effective segmentation, targeted campaigns, and improved customer service.

Taking a composable CMS & eCommerce approach

Storyblok is a performant headless content management system with a great visual editor that enables teams to easily create, manage, and deliver content across any digital channel via APIs.

It distinguishes itself through its highly composable architecture, empowering organisations to craft a highly curated tech stack by integrating best-of-breed solutions for content, commerce, and customer experience. Unlike traditional CMS platforms, the modular design, API-first approach, and reusable content components allow seamless integration with eCommerce platforms, enterprise systems, and 3rd party marketing tools, without vendor lock-in.

If you combine this with an advanced eCommerce platform like BigCommerce and its open API features, you can leverage and build a fully composable stack to deliver highly nuanced robust B2C or B2B commerce experiences. This sets the foundation for a future-proof commerce ecosystem and at an enterprise scale.

All product, supplier, and customer data is managed centrally, enabling rapid iteration and omnichannel delivery for your business.

This flexibility means your teams can swiftly adapt to new business requirements, accelerate product launches, and deliver consistent, personalised experiences across all digital channels.

Conclusion

For manufacturing businesses with complex product and vendor requirements, selecting the right CMS is indeed a challenging multi-stakeholder, strategic decision and given the nuanced complexities, often, “it will depend”.

At Ridgeway, we combine our expertise in solution architecture with a collaborative pragmatic composable mindset, appraising platforms like Kentico for unified marketing, or Storyblok and BigCommerce to provide a robust, flexible enterprise eCommerce foundation needed to meet today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities.

For those prioritising marketing automation, personalisation with a unified customer view, Xperience by Kentico offers a highly compelling proposition delivering not just a product, but a great platform for scalable, integrated digital experiences that drive growth and customer loyalty. 

The challenges you face, complex product and vendor data, the need for nuanced personalisation, seamless eCommerce integration, scalable architecture, and robust governance are not insurmountable. With the right strategy and technology, your business can unlock new levels of agility, customer engagement, and measurable growth.

Ready to take the next step?

If you’re looking to future-proof your digital ecosystem and accelerate your digital maturity, Ridgeway is here to help. Our open, honest and consultative approach ensures your CMS solution is tailored to your unique requirements, empowering your team to manage content, deliver personalised experiences, and scale with confidence, all while maintaining robust governance and compliance.

Let’s turn your digital challenges into opportunities for growth

Contact us today and discover how we can help you build a scalable, integrated CMS solution that drives engagement, loyalty, and results for your manufacturing business.