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As a leader of a manufacturing business, you have a lot on your plate. You shouldn’t need to worry about exploring the plethora of Content Management System (CMS) choices out in the wild. We’ve been there and want to simplify the process for you. For industrial or manufacturing businesses, we’ve found that the Umbraco CMS is a great choice.
Umbraco, called “the friendly CMS,” has been powering websites since 2005. There are more than 700,000 websites currently running the Umbraco CMS worldwide, making it the most popular Microsoft .NET CMS. These sites aren’t small either – some of Umbraco’s flagship websites are ArcelorMittal, Rubbermaid Commercial Products, Frontier Airlines, Heinz.
While popularity isn’t everything, there’s good reason for why Umbraco is a go-to CMS for manufacturers across the country. Let’s break down three key ways that Umbraco can simplify website management for your business.
With most technology platforms, there are always a number of built-in bells and whistles that can result in additional costs for functionality you rarely use. Umbraco is different. Rather than paying a premium for unnecessary functionality, Umbraco allows you to allocate more budget to building business rules and workflows you actually need and want without the hefty license fees.
How much are these hefty license fees, you ask? Kentico is another variety of a .NET CMS. Kentico has a few pricing tiers with annual license fees ranging from $4,999 to $29,000 and more. If you need to add an extra user, that’ll cost you. Sitecore, a popular enterprise CMS, has such complex pricing tiers that they don’t publicize their pricing. In fact, you’ll need to call them to figure out how many thousand(s) per year it will cost you just to license their software.
Umbraco is open-source and has a $0 annual license fee. Those qualities mean that Umbraco is maintained and improved by both the company and a global community of developers, all without any license fees. Better yet, it will remain free forever. Think about the money saved on license fees alone. Use that money to improve your content for SEO or build a custom Thermocouple Builder like our friends at GeoCorp did.
The goal of most business websites is to educate the buyer, generate leads, and increase sales. The best way to manage leads and engage with and nurture prospects and clients alike is through a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
You’re likely already using a CRM, such as Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce. Do you know if you have a web-to-lead integration setup? This is the most common type of integration, but there are many others you may need. Not every CMS allows you to integrate with third party tools (like CRM) with ease. With Umbraco being an open-source CMS, you have more freedom to integrate with outside platforms you need to conduct business, such as:
The straightforward logic of Umbraco minimizes the chance of contact forms, complex business rules, and valuable information being mismanaged or having to be double entered. Umbraco can solve even the more complex business rules like routing specific leads to certain departments, assign sales reps, etc.
The best recommendation is to take a look at your current lead workflows and see if there are gaps or room for automation. Once you’ve done this, take your ideas to a skilled application development team. You bring the ideas, and let others worry about the code.
Umbraco is a flexible platform that your marketing team can leverage to your needs. Take the time up front to identify daily CMS tasks or pages you’ll be creating post-launch. Are you actively acquiring new brands or products? Make sure those templates are considered during the design and development process.
Are you actively acquiring new brands or products? If so, you’ll likely be creating and publishing new pages on the fly. With Umbraco, you can create a new product detail page with ease. Curious how that new page will look on your mobile device? Thanks to Umbraco’s Responsive Preview function, you can preview your content before publishing it live – you can also see how it will look and feel on your tablet, phone, or desktop.
Maybe you just inked a new deal to expand into Germany – how will you translate your website content quickly and easily for your new German speaking audience? Umbraco has your back with multilingual content management. Umbraco has built-in features that have been designed to simplify the process to update and manage multilingual content.
The right CMS can make a massive difference. As a registered Umbraco partner, our website design and development team is here to custom functionality, a better user experience, and a faster turnaround time for your website. Aztek has been helping manufacturers and industrial businesses solve digital problems for over 24 years, so we have the experience it takes to improve your online presence with Umbraco.
Want to take a look at some of our example work to help get your wheels spinning? Check out our work to see the results for yourself! Once you’re done, contact us today and we’ll be there to bring your ideas to life.
