CMS. Three letters that are so ingrained into our consciousness that we don’t even need to be reminded what they mean. If you work in tech, you know that it stands for content management system — and that means the tool you use to update the content on your web site or intranet. Pretty simple, right?

Not so fast. If you’re only thinking of your CMS as a digital publishing tool, you’re missing the big picture. In fact, a good CMS can do far more than update a blog or add a picture of a hyperkinetic CEO on a mountain bike. It can actually be a powerful business tool to help collect analytics, drive leads, and improve the visitor experience. All of which can have a major positive impact on your bottom line.

Why business-grade CMS matters 

Thinking small about CMS can lead businesses to make suboptimal decisions about the digital experiences they create. For example, people tend to gravitate toward content management systems they’ve heard of, such as WordPress or Wix. But these entry-level tools, while great for managing small projects like a portfolio or a blog or even a small company, aren’t suitable for most business purposes. Just think: what happens when you have multiple users and teams on a project? How are you going to handle permissions and workflow? Consumer-focused CMS tools just don’t have the horsepower to handle the complex business scenarios that arise when people and teams need to collaborate to see a project through.

That’s where a business-grade CMS comes in handy. A CMS designed for enterprise use will be equipped with the feature sets a bustling business needs to ensure quality content gets where it’s supposed to be, when it’s supposed to be there. That means everything from who gets to edit what, to tracking who changed what when, to alerting users when they need to review or publish a document is handled entirely by the CMS.

That’s a big deal if you're trying to run a business, as employees passing content back and forth through email or Slack is a sure way to find yourself in version control Hell. What business should look for in a CMS — and what a business-grade CMS should offer — then, are tools that effectively enable swift project management for a diverse group of people. And you just can’t find that in a free CMS.

CMS as a sales tool 

In general, we’re not accustomed to thinking of the CMS itself as a sales tool. Sure, it’s the place where prospective customers check first to learn more about your products or services. And we’ll all agree the user experience should impress customers enough to want to learn more. But most people still see the CMS as a primitive tool that publishes and organizes their content. Basically, it’s just a modern version of Tripod or Geocities.

A few minutes with a true business-grade CMS ought to change that perception. There’s tons of important data that comes through a website, and a business would be remiss if it weren’t capturing and using that data. That’s why today’s business-oriented CMSs integrate advanced tracking and data analytics technologies. Most business-grade solutions have a dashboard that offers an at-a-glance overview of how your site and your content is performing. They also should have built-in reports that allow you to dig deep into metrics like where your visitors are from geographically, how long they spend on the site and specific pages, and what’s causing people to abandon your site.

All that data can help a business learn more about its customers, and what it needs to do to convince them to buy. It also helps drive continual improvement of your site and ensures things like slow-loading times or weird glitches aren’t putting people off.

One app to rule them all 

You might be thinking that you can find a lot of these tools in various products on the market today. So why do I need my CMS to have all these features?

It’s true that you could cobble together tools from multiple vendors to have, on paper, most or all of these same features. But once you’ve experienced a real business-grade CMS solution, you’ll have to agree that it’s advantageous to have them integrated into your CMS for reasons of simplicity. That is to say, all other things being equal, the fewer the number of apps employees need to use to perform their duties, the better. If content creators can find all the data they need and have all the tools they need to publish content without leaving the app, they’ll be more efficient, more organized, and produce better content.

And that’s precisely why businesses shouldn’t settle for some glorified blog publishing tool to carry out their content strategy. From an operational, as well as a marketing intelligence, perspective, there’s just no comparison with a business-grade CMS.