Omnichannel Requires a New Kind of Web Content Management

The Gist

• WCM has evolved. Web content management has shifted from static page publishing to lightweight systems that support omnichannel experiences.

• Simpler can be smarter. Enterprises are moving away from bloated platforms in favor of more agile, integrated tools that focus on content reuse and inbound delivery.

• DXP is over. Digital experience platforms are giving way to modular systems that play a smaller but smarter role in the martech stack.

The web content and experience management marketplace (also known as WCM or CMS) is approaching 30 years old. This function is something of a greybeard in most martech stacks. It should come as no surprise that most enterprises have spent those decades increasing the level and sophistication of investment in their WCM platforms. 

Yet, changes in customer behaviors and a profusion of engagement channels have shifted websites from the center of the martech stack to just one of many important touchpoints. This means that when we talk about phases of WCM development, the latest level actually represents a step downward in level of effort. And that’s a good thing.

At my organization, we isolate four phases of web content management evolution. It’s partly a historical tour for many of you. Even more so, it’s a spectrum of sophistication and adaptation to evolving needs and possibilities.

Table of Contents

Phase 1: Page Publisher

In this phase, your web content management platform focuses on publishing primarily static content, likely with an emphasis on long-form content. Content managers can curate some page experiences within fixed templates, but mostly this is for publishing unstructured content. Pages live in a single location under some sort of tree-based navigation. 

Most enterprises started this way, and the model can still work well for some use cases, for example certain news media properties or firms whose principal content production consists of things like case studies and press releases. The persistence of WordPress (which always excelled at this phase, even if it can do somewhat more now) proves that this model still holds situational value.

Phase 2: Content Catalog

Phase two introduces several related innovations, including componentized web content, taxonomy-driven organization and dynamic page assembly and delivery. This allows for greater separation of content and presentation, as well as placeless content that can appear in multiple different locations and experience contexts, including web and mobile applications.

To support this functionality, nearly all web content management vendors evolved to offer some sort of headless architecture option, and a new crop of headless-only solutions emerged. This model also better supports content-sharing across sites, and it heralded the new wave of European WCM vendors who grew up supporting multi-lingual, multi-site platforms. Many enterprises remain at this phase, and when mastered, it can serve them well.

Related Article: How to Plan for a Headless CMS Project

Phase 3: Site Personalization Manager

This phase begins to see web content management as an important service in a broader martech stack, and it focuses on integration with a wide variety of other engagement platforms. Access to customer data (even if it’s just behavioral data that the WCM platform collects itself) allows some degree of personalized website experiences. Growing sophistication in adjacent capabilities (i.e., digital asset management, optimization and analytics) allows for even more sophisticated experiences. Generative AI offers potential for speeding and enhancing content creation and publishing processes.

Phase three represents a substantial step up in cost and effort. Returns on those investments have not always been realized as promised, especially around content personalization. WCM implementations in this phase tend to become heavy, where small changes can beget significant developer effort. 

As the dust settles from pandemic-inspired transformation programs, savvy enterprises are starting to take a closer look at their digital investments. One key question is whether their website platforms are delivering enough value to justify the growing costs. Is their WCM overkill?

Phases of Web Content Management (WCM)

This table outlines the four phases of WCM evolution as defined by the Real Story Group. It highlights how enterprise WCM has shifted from static publishing to lighter, integrated inbound experience platforms.

Source: Real Story Group, 2025

Phase 4: Inbound Experience Director

This phase represents a fundamental shift in approach, as the web content management platform now becomes fully legless. By legless, I mean that the system incorporates reusable marketing content components, customer data and personalization logic from lower-level systems of record that aren’t coupled to any single channel. 

This narrower scope still has the WCM platform managing long-form, web-specific content. But the larger role now becomes directing inbound experiences on your site, where the most important information and decisions come from elsewhere. This means your WCM becomes simpler in scope, less of a decision-maker and more of an order-taker.

This architecture finally realizes the long-held dream of headless content. But the most important marketing content doesn’t reside in the WCM. Instead, it originates in a more sophisticated, multi-asset component management system that we label as an omnichannel content platform (OCP). OCPs are spin-offs from the digital asset management (DAM) marketplace.

Related Article: Elevate Engagement Through Your Omnichannel Content Strategy

What This Shift Means for Enterprise Teams

For enterprise digital and martech leaders, there are three major implications for this down-shift.

Playing Nice With Your Stack

The WCM of the future needs to explicitly recognize its predicate place in the broader martech stack. That means being open to integrate with a wide range of services, including data, event and AI tools from many different vendors. Note that this is the opposite trajectory of most longstanding web content management platforms on the market, which have tended to bloat themselves with a variety of adjacent services, either bundled in or cross-sold by the vendor.