The Power of Passle with your CMS
How Passle helps professional services firms with content management
Many websites include more technical content that is designed for a professional audience. For example, law firm websites will contain updates written by lawyers for lawyers. Accountants will be writing for others who have expert knowledge of accounting and financial matters. Technology websites might have articles written by developers about coding that are highly technical.
This content is important as it demonstrates and validates the expertise and specialist knowledge of a business. It also might provide important updates, perspectives and even thought leadership to attract repeat visitors, helping drive brand awareness and advocacy across a key professional audience.
The challenge of expert content in professional services
Managing this expert content is not always straightforward for digital marketing teams, who may not necessarily fully understand the content that is being written and are therefore not always in a position be able to edit or change it. There can naturally be some tension with the wishes of digital marketing teams to provide content that is primed for SEO and is engaging, with the wishes of a professional audience who care about the technical accuracy. For example, a digital marketer and a lawyer may have very different views on the suitability of a headline of an article or the readability of the text.
There can also be some more practical issues that occur in the actual content management process.
Experts are always busy
Technical and professional staff can be very busy and inevitably the people who have in-demand expertise and can contribute the most valuable articles are often the busiest. Marketing teams tasked with encouraging extremely busy people to contribute articles and content can hit a brick wall. Unfortunately, it’s those cats that needed to be herded again.
Professionals are reluctant to use a CMS
It can also be very hard to get busy professionals to input data into a content management system. If you are using a more complex digital experience platform (DXP) like Sitecore, for example, it can be quite a confusing experience. A simpler and straightforward Content Management System (CMS) like Umbraco arguably has an easier interface to deal with, but it is still beyond the comfort zone of some professionals.
In practice, many would often rather produce an article in Word and email that to the digital marketing team to add to the CMS. This is a compromise that some digital marketing teams accept and works OK,but is not ideal. It can lead to a lot of demand on already time-stretched digital marketing teams and can also add significant time to getting content out.
Time-sensitive content can miss the target
Another issue is that often content is time sensitive in order for it to have value. You might be getting an urgent technical update out on a legal ruling or a new government announcement. Time is of the essence, but when the content management process is convoluted and requires multiple levels of approval, it is very challenging to get that update out of the door.
For example, when a professional writes an article in Word, gets a more senior member of staff to review it, sends it to the marketing team to add to the CMS, gets returned to them for review, perhaps then goes through senior approval again and also then needs an image added, the advantage of time and getting content out quickly may have been lost.
Not enough sharing via social media
Finally, marketing and business development teams try to encourage professionals to use social media channels to promote their content. This is a great way to strengthen relationships with fellow professionals and peers that can be important for generating leads, particularly in professional services. But again, getting professionals to use social media, is not always easy, and some are less confident and even reluctant to do so.
The power of Passle
There are different ways to overcome these challenges. Using a CMS with an easier editing experience and more streamlined publishing process can have a significant impact. As already noted, Umbraco has an intuitive editing interface that can support busy content contributors. However, one of the best content management solutions we’ve seen – particularly for professional services firms in the legal or accountancy sector – is Passle.
Passle is a CMS that has been around since 2014 and has a strong presence in the UK legal sector, and is modelled around the unique needs of professional services firms. It is a SaaS-based, highly flexible solution that acts as a headless CMS that allows blogs and articles to be served up on your website. Passle can also be skinned so it appears seamlessly as part of your website experience.
Let’s look at four ways Passle makes life easier for professionals contributing expert content as well as the digital marketing teams that support them.
- 1. Reducing barriers for content creation for professional staff
One of the strengths of Passle is it is focused just on the upload of content rather than the bells and whistles that can cause distraction or confusion and prevent adoption. This means that professionals don’t have to worry about elements such as adding an image or formatting, and can just focus on adding a headline, summary and body copy. They can then just submit this into the content management workflow and move on. They can also log into Passle via Single Sign-On.
Overall Passle streamlines and simplifies the content creation and submission process, reducing barriers for professional staff, and making adoption more likely.
- 2. Set the right content management workflow
Another strength of Passle is the ability to configure the content management workflow that can suit the needs of both contributors and the central digital management team. This is very flexible so you can set the right approvals and steps, allow technical oversight as well as central digital marketing teams to add images if necessary and so on.
Sometimes this flexibility is not straightforward to achieve in a standard DXP or CMS, but with Passle you can design the workflow around your process, rather than having to adapt your process to the constraints of the workflow allowed in your CMS. Again, the result is to optimise publishing workflow to enable a quicker “time to market” and minimise bottlenecks, while also ensuring that any approvals are preserved.
- 3. Supports omni-channel publishing
Passle provides strong support for omni-channel publishing, both on our website or websites, but also across social media. There are a number of tools that support this including a design tool to create pages or a “content hub” which can be skinned like your website, an API for website integration, and also a plug-in to allow easy embedding into pages. You can also create email digests and newsletters and provide easy sharing across social media, enabling lawyers, accountants and other professionals to easily share across LinkedIn, Twitter and other channels direct from the Passle UI.
- 4. Analytics
Finally, Passle provides insights with analytics for both digital marketing teams but also the content contributors themselves. By providing direct insight into the success and reach of an article, it can encourage professionals to contribute more content and also give them insight into which topics resonate with their audience.
Working with Passle
Passle is a mature solution that is trusted by many professional services firms and works well for them. We’re working with clients to integrate Passle into their website experience. If you’d like to discuss the challenges around website content management in your professional services firm, or if you’re looking for help to integrate Passle with your website, then get in touch!
