For most industries, your customers demand that you deliver a modern customer experience, but for many mid-market organizations, their content management system (CMS) has become the primary barrier to delivering a cohesive customer experience.
Adding advanced capabilities such as automation, analytics, and personalization often means bolting on plugins, maintaining fragile integrations, and relying on multiple vendors. It also burdens small teams with complex training and support needs.
Outdated or traditional CMS platforms that are exclusively focused on content tend to create security gaps, slow operations, and prevent teams from orchestrating seamless digital customer engagement journeys.
These limitations are not purely technical. They are also operational, data-related, and organizational, representing a strategic failure to deliver on customer expectations at a time when digital customer experience is a critical driver of competitive advantage.
The Inspiration, Technology, and Skills Gap
Across the mid-market, two clear organizational profiles typically emerge.
One segment treats the website as a static deliverable: “I built my website and I’m done.” Such organizations fall into the trap of short-term thinking. Moving beyond this perception is essential.
The second segment recognizes the need to do more digitally but struggles with limited tools, small marketing teams, and legacy technology that cannot deliver the experiences customers now expect.
This group faces fundamental barriers:
- Security vulnerabilities from unvetted third-party plugins
- Operational complexity stemming from disconnected systems
- Missing capabilities beyond content management, such as:
- Personalized email and SMS delivery
- Dynamic page personalization based on behavior or segments
- Integrated customer behavior tracking and analytics
- Automated campaign workflows across multiple channels
- Difficulty in scaling as business needs grow
Legacy CMS platforms cannot support these requirements without relying on external tools, making the current MarTech stack fragmented and unfit for purpose.
These challenges typically reveal themselves in specific business triggers:
- New leadership recognizes a need to modernize
- Legacy CMS platforms, like WordPress, create operational drag
- Sales teams lose leads (and deals) to more digitally savvy competitors
- Customers explicitly cite poor digital experiences as a reason to churn
For organizations wanting to address these triggers, it requires more than patching old systems. It demands new skills, new technology, and a fundamental shift in mindset: from treating the website as an isolated asset to recognizing it as the cornerstone of customer engagement.
Why the Shift to Digital Experience Platform is Strategic, Not Technical
Modern customer journeys span four critical domains:
- Content
- Commerce
- Marketing
- Data
A Digital Experience Platform changes the equation. It unifies these domains in a single, integrated system:
- All-in-one tool: Simplifies training and certification, reducing reliance on IT.
- Breaks down silos: Eliminates the need to juggle multiple platforms for a single customer experience.
- Empowers marketers: Shifts control from IT to marketing teams.
Such integration is a strategic necessity for organizations seeking to break down silos and deliver consistent, connected experiences across every customer touchpoint.
How Xperience by Kentico Aligns with Mid-Market Needs
Xperience by Kentico offers a Digital Experience Platform designed with mid-market realities in mind.
Kentico’s approach includes:
- Cloud-native architecture: Delivers speed, scalability, and efficiency.
- AI-enhanced personalization: Enables smarter engagement by using customer data and behavior to deliver relevant, tailored experiences.
- Workflow automation: Reduces manual effort, streamlines campaign execution, and improves marketing productivity.
- Seamless marketing integration: Gives built-in support for multi-site, multi-brand, and multi-language experiences.
- Fast implementation, faster results: Accelerates time to value.
- Integration with Microsoft Dynamics: Facilitates seamless data flow for connected customer experiences.
While enterprise-focused solutions often cost twice to four times as much, Kentico delivers a broad set of capabilities at a transparent, predictable price point.
Features include email marketing, landing pages, forms, and content reuse across web, mobile, digital signage, and microsites—all in one place. As one client conversation highlighted: “You’re not paying for endless add-ons. You get a lot of capability for a good deal.”
Additionally, Kentico’s integrations with systems like Microsoft Dynamics ensure customer data can flow seamlessly between CRM and digital channels, supporting sophisticated personalization strategies without the typical integration burden.
The Strategic Value: Accelerating Customer Engagement and Sales
Adopting a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) offers measurable business benefits.
Unified Data and Personalization
An integrated data layer enables real-time, AI-powered personalization, turning every interaction into an opportunity to strengthen customer relationships and drive conversions.
Operational Agility
Disconnected tools and manual processes give way to streamlined workflows. Marketing teams gain direct control over execution, reducing IT bottlenecks and enabling faster innovation.
Security and Trust
Plugin-heavy CMS architectures introduce significant risk. A DXP offers enterprise-grade security and compliance by design, reinforcing customer trust.
Revenue Impact
Better personalization, greater operational efficiency, and improved customer satisfaction translate directly into higher conversion rates, stronger retention, and increased customer lifetime value.
Moving from content management to experience management and treating that shift as a boardroom-level priority is critical.
The Leadership Mandate: Transformation Requires Action
Incremental improvements are no longer sufficient in an environment where competitors continually raise the bar for digital engagement.
Marketing leaders face a clear mandate: move beyond a patchwork of disconnected tools and champion the adoption of unified platforms that enable their teams to deliver seamless, impactful customer journeys.
Transformation is not about adding more tools. It is about rethinking how digital engagement is planned, executed, and measured.
Investing in a modern digital experience platform (DXP) is a strategic commitment to delivering modern, connected, customer-centric experiences.
Transformation demands action. The time to move forward is now.
Ready to discover what a DXP can do for your organization? Start the conversation today.
About the Author
Will Payman, a Senior Director of Strategy—CX at Synoptek, leads the digital strategy and analytics discipline for various clients across different industries. He supports clients with digital strategy activities and deliverables, including competitive analysis, opportunity assessment, current state assessments, and strategy development. Additionally, he leads the analytics team, overseeing setup, reporting, insights, and recommendations for experience improvements.
