CMS Shakes Dot Zero Resistance

In the five days since the release of DNN Evoq 9.1 (Wednesday, April 26) and when Website Magazine spoke with DNN spokespersons (Monday, May 1), there was already a higher adoption rate of the just-released Evoq 9.1 than the launch of 9.0 (Dec. 2016).

Will Morgenweck, DNN's VP of product management and Dennis Shiao, director of content marketing, both agree there's a stigma of dot zero releases with not many people wanting to be first - waiting for vendors to work out the "kinks" that may or may not be there.

Like 9.0, Liquid Content serves as the omnichannel publishing system central to Evoq 9.1. Liquid Content empowers marketers to publish across devices (like Amazon Echo), across owned digital properties (landing pages, blogs, apps, etc.) and third-party applications (such as Facebook Messenger, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) by storing content in a single repository that can be called on and adapted based on where the content will be published.

Evoq's "visualizers," for instance, can be applied to a variety of use-cases (new ones get pushed out nearly weekly) so that plain-text content can be rendered to how the marketer wants it to appear (whether it's making an executive's headshot round for one channel and square for another or turning a slideshow into static images).

A couple of the new features within 9.1 include the ability to make content even more portable, like the development of an Alexa Skill for Amazon Echo, which uses Liquid Content's REST API to access content stored in Liquid Content. The semantically tagged content enables Alexa to provide answers to questions such as someone looking up menu items at a restaurant or searching for the most current retail promotion.

Consumers are likely to begin using voice assistants for nearly every conceivable situation (find me a restaurant, open up this website, book a trip, etc.) sooner than later, so while it's early stages, having a content management system (CMS) that allows for the delivery of content to any channel that consumers adopt, will be critical from both a resource standpoint (avoiding the need to develop multiple versions of content) and from a competitive one (meeting consumers' expectations that business info will be available and accessible wherever they are).

Updates in 9.1 also center on content analytics. While some content management systems rely solely on third-party systems (most notably Google Analytics), Evoq 9.1 is able to pull information from Google Analtyics and provide insights on top of that data. The update offers rich dynamic charts to further segment data and understand interactions on the website. According to DNN, charts are updated in real-time, as users modify dimensions or date ranges. Conversion tracking was enhanced to include segmentation based on individual conversion metrics, as well as visitor pathway analysis and attribute page-conversion performance.

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