Enterprise organizations in healthcare, life sciences, and other regulated sectors often make significant investments in digital infrastructure. Tools like Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, and Optimizely are powerful platforms, promising scalability, personalization, and rich content experiences.
But in our work at XDS, we’ve found that most brands only scratch the surface. Despite having the tools in place, their digital experiences are slow, fragmented, and underperforming. And it’s not because the platforms lack capability. It’s because organizations rarely unlock more than 10 to 20 percent of what they can actually do.
The Disconnect Between Platform and Performance
When CMS platforms are first implemented, teams are typically focused on migration and setup: Getting content live, ensuring compliance, and replicating the existing site structure. But post-launch, things often stall.
Without a clear roadmap for optimization, marketing teams default to outdated templates, inflexible components, or inefficient workflows. Features like personalization, analytics integration, or modular design systems go untouched. In many cases, even basic CMS functions like tagging, A/B testing, or content scheduling are underutilized.
According to Gartner, nearly 70 percent of digital experience platform (DXP) functionality goes unused after implementation. And in industries where customer experience and credibility are paramount, that’s a costly oversight.
Why This Matters in Regulated Industries
In healthcare and pharma, digital interactions often replace face-to-face engagement. That means your CMS isn’t just a backend tool, it’s the engine behind your first impression.
When patients, clinicians, or procurement teams land on a slow, disorganized site, trust erodes. If mobile load times are poor or compliance content is difficult to access (or the opposite, a barrier), you risk more than bounce rates, you risk reputational damage.
Worse, many healthcare marketers we speak with assume these shortcomings are “just the way things are” with enterprise CMS platforms. They’re not.
Five Ways to Unlock the Other 90%
1. Conduct a CMS Audit
Start by understanding what’s been built and how well it performs. A structured audit should assess load times, accessibility, authoring workflows, and compliance integration. We often begin client engagements with a performance UX audit to uncover immediate opportunities.
2. Rebuild Your Component Library
Many organizations inherit bloated, hard-coded modules that don’t flex well across devices. Rebuilding your component library with speed, responsiveness, and modularity in mind allows internal teams to move faster and deliver better outcomes without reinventing the wheel each time.
3. Operationalize Personalization
The most underused (and overhyped) CMS feature is personalization. That doesn’t mean 1-to-1 targeting, it can be as simple as creating segmented journeys for clinicians, patients, or partners. Role-based pathways help users find what they need faster, increasing both engagement and conversion.
4. Re-surface Hidden Content
Healthcare organizations often possess a rich library of valuable content: white papers, videos, physician resources; but these assets are frequently buried deep within subpages, disconnected from the core user journey. By leveraging dynamic CTAs, structured internal linking, and embedded previews, you can elevate this content to where it matters most, increasing visibility and driving greater engagement.
Addressing this mid-funnel gap is essential. Even the strongest campaigns can stall without proper exposure or completion paths. Bridging that disconnect ensures your content not only gets seen but also contributes meaningfully to conversion and growth.
5. Connect CMS to Analytics and Decision-Making
Too often, content performance is tracked in isolation from CMS activity. By integrating analytics platforms and experimentation tools like Adobe Target, you can continuously test what’s working, inform future content development, and ensure your CMS evolves alongside user behavior.
A Missed Opportunity Hiding in Plain Sight
For many marketing teams, the CMS is treated as a technical necessity rather than a strategic asset. But with the right structure, guidance, and creative thinking, it can become a driver of growth, especially when paired with AI-enhanced workflows, smarter UX, and compliance-aware design.
At XDS, we help enterprise clients get more from what they already have. Whether that’s optimizing Adobe Experience Manager for mobile performance, rebuilding internal workflows, or developing compliant component libraries from the ground up, we don’t just launch, we activate.
If you’re looking to unlock the other 90 percent of your CMS investment, we’d love to show you what’s possible.
Let’s start the conversation, or explore more of our work on XDSHealth and HueRx.
About the Experience Design Studio
The Experience Design Studio is an award-winning digitally native customer experience agency founded in 2017 by two agency veterans, bringing their collective creative, user experience, marketing, technology, and healthcare expertise together.
XDS is a full-service digital agency providing strategy to creation, consulting, design, engineering, marketing, and analytics, with the aim of providing seamless DTC and B2B experiences across all digital touch points, with common sense sprinkled in.