The Business Case for Web Content Management
The current economy presents a tough environment for technology investment, but delaying the purchase of a Web content management system (WCMS) can cost businesses in the long run.
When providing justification for a WCM, organizations will likely scrutinize potential return on investment (ROI). In this article we will discuss how a carefully selected WCMS can increase revenue while decreasing operational costs. Additionally, we will take a look at a major WCMS benefit that can even supercede ROI.
The selection of a WCMS should correspond with the size and challenges of your business. This article particularly pertains to enterprise-level organizations with the need to manage complex content across multiple websites or online channels. The content is adapted from a free white paper written by Tony White, lead WCM analyst at the Gilbane Group. SDL Tridion sponsored the original white paper and research. (gilbane.com/whitepapers.pl?view=33)
A WCMS increases revenue.
A WCMS centralizes marketing content and streamlines internal workflow process—both cost-effective improvements that can boost overall revenue. Every mid-tier and enterprise corporation should consider its website an integral part of its marketing strategy. In order to increase lead conversions and revenue, you need a great online experience that reinforces relationships with existing customers and helps you to reach new ones.
A WCMS provides this ideal user experience by allowing non-technical subject matter experts to create centralized content that can be easily personalized for various customer profiles. With a WCMS, marketers and communicators can easily create new pages with a high level of user interactivity and target visitors through geography, language and social computing tools such as blogs, wikis and multimedia.
It is widely accepted that granting control to subject matter experts results in timely, relevant and compelling content for your audience. It’s less obvious that the quality of content plummets when you don’t emphasize the need for synchronization of content across your brand in all sites, locales and languages.
If you use a WCMS to synchronize content and grant update control to the experts, it increases the likelihood that your content will be relevant and you can deliver an ideal online experience to your customers. It’s no surprise that this approach helps to increase customer satisfaction and optimize your revenue-generating site, so you make money rather than lose it.
A WCMS decreases operational costs.
Picture the grueling process of creating in-house software for the first time. You usually get all the surprises (bugs, setbacks, delays and workflow issues) you could imagine, and then there’s no guarantee that things are going to work properly once the initial implementation is completed. In our research, businesses tend to drastically underestimate the cost of developing and maintaining an in-house system.
With a WCMS, decreasing costs goes hand-in-hand with increasing revenue. To start, you spend less money updating your website by avoiding the inefficient practice of copying and pasting bits of content across multiple pages. By using templates to automatically update localized sites across the world, you lower labor costs and protect your brand from costly content and design inconsistencies.
A WCMS also lowers operational costs by allowing your organization to use its IT department effectively. Do you really want IT involved in the authoring and publishing process? Efficient use of IT resources saves you money and streamlines your internal workflow.
Third, a WCMS—through centralization of content—strongly lowers risks to your brand such as duplicated, outdated and conflicting content. In-house systems are often sectioned off according to your organizational model, and this means that employees in one department cannot see what content is being used by other departments. If we’re talking multiple websites, a single error can become a huge problem as it snowballs over time and becomes difficult to mitigate. A WCMS saves you money (and eputation) by avoiding a potential mess.
A WCMS almost always provides a sizable ROI.
Over the past year, the concept of return on investment (ROI) has been on the tip of everyone’s tongue when discussing new technology investments. Don’t worry: in addition to saving money and boosting revenue, a WCMS allows you to accelerate and simplify projects such as website development, implementation and content creation. This usually results in a sizable ROI.
In order to accurately measure ROI, the two primary metrics should be your organization’s investment in site implementation and training. In a side-by-side comparison between an enterprise WCMS and in-house system, the disparities in ROI are striking.
Gilbane found that site development based around a WCMS saves a company 70%-80% on cost when compared to in-house development. Content creation in a WCMS looks and feels like common business tools such as Microsoft Word and blogging platforms. According to Gilbane’s research, this ease-of-use cuts training times by up to 90%. This also means that updates will no longer get bogged down in busy IT departments. Marketers and communicators can create and repurpose content as easily as making or editing a Word document. Timely content updates provide your users with a better online experience.
The benefits of a WCMS can supersede ROI.
Implementing a new WCMS will help protect your brand equity. For larger companies, consistent branding remains one of your most important assets, and positive customer perception is integral to your continued success. A WCMS allows you to build and maintain your brand with minimal problems. Even if you come up with initial ROI figures that are lower than you want, maintaining your brand and providing your users with an ideal experience across multiple channels is enough to make the business case for updating and revamping your WCM strategy today.
For more information call us at 646-512-5173 or visit us at www.sdltridion.com.