Solving the marketing productivity puzzle in one clean sweep

15 May 2020
Content marketing concept with person using a laptop computer

Budgets are being cut. Marketing activity on digital channels has never been higher. Marketers and IT organizations are trying to do more with less. Economic uncertainty is making everyone investment-shy.

Now might be the best time to change your web CMS. Hear me out.

Changing now to a true cloud-architected web content management system (CMS) can:

  • Reduce operating costs so you can unlock budgets for marketing
  • Accelerate marketer programs and digital activity so you can keep up with the incredible pace of change throughout the crisis
  • Free up IT resources for more mission-critical projects

What does this look like in practice? For many organizations, after a 4- to 6-week transition, they can reduce costs and take advantage of massively increased efficiency. Most will save more money in the first year alone to justify an immediate switch.

Operational complexity

Every enterprise application carries a human cost, in terms of development hours and IT-specific tasks. An enterprise web CMS boosts people-related costs to another level, which requires significant ongoing commitment from internal developers, IT staff, and a dedicated digital agency team. Altogether, these factors make marketers’ productivity contingent on many resources beyond their control.

For many organizations, their web CMS is like these enterprise applications. Heavy, monolithic application frameworks that require lots of administration, programming, support, testing, and the dreaded upgrade cycles. There is a better way.

Over the past 20 years, the tech industry has been moving steadily to the cloud with true SaaS (software-as-a-service) solutions. In every category (CRM, ERP, HR, and on), today’s winners are the technologies that have been built specifically for SaaS. Strangely, only enterprise web CMS has not made the move, with today’s big players still selling 1990’s architecture. Software that’s installed, managed, administrated, supported, tested, and manually upgraded on servers.

Why has the rest of the tech industry moved to SaaS?

  • It makes you faster. In a decoupled SaaS environment, marketers are empowered to create quicker and more freely. A marketer working with a designer can build new pages in minutes with pre-built components, launching new designs and experiences in hours – not weeks or months like on a legacy CMS.
  • It simplifies operations. SaaS tools don’t need armies of administrators and support staff to keep the lights on. With Crownpeak, you don’t even need a single server to develop, deploy, edit, host, and deliver web experiences. With no servers, there’s nothing to hack, nothing to support, nothing to manage.
  • It reduces costs. With Crownpeak taking care of all of the infrastructure, most of the expensive parts of a website (hosting, servers, administration, upgrades) are outright eliminated.

While switching to a new CMS might seem counterproductive right now, doing so can empower a wave of productivity across marketing and technology functions, dramatically lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO) of your enterprise CMS. In my last blog post, I talked about the mechanics of the cost equation. Now, let’s look at the hidden pockets of productivity that can be raised by switching from a traditional CMS to Crownpeak.

Multiple drains on productivity

The license cost of a legacy CMS – defined as any CMS not expressly architected for the cloud – typically comprises only 15% to 20% of its TCO. That means your company almost certainly devotes the majority of its development and other IT resources to basic maintenance and upgrades.

How the true cost of monolithic vs Crownpeak SaaS add up

When a CMS is up and running, keeping it in production entails long development cycles with expensive digital agency resources. Content management systems typically run on programming languages that are not within a marketer’s wheelhouse, necessitating the specialized resources of digital agencies for even small tasks. Marketers are often limited to creating and publishing content, which if often a complex and overly technical task.

Finally, many companies with large, complex environments end up foregoing CMS upgrades because of cost and risk – denying marketers new features and functionality to help maximize the productivity of their efforts.

Marketers need usable tools

A 2018 article in CMSWire offers a still-timely list of issues indicating that your company is a good candidate for switching to a new CMS. Pamela Muldoon, revenue marketing coach for marketing consulting firm The Pedowitz Group, was indirectly quoted, “If content creators are having more issues than not when it comes to creating and publishing content within the CMS, it may be time to look at different options. A solid, user-friendly, easy-to-manage CMS platform will allow users to get more done in less time and ensure less headaches along the way.”

Crownpeak offers marketing teams a radical departure from unwieldy content management systems, allowing them to create all manner of content and campaigns with ease, and at a fast pace. By returning users to a familiar, HTML-driven development model, Crownpeak gives back the power to create to marketing teams, reducing their reliance on digital agencies to drive major content launches and campaigns.

Crownpeak restores simplicity

The only enterprise-class web content management system built in the cloud and for the cloud, Crownpeak makes the old server-centric, tightly coupled CMS architectures that dominated the past obsolete. Crownpeak takes full advantage of today’s fantastically powerful front-end devices and networks, using the computing power in users’ hands. With more than half of all web traffic occurring via mobile devices, it’s more important than ever that companies adopt a CMS architecture that aligns accordingly.

Make a clean sweep to Crownpeak

Learn more about how easy it is to solve the CMS productivity puzzle in the ebook “ When Cost and Speed Matter: The Key Benefits of Replacing Your Web CMS. ” In addition, you can use the Crownpeak Web CMS Carrying Costs calculator to find out how much you’re spending, and could be saving by switching to Crownpeak. You could be on the path to igniting your company’s marketing productivity, right now.

Next Steps

If you’d like to find out how Crownpeak can:

  • Make your marketing organization 3-5x faster
  • Empower marketers to deploy new designs and experiences in just days
  • Give you the enterprise CMS you need with security, multi-language, workflow, governance, personalization, and more, built-in
  • Save you up to 70% of your web operating costs in the first year

Reach out to us today.

Tags: Web Content Management Digital Experience Management