2012 may indeed be the “Year of Web Content.” Actually, so was 2011, 2010, 2009… But this article on the Forbes Marketwatch blog describes how some big brands are attacking content marketing and content curation to help fulfill their brand promise.
Amongst content management insiders, there has been an ongoing acronym war over what the technology systems should be called that help companies manage their content online -- which quite frankly, end users care very little about.
At the end of the day, the companies mentioned in the Forbes article, and countless others, want to use content to engage with their customers and prospects to drive their business goals. And they want their content technologies to help them achieve those goals, not get in the way--regardless of what it’s called.
However there’s a growing disconnect between what’s expected and what’s actually being delivered when it comes to implementing those content systems and the associated costs. Increasingly, companies are questioning what capabilities (or lack of) they’re receiving from their web content systems investments. As well as, what additional costs of services they’ll need to incur to support, maintain and upgrade what becomes a very complex, highly customized system.
According to a post by The Real Story Group this past spring, web content management system implementation costs have risen to 7-8 times the cost of software licensing. Perhaps most galling to buyers, the increased ratios are simply stipulated as a fact that buyers should just prepare for. We have heard some form of the following countless times:
Systems are becoming more complex, and to deploy complex systems, it takes time, and your services dollars, and that’s ok.
Really? The kinds of deep customizations that cost “all of that” time and money means you are the only company in the world with that platform instance, making support nearly impossible, and upgrading merely a pipe dream.
Now, rather than having the ongoing flexibility to add functionality every year, your system goes stale. Somewhere around three to five years post-deployment, it has become so stale that you are forced to start over rather than attempt a lengthy upgrade cycle.
There is A Better Way
There is a revolution against complexity taking place amongst the buyers of web content technologies. Customers are demanding that technologies be flexible to adapt to the rapidly changing web. And most of all, content owners want a highly usable system that gives them the power to manage their content and drive engagement across their digital platform. After all, more content drives more engagement, which drives more interactions, which drives more conversions to revenue.
To ensure sustained success use the following key criteria to assess your content technology strategy:
- Usability: Usability has nothing to do with how pretty the product is. Usability has everything do with how much can the content owner control, how easy is it for them to manage their day to day content distribution without having to call in the technologists or a 3rdparty services team.
- Flexibility: None of us truly know what is coming next on the Web. Today it’s Google + (particularly with the changes to Google’s search algorithm), tomorrow it will be what? We think we want to deliver a personalized web experience. We know we need to “do” social and mobile. After that? It’s impossible to buy a system today and guess what you will need 3 or 5 years from now. Instead, gauge how flexible the product you are buying is to meet your unknown future needs and the cost of changes.
- Affordability: Calculate the hard dollar cost of the deployment and add to that the cost of the time it will take to deploy, manage, configure, update, etc. The more complex and customized the system is for your expected needs, the more expensive the platform is going to be in years 2, 3, 4, etc. That might work if you have an unlimited budget, but since most of us don’t, be sure to calculate those ongoing costs and plan accordingly.
- Business Value: Make sure you have done a thorough analysis of your business goals and how your content technologies will drive those goals. Buying and deploying a new system because “my job is too hard” rarely (never?) works as a cost justification strategy. The more connected your online goals are to business goals, the more value you are going to deliver to the organization.
In the end, as you evaluate your web content strategy, and the underlying systems, don’t accept the status quo. There is no reason to accept complexity, or a 7:1 services to licenses ratio because “that is the way it is.” Measure what extra value that complexity will deliver against its cost, and then determine if it’s actually worth it. You will probably determine that it’s not. But if you don’t, your CFO may do it for you.