CMS Carrying Costs are Destroying Marketing ROI
If your organization is like most, your website is one of your best performing marketing assets. Yet, this amazing asset comes with some hidden costs that are dragging down marketing performance and ROI. Many companies are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to hidden carrying costs associated with their websites. Many don't realize the extent of the problem – or even if they do, they don't know that there's an alternative.
Over the decade I've been working in the web content management (CMS) space, I've seen the emergence of a new breed of technologies that are making web experiences more agile and affordable than ever. But I've also seen too many companies stick with traditional web infrastructure – not knowing that it's holding them back both financially and speed to market.
The new wave of tech
Martech has exploded from just 151 to 7,050 tracked technologies over the past 8 years. The new technologies bring with them the advantages of the new wave of tech:
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True, multi-tenant SaaS applications that don't need infrastructure, upgrades, or maintenance
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Built from the ground up for integration and cooperation with other cloud solutions
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Designed to be fast and configurable, in many cases requiring no, or little development effort to deploy.
Yesterday's CMS platforms
But the cornerstone of the digital experience – your website – has been left behind. The web CMS market largely still lives in the past. The biggest vendors give only lip service to the new tech. They call themselves "clouds" but are more like traditional software products from the '90s when software was designed to be installed from CD-ROM or floppy disks. These traditional vendors have spruced up the delivery mechanism – giving you downloadable files or even click-to-install on Azure or other cloud server providers – but they still come with all the costs and overhead of those same on-premises installed vendors. This is weighing companies down with architecture from the 1990s.
What does using these old solutions cost you and your organization?
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Big upgrade bills. Customers migrating from traditional solutions have told us that they're forced to upgrade every two to three years. It's these upgrade costs that completely consume their marketing budgets. We've heard that these costs can range anywhere from $100,000 to over $1 million to keep your most important marketing platform secure and current.
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Ongoing maintenance. Companies are managing big teams of internal or external developers just to keep their traditional solution running and patched. One mid-size company told us that they had a team of 11 developers spending one-third of their time just on maintenance and upkeep and then another third of their time on upgrades, leaving just 33% of dev hours available for actual marketing efforts. If you need to triple the size of your development team just to keep the lights on, these headcounts can cost you from $750,000 to $5,000,000 or more every year.
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Infrastructure costs. Whether the software is installed on your servers, a cloud provider, or managed through a managed services company, you'll be paying for those servers to run the CMS, hosting, development, staging, and every other environment you need to properly serve your digital channels. These costs vary a lot for each company, but often range from $100,000 to $1,000,000 per year. We often hear of customers of other platforms paying $25,000 to $100,000 a month in cloud hosting alone. Yes, that's one month.
If you're on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Sitecore, EpiServer, or just about any other vendor on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WCM, you're throwing thousands out the door every day just to keep the lights on.
Crownpeak's TCO advantage
With Crownpeak, these costs disappear. We preach it loud and often, but being the only true SaaS CMS solution available brings many advantages to your organization, including:
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No upgrades. We're a true multi-tenant SaaS provider. Every customer is always on the latest version and we release every two weeks!
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No maintenance. All of our customers share the same software, which means it's our job to keep everything running smoothly.
- No infrastructure costs. Our customers are on our hardware and we manage the costs of our infrastructure in your low annual license fee.
If you're like most enterprises, the big carrying costs of "the other guys" comes directly at the expense of the execution of your marketing programs. The typical organization can save $1 million per year by switching to Crownpeak without giving up any of the enterprise features you need. Think about it. What could your marketing organization do with $1 million in incremental investment? What would you do if you could execute twice the marketing programs?
For many companies, you can switch to Crownpeak, pay our competitive license fees, migrate your websites while still paying your legacy vendors software subscription and still save money in year one.
These savings aren't hyperbole. You can check out their own ROI studies, often called Total Economic Impact reports, on their own sites to see them report costs of $1 million to $4 million annually. And these costs are in addition to their software license fees!
If you're sick and tired of throwing out good budget just to keep your website and digital program lights on, here are the simple next steps:
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Try our Crownpeak carrying cost calculator to see just how much "keeping the lights on" is costing your company today.
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Read the feature comparison breakdown between your CMS and Crownpeak:
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Sitecore
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Adobe
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Contact us to learn how you can save money now and get your budget focused on delivering innovative marketing. In some cases, your company might even qualify for free migration to Crownpeak. Seriously.
Yes, we're boasting a little, but we're not kidding. It's time for companies looking for a better way to deliver their digital experiences to understand that legacy web content management systems are holding you back. Take our calculator challenge and free your budget from tech that's holding you back.
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