Choosing the correct CMS for business can take time and effort. Each one offers different features relevant to the user experience, from multi-channel support and content delivery to personalization and analytical tools.
However, they also come with different price tags and architectures. It's also easy to be lured by fancy features you will never use, which end up being additional perks that will take a toll on your company's budget.
With research, companies can save money by selecting the right platform, particularly considering how expensive it is to buy software solutions. Amidst rising expenses, intelligently reducing costs and increasing value for money with a modern CMS can be beneficial.
This article will discuss the factors to consider while purchasing a CMS and will help you find the most cost-effective solution for maximum ROI.
How to Measure the ROI of a CMS
Return on investment (ROI) is the measure of benefit that you gain from a particular investment. It explains how much you gained as a percentage of how much you had to spend initially. This seems straightforward for businesses, but the ROI of a software solution like a CMS is slightly tricky. Choosing the wrong CMS costs companies, and the longer they stick to it, the higher the loss.
Losing Money and Time to the Wrong CMS
Often, companies using a legacy or traditional CMS may receive a poor investment return. Operating on legacy software can be a waste of time and resources. You might also miss out on some key features, such as:
Lack of SEO Support: SEO is essential for content publishers. An ill-equipped CMS will be unable to optimize content for higher rankings and might cost you in terms of speed as well, which means losing website traffic.
Difficult Integrations: Marketers rely on several different tools aside from the CMS. Analytics tools, personalization engines, CRMs, and more need to be integrated for the best experience. However, if your CMS can't integrate these easily, it can increase costs many businesses can't afford.
Lack of Omnichannel Content Delivery: Most traditional or legacy CMSs do not support multiple channels. However, today delivering content to multiple channels is essential to the best digital experience.
Expensive Migrations: If you choose to move to a modern CMS, it can lead to a better ROI in the medium to long term. However, some CMSs, like Drupal, force you to migrate often. This requires changing URLs and metatags, killing established SEO traffic for your content, not to mention the additional time and resources you will need to use.
How a CMS Can Bring ROI
Your CMS may not necessarily be a direct contributor to an increase in revenue, but it can help to improve business operations and enhance the customer experience.
If you can deliver the best digital experience, you can improve customer acquisition and retain your existing customers. A CMS that can help you accomplish this often includes the following characteristics:
Optimized Content Placement: Proper placement of content on the website is key to converting views into sales. Content placement offers convenience to the user, and they are more likely to complete a purchase.
Omnichannel Content Delivery: Don't just limit your options to delivering content to a website but to various channels where customers engage with the brand. Modern architectures, such as a headless CMS, allow content managers to publish to multiple platforms to cover a wider audience.
Faster Loading Times: Faster page loading leads to an enhanced user experience. A seamless experience means users are less likely to bounce from your page and start exploring other websites.
Simplified Scalability: The right CMS makes scaling much easier, which can improve ROI in several ways. For example, if using a SaaS CMS, you can achieve better scalability to deal with traffic spikes. A headless CMS offering multitenant features can allow enterprises with multiple websites to manage everything using a single CMS instance.
Simplified Extensibility: Another feature of a CMS with good ROI is that can extend the CMS using marketplace plugins, and API connectivity can positively impact the bottom line.
SEO Optimization: The right CMS also optimizes content for a higher SEO ranking, driving more website traffic, which can lead to more sales.
Assessing Your CMS Options
When considering whether or not a CMS can deliver the ROI you need, you must analyze the different options and architectures available.
Headless CMS vs. Hybrid Headless CMS vs. Traditional CMS
CMSs have been continuously evolving according to business needs. With each iteration, they introduce features that benefit clients in terms of productivity or revenue.
Traditional CMS
A traditional CMS such as WordPress has a tightly coupled frontend and backend that is ideal for publishing to one channel, such as a blog. These types of CMSs offer a ready-to-use system out of the box. However, users are stuck with a predefined interface with little flexibility. Also, content from traditional CMS is often limited to just a website and is challenging to use on other channels.
Headless CMS
A headless CMS provides the same backend for content management but removes the front interface entirely. Instead, the architecture provides a set of APIs that can link the CMS to a custom-designed user interface. This makes the headless CMS an omnichannel platform that can deliver content to various devices such as desktops, mobile, and AR/VR applications.
The drawback of this approach is that it requires additional technical expertise to create and optimize an interface. Marketers charged with creating the digital experience have to rely on their more technical counterparts.
Hybrid Headless CMS
A hybrid headless CMS combines a traditional CMS and headless CMS. It leverages the benefits of a headless-first CMS architecture by providing content delivery APIs. Still, it allows non-technical users to create and publish content with marketer-friendly features like WYSIWYG editing.
A hybrid CMS, such as Zesty.io, benefits marketers and developers by providing seamless content publishing and the flexibility to create any frontend interface required.
Monolithic CMS vs. Headless CMS: Achieving "Composability"
Many traditional and legacy CMSs are often monolithic. These monolithic CMSs can also be part of a larger monolithic DXP that offers more than just content management but features like personalization, analytics, and more.
However, these monolithic platforms are bulky structures that are expensive to maintain and can lock businesses into a specific way of doing things and make it difficult to adapt.
On the other hand, opting for a headless CMS or, better yet, a hybrid headless CMS, opens up the door to composability. With a headless CMS, you can easily integrate other tools into your tech stack since it acts as the centerpiece for a composable DXP. This allows you to achieve the same functionality as a monolithic DXP but with more flexibility and the option of selecting from different best-of-breed tools.
Talking MACH: What is MACH Architecture?
The benefits of "composability" led to the development of MACH architecture. MACH refers to:
Microservices
API-first
Cloud-Native
Headless architecture
The MACH architecture defines what it truly means to embrace modularity in the software space. It encompasses all technologies that ensure a fail-safe, scalable and future-proof application. The architecture promotes microservices-based development and deployment techniques coupled with APIs for inter-service communication.
It encourages development in a scalable cloud environment so applications can be upgraded according to client needs. Finally, the headless approach allows brands to publish content to various channels with a frontend presentation layer decoupled from backend logic.
Some of the benefits of systems that are considered MACH-based include the following:
Omnichannel Delivery: Content can be published to multiple platforms via APIs. This allows organizations to capture a wider audience.
Customization: The flexibility of creating your platform means you can customize it according to your specific needs.
Scalability: Since apps are deployed independently, developers can scale them without disturbing other services.
Preventing Downtimes: Due to the isolation between the individual services, error in any one does not affect the functionality of any other services.
Getting Specific: What to Look For in a CMS in 2023
Modern businesses have begun to embrace CMSs that allow them to experience the benefits of composability and MACH architecture. However, amongst other IT expenditures, the choice of a CMS requires planning. There are many factors to consider, especially when focusing on ROI.
Here are a few key questions to ask:
A traditional CMS connects the presentation (frontend) and logic (backend) layers of a website for easy and faster deployment. You can serve your entire website from a single CMS by making use of themes and templates available, or customize the design using an editable HTML view.
A headless CMS separates the frontend of a website from its backend. That way, you can use content APIs to pull content to any digital channel (website, mobile, IoT, VR/AR, e.t.c) with little worry about its frontend framework (frontend agnostic).
The MACH architecture (Microservice-based, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless) is a modern development approach to building a modular, composable, and highly scalable tech stack. By using a technology that follows MACH, you can integrate more best-of-breed services into your stack, ensuring greater agility and innovation.
A CMS can be cloud-based, on-prem, or hybrid. This will play a huge role in providing better scalability and security, as well as internal security measures.
By knowing the cloud platform that the CMS is built on (GCP, Azure, AWS, etc.), you can better understand the technologies you can use with the CMS.
A suite/all-in-one CMS combines everything you need into one monolithic software stack. While sometimes helpful, it can limit innovation, flexibility, and scalability.
You can visualize how your content will appear across different devices and channels with content previews.
You want a CMS that aligns with the skillset present in your enterprise. Furthermore, you should choose a frontend agnostic CMS, so you can use whatever language you like.
Some CMSs have complicated processes to re-platform or migrate content. Before choosing a CMS, find out the options available for migrating content and the associated costs.
Some CMS vendors may need to provide the cost of implementation during the selection process. You want to ensure that the timeline and cost suit you.
Tell your vendor what you want to achieve within a specific date and the metrics you plan to focus on to ensure that the platform will support you in achieving your goals.
You must ensure that the CMS integrates seamlessly with your current tech stack.
The success of your CMS may depend on how fast you can mitigate challenging incidents. A 24/7, 365-day support service will go a long way toward that goal.
For SaaS businesses, there are many pricing models to choose from. Choose a CMS that delivers at an affordable price that meets your needs.
For a deeper understanding of a robust CMS that provides a good ROI, download our Headless CMS Buyer's Guide and RFP Template.
By Katie Moser
Katie is the Senior Marketing Manager for Zesty.io. Her expertise lies in crafting marketing strategy, with an emphasis on content and digital marketing. Having spent too much time in clunky CMS's, Katie understands the need for a CMS that works with you - not against you. In her free time, you can find Katie in San Diego enjoying the sunshine at the beach or on hikes.