Delivering For Clients: Improving ROI with Enterprise WordPress

Editor's Notes

• #3: Yalo means soul in Fiji. For us, our soul is rooted in our approach to creative marketing by leveraging FAMS for inspiration for our clients and their brands. We are based in Atlanta and Cleveland. We are a Strategic Agency Partner with WPE. We are here today to discuss with you the opportunity to choose WordPress for your DXP and why you would make this decision.
• #4: ARNOLD Blacksheep – do you know this song? music is our approach to everything
• #5: ANNE Let’s break it down.
• #6: ARNOLD We see opensource being used in SMB’s. SMB’s want something simple, easy to use and low cost. They need basic capabilities but want something more than WIX/Squarespace. They want to represent their brand with a good looking site without being cookie cutter/boring/template driven. Thus they need the ability to custom modify the site to differentiate it. The Mid to Enterprise sized clients have more options thanks to bigger budgets. So they certainly have the option to buy a COTS CMS. BUT more and more we see them weighing the benefits of an opensource vs COTS in order to save $ and investing in content or additional features.
• #7: ANNE Yes it matters. We see opensource in key industries such as CPG, F&B and non-ecomm B2B. The reason being is that these are heavily brand-content-experience driven type websites. They have a simpler business functions or execute simple ecommerce transactions. But the key is content driven and brand driven and experience driven expectations.
• #8: ARNOLD When the discussion of opensource vs COTS comes up, we describe it this way. It’s kind of like buying a car. You need a car to get to work, you need it to look good (good enough to get a date), work well and be reliable. That’s opensource. However, when you are at the showroom, you could be tempted to look at the Ferrari. It’s sleek, it’s fancy, it’s powerful. But…have you considered the maintenance, new tires, and insurance? The cost to purchase and maintain a Ferrari is VERY expensive. And the biggest issue we see is that once the Ferrari is purchased, the owner isn’t a race car driver, doesn’t really know how to operate all the bells and whistles, doesn’t know how to leverage all that horsepower. Thus the Ferrari gets driven around in 1st or at best, 2nd gear. That’s COTS. Cautionary tale of Jabil, Molex about to go down the same road.
• #9: ANNE Shockingly yes this still happens It is sold to clients based on fear of security or speed – “Custom code can’t be attacked or hacked’. Well that may be true, however it also puts the client in a precarious position. Might be good short term fix b/c it meets the needs but its not a long term strategy. All content changes require a partner/the agency that built the site. The marketing people lose control over content management. All technical changes also have to be done by the agency b/c it is proprietary code and requires very specific skills to do so. It is the equivalent of being in ‘jail’. PASS ARNOLD - Cautionary tale of B&G – Long SLA’s, limited # of changes per month, terms of how work got done was dictated by the agency vs the client (no business flexibility and business needs).
• #10: ARNOLD Once you’ve made the decision to go opensource, there are options. Sometimes we see this being a decision based on base tech stack of the IT department. If you’re a .NET shop, then we see Umbraco, Kentico, or Dotnetnuke. If the marketing team is driving the decision or the IT department is agnostic, then we see more of a decision between WordPress and Drupal. Both are PHP based. Both have very strong opensource communities. However, WordPress has a couple key advantages vs Drupal that we discuss with clients. WP is content-editor friendly. Just about every marketer has used WP at some point. Be it for a blog or a website. It is really easy to use and manage for content editors. The same cannot be said for Drupal. It takes effort to make Drupal as content-editor-friendly as WP. WP has basic constructs and starting templates that make the creation of a website more efficient while not sacrificing uniqueness. Drupal is like starting with a blank sheet of paper.
• #11: ARNOLD So here is another analogy we use with clients. Drupal is like the electronic seat adjustment in your car. It has infinite seat positions for you, but how do you know what the right one is? You could be adjusting it forever. WP on the other hand, is like having 3 presets for your seat. You can start with one of those presets, then adjust from there.
• #12: ANNE There is no doubt, COTS has is merits. Powerful platform with all the features, bells and whistles. But it is proprietary code. It requires very specific skill sets. Limits the ability to find internal resources or 3rd party, cost effective support. With WP, you can get a wide range of skills to support your marketing efforts, both IT and marketing. Additionally, WordPress sitting in WP-Engine gives you all the same infrastructure benefits as a COTS. Security Performance Scalability Most importantly, your marketing team can own and manage their own content, easier than any other platform in the market. Give the power to your people. Give the content to your customers that they want. Create interest, engagement, and conversions. Besides, have you ever heard of a WordPress project being accused of being too complicated? Taking too long? Or costing too much? Probably not….but you for sure have heard those stories about COTS systems. Something to consider.
• #13: ANNE Now that you’ve settled on WordPress, you have what you need to build your complete, enterprise DXP. You have additional capabilities that can be bolted on to expand the capabilities to match and surpass what you would get with COTS. Hubspot – Marketing Automation FullStory – UX/UI optimization Dynamic Yield – A/B Testing and Personalization Qualified – Sales conversion
• #14: ARNOLD In addition, you have the opportunity to go ‘headless’. Get the speed and performance to impact your SEO rankings. Sacrifice nothing for your marketing team. Same, easy to use backend for the content editors.