Determining ROI for content management investments can be a difficult task. To most marketing and IT departments, Return on Investment for CMS is more justified through intangible or “softer” benefits than dollars and cents. However, in business we all know that just about every decision, especially technology, affects the bottom line. Based on our ten year experience in the content management industry, this assessment puts both the tangible (dollars and investment) and intangible (softer benefits) return and savings for your organization in perspective when implementing Content Management Software.

A Softer Side

Softer, intangible benefits of a CMS implementation include:

• Manage and publish to multiple websites from one implementation
• Unlimited user license (no seat licenses)
• Template based publishing for unified look and feel reduces designer time
• Automated workflow approve / review process
• Publish multilingual content
• Maintain your online brand
• Keeps staff hiring in check by automating many activities and reducing IT dependence
• Multi contributor integration and management of information flow
• Unified platform for online growth
• Inter-departmental efficiencies
• Access to searchable online corporate digital assets
• Faster updates and response times for your customers

These and many other benefits are vital to realizing a true ROI for CMS. However, these intangible benefits rarely persuade an unsympathetic CFO or CIO to pull the trigger unless they see tangible investment savings before making an important enterprise decision.

The Good, the Bad, and the Tangible

According to Forrester, organizations should be spending 75% of their online budgets on content and 25% on content management. Actually, the reverse is true. Staffs spend their time writing HTML, copying and pasting, working with IT, resizing images, browser compatibility checks, etc., instead of delivering marketing and value propositions through the website. Since the majority of these tasks are manual and repetitive, automating many of them will bring time saving efficiencies into your organization. These time savers include auto template and code writing, quality assurance for browser compatibility, massive reduction on IT dependence and workflow approval.

Potential Work Force Savings

Based on the average company a well-implemented CMS can save the following time:

• 10 percent for business contributors
• 10 percent for content authors
• 15-20 percent for online marketing staff and designers

The Tangible Evidence

Below are a few ROI equations that factor into CMS implementations:

Based on the above manpower savings, an organization could possibly save the following amounts annually:

• Business contributor: $85,000 X .10 = $8,000 savings
• Content author: $65,000 X .10 = $6,500 savings
• Marketing staff: $85,000 X .15 = $18,000 savings
• Webmaster: Lower level position = $20,000 savings
• IT or Technical Contractor: $60,000 X .40 = $24,000
• VP marketing or Interactive: No savings

TOTAL Annual Manpower Savings: $76,500

Many companies pay in excess of $10 per call and $6 per email to support customers who cannot find or retrieve content that could be maintained via the web. Rather than having to engage a person live (phone or email) for trivial or level 1 or 2 type questions CMS can easily pay for itself by automating your content delivery. Think about the extended savings if you are a global company and have multilingual support.

Less dependence on IT: Instead of IT coding a page, changing navigation, adding user permissions, trouble shooting, etc., they can be freed-up to manage the network and servers. The average company utilizes one IT resource per day. With IT administrator earnings in excess of $75,000, this is an annual savings of approximately $30,000.

It’s obvious both tangible and intangible savings can easily justify the purchase of a CMS, and the cost has as much to do with the return as the cost savings. Based on this assessment, a forward-thinking globally competitive organization needs a well maintained website and Content Management Software to compete in the 21^st century.

Written by Tony Pietrocola