Total cost of ownership: Finding long-term value in your CMS

When organizations plan a switch to a new content platform, the first thing they usually think about is cost: “What’s the price tag?”

That instinct is understandable: Every team has a budget and every organization needs its content management system (CMS) and associated tools to deliver value. But it can also be a bit of a trap. The “price” of a software license is rarely just the number in the sales order. In the case of a content platform, it can also include monthly or yearly subscriptions, employee training, hardware requirements, and more.

Even when those “hidden” costs are factored in, they don’t necessarily reflect the “hidden” benefits — the money that new software could save the company in the way that it operates. And it’s that operational efficiency that ultimately increases the return on investment (ROI) that leadership is looking for.  

The point is, the actual “cost” of software is more nuanced than a lot of organizations frame it, and that misconception can keep them from choosing the right content platform when it’s time to make a change. Which means they miss out on the potential benefits of transformation.

What we need is a mindset shift; one that helps marketers focus less on total cost of ownership (TCO) and more on ROI. 

In this post, we’ll explore that. We’ll unpack what marketers typically get wrong about TCO, what they need to get right, and how Contentful helps brands enhance ROI.

What does “cost” really mean?

A software license isn’t something you hang on the wall to admire. When you invest in software, you expect to see meaningful impact in your workplace.

Often, that impact is speed: “If you implement X, you’ll be able to accomplish Y faster.” In the world of content marketing, that might mean going from weeks to launch a campaign to days, or reducing hours of manual meta tagging to minutes of automated tagging. Whatever the improvement, price is usually weighed against time saved.

But speed alone isn’t the end goal. You’re not buying speed when you buy software. What speed actually represents is opportunity — the ability for marketing teams to create more pages and blog articles, generate new ideas, perform experiments, launch campaigns, and run promotions.

And that opportunity translates into more chances for brands to connect with their audiences (old and new), which leads to more engagement, more conversions, and ultimately more revenue. That’s what brands need to be factoring into their total cost of ownership analysis, and into their CMS ROI objective.

Exploring total cost of ownership

Now is a good time to break down what goes into TCO.

License and migration

The most visible part of TCO is the annual license fee, or an initial purchase price. Then there’s the one-off cost of migrating from an existing platform to a new one. Both of those involve direct and indirect costs, but are relatively straightforward and can (ideally) be reduced by working with the right vendor — one with the tooling, automation, and migration expertise to simplify the process (like Contentful, for example).

Ongoing operations

The most significant factor in determining TCO is ongoing operational and maintenance costs: the day-to-day work required to create and deliver digital content and marketing campaigns.

Beyond the production of promotions and campaigns, operational costs involve more direct and indirect expenses. These take in modeling new web experiences, designing assets, translating content for different regions, personalizing content, testing and experimenting, publishing across different channels, and so on. Each of these factors can add complexity and hidden costs that change the TCO calculation.

And it’s here that the speed advantage really starts to count because the right platform can generate significant savings by streamlining content operations and reducing operating costs. If your new software isn’t moving the needle on everyday work, it’s time to rethink what it’s actually worth.

Shifting brand mindsets

The operational cost component is the key to shifting from a TCO mindset to an ROI mindset.

Central to that shift, is the need for organizations to stop framing “cost” as a direct comparison between the capabilities of a legacy solution and a new solution. Instead, they should focus on how their ongoing content operations are going to benefit as a result of the investment.

“Contentful brought us together. We’re able to go after the blue-sky ideas that demand a stronger cross-functional relationship. The platform enables us to share ideas, conceptualize them, and collect feedback that informs in-house creativity and product development in the future.”

Abby McInerney, Senior Creative Director, Brand Creative, Audible.

Understanding operational benefits

Once you’ve connected TCO to ROI, the next question is: Where do those operational benefits come from? Fortunately, we don’t need to look far — because Contentful delivers them.

Workflow freedom

Content teams don’t need technical expertise or developer support to create frontend content experiences in the Contentful Platform. With fewer workflow dependencies and bottlenecks, marketers are free to bring new content to market faster.

Omnichannel publishing

Contentful supports omnichannel marketing strategies, enabling brands to publish seamlessly across every channel — websites, mobile apps, in-store displays, and more — without formatting errors, scaling experiences effortlessly when needs change. 

Structured content

Contentful supports structured content, breaking content down into its component parts so that it can be reused in any part of the digital ecosystem. Structuring means that marketers can spin up new pages and launch new campaigns using existing copy, headers, images, bylines, author bios, and other assets, reducing the need to build new content from scratch and accelerating production.

AI-powered automation

Contentful removes manual friction from content operations by building a suite of AI automations, known as AI Actions, into the platform itself. From SEO metadata tagging to generating content outlines, AI Actions can free skilled employees from a range of tedious manual work and hours at the keyboard. 

Personalization and localization

Contentful offers native personalization and localization, enabling teams to adapt content for specific audiences with the click of a button. That includes automated text translation, suggested regional content, audience segmentation, and more.

Composability

Contentful’s composable tech stack allows brands to evolve their content management tech stack continually, swapping in new apps or services for cost efficiency or functionality, without risking downtime or compatibility issues.

Invest in operational efficiency

The real lesson for determining TCO is this: Moving to a new software platform isn’t (just) about the cost of the annual software license or cloud migration. Nor is it about the need to replace any particular asset with a new and improved tool. It's about the potential that your new platform represents over the long term — and, critically, understanding that not all CMS platforms are created equal. 

Contentful unlocks that potential by delivering operational efficiency — for content teams all over the world.

“We struggled to make changes at any scale,” said Abby McInerney, Senior Creative Director, Brand Creative at Audible. “It was frustrating for our creative teams. They’d dream up great ideas but we didn’t have the tools or capacity to apply them so they were sent to the creative graveyard.”

By providing the operational foundation on which to build a culture of creativity, Contentful transformed the way that Abby’s team worked with content — even giving it the means to pull ideas back out of the “creative graveyard.”

“Contentful brought us together. We’re able to go after the blue-sky ideas that demand a stronger cross-functional relationship,” said Abby. “The platform enables us to share ideas, conceptualize them, and collect feedback that informs in-house creativity and product development in the future.”

Make the creative difference

Achieving new levels of operational efficiency is how teams like Abby’s and organizations like Audible increase the rate at which they’re able to launch promotions and campaigns, and publish content.

Because the value of new software is more than just the speed boost that it delivers for existing software. It’s the space that it makes for content teams to experiment with new tools and technologies, and explore new ways of working with content. 

That’s the difference to performance that brands should be looking for when they think about TCO — a difference that translates to deeper engagement, more conversions, and greater revenue. 

You can discover the creative difference that the Contentful Platform makes yourself: Explore demos of our AI Actions tools, browse our products and features, or connect with our sales team to discuss your next move.

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