Ask a small to medium sized company about how frequently it updates its site or how difficult it is to do so, and chances are it knows it has a problem – it just doesn’t know how to solve it, says Bill Rogers, CEO of Ektron Inc.
“They know but they think it’s too hard to get into a mode where they can make the updates and changes themselves,” says Rogers, whose company provides authoring tools that enable a company`s marketers to manage web content on their own. “They think if they want to make updates or changes to the site, they will have to send them to their local web development firm, and it’s going to them at $150.00 for every page,” he says.
That thinking leads to seriously outdated web pages that can take the shine off online marketing efforts, and in getting started with the 11,000 online companies who now use Ektron’s content management solutions, Rogers has seen some doozies. Beyond the more common issues of outdated product or price information, examples include “directions to our headquarters” pages that sent visitors to streets long closed for construction, web content inviting visitors to an event that had occurred six weeks earlier, and a company whose site was still advertising positions when it had just announced the largest workforce reduction in its history.
Most telling is when a site doesn’t produce ROI. Ektron`s content management software starts at around $5,000 per license with an annual 20% maintenance fee -- lower than many products scaled to large enterprises, but still a chunk of dough to smaller marketers watching the bottom line. Rogers encourages customers and prospects to get a sense of what poor content management may be costing them by comparing return on their web site to return from other marketing channels they use.
“They should be seeing a better return on the web as a marketing channel than anything else they are doing today,” he says.
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