The CMO’s Guide to Solving Marketing Challenges with WordPress

Today’s Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) face a myriad of challenges. From digital transformation to ROI measurement and brand consistency, the pressure to deliver is immense. ROI Amplified recently wrote in their article, “2024 CMO Marketing Challenges to Prepare for in 2024,” and said that CMOs need to embrace digital transformation, invest in data and technology, and develop unique messaging. 2024 is just around the corner and allocating resources effectively can help CMOs achieve marketing goals and drive business growth. At Crowd Favorite we know just the tool that stands out, can address the challenges, and achieve those goals: WordPress. Here's how.

Digital Transformation and Integration

WordPress has matured over the years into a comprehensive content management system (CMS) suitable for all types of websites, from simple blogs to full-fledged WordPress-based custom marketing platform. Its flexibility is one of its strong suits and has been for over a decade. Going back as far as 2014, CMOs looking to launch new products felt only complete systems, like Sitecore, could provide landing pages that integrated with email marketing tools, analytics, and CRM systems. When we were asked by a national HR firm to recreate a complete set of functionality in WordPress, with advanced tools like progressive profiling and content specific personalization, we saved the client over $200,000 over the first 24 months in total cost of ownership, and that was including our migration costs. That was in 2014…imagine the savings today!

With the vast ecosystem of plugins, themes, and integration options creating a truly enterprise grade WordPress solution is by no means an out of the box solution. It takes planning and custom workflows, but with WordPress as a base, clients both control TCO, and iterate on marketing in real time, not based on a SaaS products roadmap. We are always telling our Enterprise clients that WordPress can serve as a hub for their solution. This centralization simplifies the process of digital transformation and integration.

ROI Measurement and Justification

WordPress' Enterprise integration capabilities don't stop at CRMs and eCommerce. Integration with platforms like Google Analytics, CMOs can have direct insights into their website's performance. A CMO can quickly determine which marketing campaigns are driving the most traffic, the conversion rates for each campaign, and even the lifetime value of customers acquired through different channels. Such granular insights make it easier to justify marketing spend and optimize for better results.

WordPress, being an Open Source platform, offers a cost-effective solution for enterprises. The overall expenditure is often lower than other proprietary enterprise-grade solutions, allowing for a higher ROI. No one knows this better than Academic Partnerships who came to Crowd Favorite with a closed source bid for their complex website and we were able to save them 35% Y-o-Y by using WordPress. Those types of budget savings allow room for other marketing initiatives like campaigns, research, or even expand their teams, all contributing to a better ROI.

Brand Consistency and Customer Experience

“Create Once, Publish Everywhere” has long been a WordPress motto. With multi-site capabilities, enterprises can manage multiple websites or platforms under a single WordPress installation. This ensures brand consistency across different regions, products, or campaigns. A global enterprise can maintain different sites for each region, ensuring that branding, messaging, and customer experience remain consistent, whether a customer visits the US, European, or Asian site.

We did exactly that for Disney/ABC Press when we built their WordPress site over ten years ago. We created a system that allowed their team to enter the show and all related content one time, and then set rules for what sites it appeared on, in what period of time. A single show can air at different times around the world. We elevated “Create Once, Publish Everywhere” to “Add Once, Show Many Times at Different Times.”