An economic downturn is on the horizon, and layoffs are rising. Fortune reports that the number of people in 2022 who lost their jobs in the tech industry alone is more than 150,000– a tenfold increase over the prior year. In the first week of 2023, NPR reported that Amazon is cutting more than 18,000 corporate office jobs and Salesforce will eliminate 8,000 jobs, or 10% of its workforce. With a slowing global economy, even the most successful companies are assessing their budgets, making cuts, and searching for ways to streamline their operations.
Technology stacks are often some of the most scrutinized, and businesses that want to survive and thrive in the coming years must comb through their tech stacks to ensure they have the right tools to support them.
In this article, we’ll explain how to assess your current tech solutions to determine if you’re getting a good ROI and how a hybrid CMS could be the answer to recession-proofing your tech stack.
Assess Your Current Technology Investment ROI
Enterprises have spent $675 billion on software solutions in 2022, which is expected to rise to $755 billion by the end of 2023. With so much money on the line, your technology stack’s return on investment (ROI) is an indicator of whether or not your software solutions are delivering value for your customers and your business or simply an expensive line item on your annual expenses.
To calculate the ROI of your martech stack you need to consider what you gain in productivity and speed to market, compared to the investments made in software licenses, hardware, implementation, and migration costs.
In the digital environment of today, your technology stack, particularly the content management system (CMS) that manages the digital experience, should help rather than hinder you, but there are some instances where you could be overspending and doing considerable damage to your bottom line if you:
Rely on a bulky suite: Suite CMSs and monolithic DXPs can cost hundreds of thousands more in licensing costs than headless CMS solutions. In many cases, companies can end up overpaying for a service that restricts their flexibility and makes it difficult to adapt to changing market conditions. Many companies also end up paying for a number of products they don’t use.
Spend too much time on maintenance and battling security threats: Legacy and traditional CMS platforms can become problematic when it comes to security. This forces IT teams to spend additional resources on excessive maintenance. They must also try to prevent malicious attacks from causing downtime that leads to further loss of revenue.
Need to hire an entire outside team of developers: When your marketers or current software development team has to consistently ask for help to use your technology, it means you’re not getting a good return on your investment.
Can’t publish to various channels: The modern customer journey isn’t restricted to just your website, and your CMS shouldn’t restrict you to that either. To counteract the single channel limitations of your traditional CMS you might need to use another CMS for your mobile applications and this can result in a higher total cost of ownership than you should have to deal with.
Can’t integrate with other tools easily: With so many tools in the modern technology stack, your CMS must integrate with them easily using APIs. If your IT team needs to spend unnecessary resources on complex integrations, then you’re getting a poor ROI.
Have limits on your content assets or users: Headless platforms solve many of the issues outlined but could still be eating into your budget unnecessarily if the CMS imposes limits on the number of sites, applications, workflows, users, content types, or API calls. Paying extra every time you want to expand your business can escalate costs and inhibit scalability.
Read More: What’s the ROI of a CMS?
Expand Your Horizons With a Hybrid CMS
Making your technology stack recession-proof comes down to having your core pieces of technology doing more than you bargained for. A hybrid content management system that combines the freedom of a headless CMS with the user-friendliness of a traditional CMS can positively impact your bottom line and give you the agility to stay in business. It enables you to:
Stay Customer-centric
A hybrid CMS allows you to deliver content to multiple channels, not just a website. With these capabilities, you can stay customer-centric as you cater to customers on the channels they prefer rather than juggling multiple CMSs.
Improve Security
If you’re using a traditional CMS, then you are putting your security at risk, which can be detrimental when you need to conserve resources. Platforms like WordPress are constantly getting hacked. On the other hand, the headless architecture of a hybrid CMS reduces the surface area that threats like DDoS attacks in particular can target, thus improving security.
Reduce Total Cost of Ownership
Some CMS platforms can only manage content. While that’s the main goal for an enterprise tech stack, you need a CMS that can do more. A hybrid CMS that can also do personalization and give marketers the freedom to perform tasks independently can provide a better ROI and reduce vendor explosion. By consolidating multiple CMSs into one you can save money and improve scalability. A hybrid CMS with multi-tenant functionality can provide this solution to lower the TCO.
Generate Revenue
A hybrid CMS allows you to add new income streams to generate revenue by catering to customers on different channels, not just websites but mobile apps, eCommerce stores, and more.
Streamline Workflows
Your workflows and approvals processes need to sync to avoid mishaps and help you capitalize on opportunities. A hybrid CMS provides the streamlined workflow capabilities you need, whether working with a small or large team.
Future-proof
If you want to be recession-proof, you need to have a future-proof infrastructure. An API-first hybrid headless CMS allows you to adapt to changes and prepare for new channels and experiences without having to replatform or add new tools every time. Integrating new software becomes much easier if you do need to add new tools.
How dotCMS Supports Your Recession-Proof Strategy
Your technology stack can be the key to your competing and thriving during a recession. Having a hybrid CMS as the centerpiece of your tech stack can allow you to develop a solid recession-proof strategy.
dotCMS is a hybrid CMS that is agile, scalable, and secure, providing the flexibility you need to navigate the choppy waters of a recession and leave your digital experience intact. Unlike nearly every other enterprise-grade CMS on the market, dotCMS is limitless. This means you don’t pay more for additional applications, users, custom workflows, content types, languages & locales, and API requests. Competing CMS products’ “add-on” costs can result in a platform that is hundreds of thousands of dollars more each year.
Some of dotCMS’ key recession-proof features include:
Interoperability & Extensibility: As an API-first platform, dotCMS can easily integrate with the other tools in your martech stack, such as your CRM, eCommerce platforms, and analytics tools. This allows you to draw insights from multiple sources and create a better strategy while managing the entire customer journey from start to finish.
Secure: dotCMS’ decoupled infrastructure improves security and is supported by regular security patches to prevent you from getting hacked.
Cloud-native: With dotCMS Cloud there is no need for self-hosted databases or additional hosting infrastructure if you don’t need it and you can conserve resources that can go to generating more revenue.
Headless: Create engaging content experiences across multiple channels. Customers may be on one channel today, but what if those channels disappear or new ones form? dotCMS can still support you regardless of where your customers are located.
Hybrid CMS features: While some platforms may leave your non-technical personnel stranded, dotCMS offers NoCode support for marketers and non-technical personnel to avoid developer dependency and maintain productivity.