02 September 2008
Save money, market better: open source
Couple customer growth with a decrease in marketing expenses, and you have a real opportunity to hit a business nirvana.
Every business I have consulted with, from non-profits to small start-ups, feels the weight of the Internet either enhancing their opportunities or taking them away. We have new generations of consumers who send “texts” on their cell phones instead of holding verbal conversations; who don't know what a record is and no longer purchase cd's because they download to their iPods; and who have never picked up a real live tennis racket because they own a Wii. These future customers won’t pick up the print version of the yellow pages. In fact, many of them are reading this article on the Web instead of in print.
Marketing today has to turn on a dime. It has to take advantage of competitive opportunities and the desire for instant gratification by the customer. To have the flexibility to respond is expensive in traditional media such as television and radio. I cannot tell you how many times I have walked into a business’s storeroom of outdated print collateral only to equate that with wasted dollars and cents.
The Internet provides the ability to push updated content to customers instantly, promote new products based on website traffic and feedback, send email to thousands for the same price as sending it to one, and it gives you the opportunity to create an online community of loyal followers. Customers today are drawn to the flexibility and freedom the Internet has to offer and they expect it.
The web savvy consumers of today demand a web “experience”. Blogs, customer reviews, ecommerce, email marketing, mobile access, online forms, discussion forums, product recommendations, services and content based on their website activity are all part of the online world. The costs of adding some of these desired features to your site can add up...unless you go the open source route. Open source offers secure, customizable and cost effective solutions that you own.
I had to have an hour long conversation with my wife before the light bulb finally went on and she began to understand the concept of open source technology. The key to the conversation boiled down to a Coca–Cola analogy, so here it goes: Coke represents a proprietary technology. You buy a can for $1 and you can drink it. The formula is secret, rendering change impossible. Soda X represents open source. The makers of Soda X reveal the recipe to anyone who wants it so it can be modified to fit individual tastes. The can is blank allowing you to add your own branding. And the best part? The recipe was free.
Let's say that you have a set budget to spend on a website. You can go to Company A and spend much of your budget on the cost of their content management system and the programming of added features. What little budget remains is available for marketing, strategy, design and all the other elements important to the end user. So maybe you'd opt to sacrifice the features of your website in exchange for written content or added design time, or vice versa. This is commonly what businesses go through; they sacrifice some piece of their desired site which could ultimately provide a return on their investment. On top of that, if your relationship with Company A sours or you simply want a change, you'll have to leave what you have invested in and start from scratch with Company B because Company B does not have the rights to Company A's “recipe” so to speak. The result - a wasted budget.
Back to Company B; they use open source. Adding features to your website is easy, as the features have already been developed and tested on other sites. The cost of implementing such features takes little to no money. You are left with a vast majority of your budget to focus on content, implementing other marketing solutions such as email marketing or using some of those saved resources to promote the website to new and existing customers. And because open source technology is non proprietary, you are not held hostage by your website provider. If, after some time you decide that Company B is no longer satisfying your needs, you walk away with your website and all of the source code a new developer would need to continue to improve it.
With many open source tools, groups of developers globally work on solutions that others can build upon. A website today can leverage open source to add the type of features you expect from a Fortune 500 company for little or no cost. Instead of Web marketing costs being absorbed by the creation of features, your money can now be used to improve the value of your online presence. Those marketing dollars that would have once been spent on programming can now be spent on content, strategy, quality design – all the things the customer cares about.
Open source typically provides far superior support when problems arise, and it is often viewed as more secure than its proprietary counterparts. To protect their investment, the US Department of Navy is using open source for future technology development. This is one time that the government is teaching us something.
Decreasing marketing waste and tailoring our strategies to today's customer through the use of Internet solutions that capitalize on open source technologies translates into the saving of time and money and places the emphasis where it should be - on effective communication.