If you have the average number of plugins needed to just run your website, plus additional marketing services that have been cobbled together to support all the channels and target audiences you're trying to reach, then you probably don't have an effective website. You instead have a FrankenPress, a sum of parts that doesn't lead to an effective whole. Even if your website looks good, cobbled-together resources from both the website and the marketing tools add-ons is slowing you down and keeping you from effective marketing.
The pace of market change, coupled with the demand to recapture old customers plus recalibrate to new realities, the biggest cost for effective marketing is actually talent. Today, graphics, software (that used to be free), content, and strategy all cost more. Putting expensive talent into a situation where they have to work with a cobbled-together system drives the cost up, and response time down.
Streamlined marketing allows you to go from market reality to creative concept to active communication quickly. But you simply cannot do that when you are dragging the weight of old systems that are slow online, slow to build, and slow to maintain and develop.
The speed of quality execution is the competitive advantage in 2022.
In the massive WordPress Plugin directory, nearly 50% of these plugins haven't been updated in over 2 years. The WordPress core has been updated more than 50 times since 2019, with multiple major core updates. What that creates is a dangerous mixture of out-of-date or broken code.
What developers and marketing agencies won't tell you is that many times, they will intentionally not update your WordPress core and/or plugins, because they know they are going to break when they push an update out. This approach leaves you vulnerable to security risks.
Improving campaigns and learning from the data that you're collecting takes time, and the burden of slow development and upkeep often crowds out the thing that actually gives you an advantage - the ability to upgrade your marketing based on customer experience.
It's one of the things that will set marketers apart in 2020; agile marketing launches faster and then improves consistently resulting in stronger return on investment.
Our Experience: We actually love WordPress, but also know that the work of marketing rests on being agile and fast, and that carrying the load of cobbled-together solutions can get pretty heavy for marketers.
The shift to all-in-one solutions for web and marketing is changing the game by unleashing marketers to do, yes, marketing. The days are over when you had to wait weeks for development fixes, allowing execution of just-in-time responsive marketing. All of that is possible with a SaaS platform, like HubSpot.
When you compare the costs including all the software that you need, plus the costs of custom development and upkeep to an affordable SaaS approach, unleashing marketers not only makes sense from an effectiveness perspective but also from a cost-benefit analysis.
Cost Example:
If you have a WordPress Website, Secure Hosting, Advanced SEO, Email services, 20 plugins with annual fees, landing page services, a quality CRM you'll spend substantially more than the $400 per month than the all-in-one HubSpot Pro CMS system that includes all of these tools - you'll already be high in costs. Then add the time and opportunity cost for slow marketing and slow execution.