When making a significant investment, you need to know the benefits of your decision. So when you are looking into developing a website and are examining your options in how best to develop your website, you probably want to know just how each option can benefit your business goals.
In that selection process, the features of a potential new website are important - but matter little compared to the tangible benefits core elements like a CMS can provide you. Which leads us to the question driving this post: Who benefits the most from a custom developed website? Here are 3 stakeholder groups that will be happy you chose to go custom.
1) Your Marketing Experts
At the core of their work, every marketer faces a simple problem: how to differentiate your brand from that of your competitors. Being seen as replaceable by your audience is often a deathblow, as only uniquely positioned brands can succeed in the long term.
However, that differentiation is difficult to achieve with a template-based system. What if you develop a website on WordPress or Drupal, only to turn around and see a core competitor use the same template, or same menu structure as you? In that case, positioning your unique brand becomes exponentially more difficult. A custom website, on the other hand, enables you to create a truly unique online presence that your marketing department will love.
2) The IT Maintainers
At first thought, a custom website may not seem like the type of software your IT department loves. But further consideration reveals that it's a perfect match. As open source software, template-based CMS systems invite security risks and require your information to be stored with a third party. That, in turn, is a security nightmare waiting to happen for your IT team.
A custom website, instead, gives your technical professionals more control over the process. Because your company owns it, you can more freely make changes and ensure that all private information remains secure. This increased layer of security will make potential added maintenance well worth it for your IT team.
3) Your Target Audience
The best CMS is invisible, allowing you to create content and appease your audience without ever showing its seams or allowing them to peek behind the curtain. But at the same time, a custom solution provides some hidden benefits for your target audience and web visitors that will improve their user experience, and ultimately your marketing efforts.
For starters, a website built on a custom platform tends to load more quickly because it includes only the coding necessary for your individual company. We know that these faster load times have a significant impact on your audience's user experience, improving the chance that they will convert into customers.
In addition, the above-mentioned differentiation abilities for your marketing team will have direct implications for your web visitors. Because you can personalize your website to uniquely fit your core value proposition. You can also create better content that matches not just the limited abilities of a template-based solution like WordPress, but allows you to truly customize the user experience. That means a more relevant website for your visitors, who will become less likely to jump to a similar-looking competitor as a result.
Of course, these three groups are not the only ones who benefit from a custom developed website. Every CMS user will appreciate a more streamlined and simplified interface that more closely matches their job duties and responsibilities. But marketing, IT, and your target audience are three core stakeholders that need to benefit from any software implementation designed to improve your customer acquisition strategy.