If you think sales is hard, try being a buyer. Your ‘website’ = the staple of any marketing strategy and where most people discover your brand = is now an ‘Digital Experience Platform.’
It could be an ‘Open Source’ ‘Headless’ ‘CMS’, it could be a Platform as a Solution (PaaS) or Software as a Solution (SaaS). But what does any of that mean to a business owner who just wants to get more leads or sell more stuff?
It seems that many software vendors have forgotten how to market to real people, let alone users. They are focused on the Enterprise end of town, so that they can get a global brand logo on the pitch deck. Or they are so happy with their latest innovation that is driven by ideological trends rather than real customer needs that the buyer gets completely lost.
In our role as an outsourced Chief Marketing Technology Officer (CMTO) we make buying decisions based on our customer’s requirements, but many of the terms and concepts that software vendors take for granted are still not really understood by even the savviest of buyers.
Commonly Misunderstood Jargon for Ecommerce & CMS.
Over the next few days, we will go into more detail about some of the concepts below. Specifically, what are the positives and negatives of each and does it even matter?
- Open Source – How the ‘source’ code is licensed and how it can be used. Open Source does not always mean free, especially for enterprise features or support.
- Headless – Decoupling the end-user experience or UI from where the data and content is stored. Very trendy with techie types, but what does it actually mean for a customer?
- Software as a Service (SaaS) – SaaS and Open Source don’t usually go together. In a SaaS model, the platform owner has control of the source code and takes control of many of the IT requirements like hosting. PaaS
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) similar to ‘Open SaaS’ – is more common with Open Source solutions. The vendor provides a pre-built, and optimised technical environment as well as the code. The code can still be owned by the client and customised.
- Personalisation – an almost mythical promise of digital. Ecommerce platforms have been pushing innovation in this area more aggressively than Content Management (CMS) tools.
Stay tuned over the coming days for more information about these concepts.