To date, the most common use cases of Acquia Cloud Site Factory include using the platform to achieve brand consistency across sites; to reduce site delivery and maintenance costs; to increase speed to market of sites; or a combination of any of the aforementioned. As of recently, we are noticing a new, innovative use case of digital properties/sites and the trend seems to be gaining momentum.

It’s not your grandmother’s site anymore

In a world in which hundreds of sites are cropping up every minute, simply having a website isn’t enough. Not only do your sites need to be engaging, they also need to now earn their keep, meaning they need to generate revenue for your business or at least be a part of a larger revenue generating plan. Smart organizations realizing this are moving quickly to adopt new strategies, new tools, and new platforms to build digital properties that are adding value in the form of revenue to their scope.

As a result of this change, organizations are not only finding it easier to justify their new technology purchases because the licences and other associated costs are recouped fairly quickly and directly, they are getting much more creative and more advanced in their digital ambitions. In other words, there is now a different, more tangible motivation for organizations to create the best digital experiences possible for their customers. After all, their revenue depends on the sites’ success.

Where to start

So what’s a digital director to do when revenue depends on her innovations? Where do you start? Should you take some of your existing digital properties or digital strategies and transform them into revenue-generating digital experiences that compliment existing revenue generating programs? Or do you start from scratch and create a whole new, separate innovation that generates new streams of revenue? Or the other way around?

There are so many choices, and the answer to the question of “where to start” begins with answering: what makes business sense for your organization? For most organizations, the trend seems to be “start from scratch” (i.e. purchase new technology) whether they are adding to existing revenue stream or creating new ones. The decision to do so frees the organization and new initiative of technical debt, and allows the new initiative to start on the best technology for the project instead of having to deal with legacy platforms and technology.

Use cases

These are white-labeled use cases.

Use case 1:

This B2B customer had their “business-as-usual” sites and they wanted to create a new set of sites they could offer each of their existing customers known as “members” (other businesses that paid membership dues) as an added membership benefit. This organization was hoping to increase the value and appeal of their membership by offering digital storefronts to their members, which would ultimately lead to increased sales for the members and branding opportunities.

This organization couldn’t put these new sites on their existing CMS where their other sites were located because there were too many of these new sites (a governance nightmare), and from a functionality standpoint, these new sites were different from the existing business-as-usual sites. So they chose to begin their new project on a new multisite CMS, Acquia Cloud Site Factory.

Use case 2:

Like in use case 1, the customer’s new revenue initiative demanded separate technical requirements than those sites on the existing CMS platform. Starting on a new platform allowed them to select the platform that fit all of their new initiatives requirements to this new initiative’s needs.

This initiative involved creating a totally new, different revenue stream that hadn’t previously existed and wasn’t dependent on existing revenue streams. The customer planned on leveraging Acquia’s platform as a part of a new content and advertising revenue plan. With so many content creators and advertisers, volume and velocity were pain points for them, so they chose Acquia Cloud Site Factory to address both issues.

Use case 3:

Unlike the other two use cases mentioned, this customer was looking to replace parts of their existing CMS platform that were already bringing in large amounts of revenue for the customer.

With a new platform, they wanted to increase their site delivery velocity while increasing innovation on the digital experiences they provided each of their customers. By selecting Acquia Cloud Site Factory, they were able to discreetly continue their digital services and provide their customers with better digital experiences at a faster rate than their existing CMS could.

More Than Just a Website

In the age where having a site (or hundreds) is considered table stakes and organizations are tasked with the challenge to find creative ways to generate revenue with the help of technology, leveraging your sites and digital experiences to add measurable monetary value is a worthwhile strategy to explore. Whether you decide to start anew and create a totally new business with new revenue streams or you decide to monetize or add to an existing strategy, taking a closer look at how you can get more out of your digital properties could yield some big opportunities for your company.

At Acquia, we’re seeing large organizations innovate and experiment like startups because they know that to remain competitive, finding new unconventional revenue streams while leveraging technology to scale and realize their ambitions is the way of the future. Time will tell if their ventures will yield returns, but right now, we have reason to believe they are well on their way.