Martech's sleeping dragon - undermarketed and underused
Are CMOs missing a trick?
About 25 years old now, the Drupal project continues to push forward - and with gusto. With the key bases covered long ago, the recent developments for smaller Site Builders and AI connectivity are rocketing the product yet further up the charts.
So why hasn’t it taken over the world? and are you missing out?
A world-changing project
In 2023 the United Nations declared Drupal a “Digital Public Good”. Something good for the world. Their primary definition goes something like: “Digital public goods should adhere to privacy and other applicable laws, standards and best practices, do no harm.” - but that’s not all the designation implies. It reinforces the value that the platform brings to the international stage, not just one company’s coffers. All this, while thousands of local and global organisations use Drupal for their projects, large and small? Who would want to miss this train??
As an Open Source project, there are no inherent licensing or product costs for Drupal itself. For larger sites with thousands of products and pages and media items, the monthly bill for a SAAS/PAAS product is substantial. Then consider that if you spent the equivalent amount with a good Drupal agency, you’d not only have baseline maintenance but days or even weeks of developer time available for customisations, projects and improvements of your choice. Is it not an obvious win?
When a Drupal project is running well, clients are generally very happy about it. That probably applies to most projects, but it’s worth saying - it’s easy to read a lot of negative hype about a product, but miss out on important context. When looked after well by a good agency and maintained with appropriate priorities, Drupal sites absolutely perform. And when a good agency looks after your relationship too, you’re set up for an all-round great experience.
Awareness
Battle of the marketers
In the battle against “the big boys”, Open Source projects will usually lose out. They just don’t have the same marketing budgets - the central organisations for such are usually charities, managing an international project on a small string of donations and corporate sponsors. For people to be aware of Drupal at all, it’s had to be good. Really good. There’s no escaping it! And that’s where things hit home a bit - there’s an enterprise-grade product that’s been hitting hard for 25 years, and people don’t know it (or don’t know how to compare it to the competition).
It’s hard to talk about awareness and not address the negative news going round. A lot of negativity around Drupal in the last few years has been about complexity. The changes between Drupal 7 and 8 were comprehensive - a systemic shift to a new way of building. There was a lot of learning for everyone in that season, but ultimately the product has then hit its stride and matured into a CMS that is easier for Site Builders to work with and easier for developers to make deep customisations too. Though that season alienated a number of smaller site builders, the Drupal CMS project seeks to reclaim their confidence, making Drupal builds more appealing for smaller projects.
Unrecognised potential
The Drupal community has kept up with, or been ahead of, many now-standard features over the decades, and it’s not slowing down. The Drupal CMS ‘star shot’ project has had huge impacts on standardisation throughout the Drupal ecosystem, bringing together faster ways to build “standard” functionality - especially for smaller site builders. Thus, on top of Drupal’s already powerful, enterprise-grade feature set, there’s a growing ability to build the moderate and bespoke customisations with less fuss.
In recent years, Drupal’s vision for the empowered Site Builder is coming to a whole new level of fruition. The dream is that most actions, changes and builds can be done through the UI by an appropriate user. Almost all of Drupal’s out-of-the-box functionality can be completely worked with via the front end, and day by day the possibilities grow.
The modern code architecture introduced in Drupal 8 has set a foundation that supports deep customisations more easily, more consistently and more reliably; things can be less “hacky” than they used to, and that’s great for site reliability. So when you hit custom dev work, you’re working with a product built ready for the task.
“A Gartner survey of 405 marketing leaders conducted in May and June 2023 revealed the utilization of their organization's overall martech stack’s capability dropped to just 33% on average in 2023”
Gartner
2023 Martech Survey - Utilization Plunges and Generative AI Anticipation Rises
The bottom line
Any CMO looking at spending more than £50k a year to contract or license a product should seriously explore whether Drupal could do it just as well, but with a lot more joy and a lot less cost.
Working alongside known people at a small agency, rather than a call centre, is a joy almost any project manager would dream of. The ability to talk regularly with the team working on the build/design/development, in meaningful conversations and meetings, is a powerful accelerant to a project’s prospects.
All while saving money and contributing to a world-changing project.