In today’s competitive digital landscape, investing in a design system can have a profound impact on your return on investment (ROI). But how exactly does this work? If you’re unfamiliar with design systems or more specifically multi-brand Meta Design Systems, we recommend starting here.
While there are plenty of ways to calculate ROI, this article assumes that you already have a tailored ROI model in place for your business and understand the importance of KPIs in driving revenue. The real question is: How do you ensure that your technology investment fuels business growth?
Building Your Business Case
If you’re planning a technology investment to advance your marketing and sales strategies, you’re likely wondering how to justify this to your CFO. Some organisations have the luxury of data that clearly shows “if we do X, we’ll get Y return.” However, many businesses either lack that data or feel their existing analytics don’t answer the right questions.
Whether you’re looking at a greenfield or brownfield investment, you need a framework to assess the opportunity. We approach this by viewing your website as part of a marketplace—a space where human beings make purchasing decisions. Over-reliance on analytics can blind us to this fundamental reality. We combine this human-centred framework with a Drupal and Acquia Cohesion technology stack to bring it to life.
Showing Up Is 80% of Success
Your technology investment won’t drive ROI if your business isn’t present in the marketplace. The moment your new site is live is when it begins delivering value. Until then, your investment is like parking money in a low-interest account—you could be actively targeting investments that will deliver a higher return.
Web projects, particularly re-platforming efforts, are notorious for delays, budget overruns, and shifting goals. What starts as a three-month project can easily stretch into six or nine months. In that time, your market may have evolved, and your initial investment might end up solving yesterday’s problems, not today’s.
Speed to market is crucial. The quicker you can validate your assumptions against real consumer needs, the quicker you’ll see returns. Delays risk missed opportunities and wasted resources. This is where a design system can make a difference—it allows for the rapid creation and iteration of content, enabling marketers to test and refine their messaging quickly.
Why Do Web Projects Take So Long?
Web projects often expand into broader discussions about brand positioning and service offerings. The process of designing a new site can highlight strategic ambiguities, weak messaging, or a lack of differentiation. This can lead to internal soul-searching, extended UX iterations, and involvement from external consultancies, all while the market continues to evolve.
We mitigate these delays by using design systems that empower marketers to create, launch, and test content approaches quickly. Unlike traditional web CMS platforms, which rely on set templates and require developer intervention for changes, design systems offer reusable building blocks and flexible layouts. This allows marketing teams to adapt messaging without breaking the brand experience.
With a design system, the day your CMS platform goes live is just the beginning. Unlike traditional systems, which tend to “freeze” once launched, a design system-based platform evolves over time. Marketers can publish content based on their own schedules, not the constraints of technology.
Learning by Doing
Once your design system-based CMS is live, your marketing team can quickly start testing and refining their content strategies. This leads to more profound insights about your marketplace and, ultimately, better ROI.
The agile marketing approach—testing ideas and iterating based on real-world feedback—has proven to deliver impressive results for businesses that consistently outperform their competitors. By learning faster and more deeply than the competition, these businesses gain a significant advantage.
A design system makes this process efficient. Marketing teams can run A/B tests, launch new campaigns, and tweak messaging without relying on costly, time-consuming development work. This encourages experimentation, allowing marketers to try new ideas with minimal risk.
When experimentation becomes easier and more affordable, marketers gain valuable insights that are validated by real consumer behaviour. This, in turn, strengthens your marketing and sales strategies, providing a clearer path to ROI.
Maximising Reach and Extending Your ROI
Once you’ve entered the marketplace and gathered insights, the next step is to maximise your reach. This means ensuring your content is accessible to the broadest possible audience, across markets and platforms.
Your design system can help extend the reach of your CMS in several ways:
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Geographical expansion: Launch new brand websites for different regions or languages, all managed through a single codebase.
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Accessibility: Improve the user experience for different consumer segments, including those with disabilities or unique needs.
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New service offerings: Pivot or expand your existing offerings to meet changing market conditions.
Traditional CMS platforms can struggle with extensibility, often leading to high development costs and a lack of agility. In contrast, design systems, especially when combined with powerful CMS platforms like Drupal and tools like Acquia Cohesion or Acquia SiteFactory, allow you to manage multi-site environments from a single, scalable codebase.
For instance, if your business operates across multiple markets or brands, a Meta Design System can create separate branded websites for each market or brand, all while maintaining a unified technical foundation. This ensures brand consistency and governance across the board while allowing regional teams to tailor their content to local needs.
Efficiency vs. Productivity: Understanding Your Objectives
Before investing in a design system, it’s important to be clear about your objectives. Are you aiming for efficiency or productivity?
Efficiency: Doing the same with less. This is often the goal for large enterprises with multiple websites and mounting technical debt. In this case, an open-source design system can help reduce costs while maintaining enterprise-grade capabilities.
Productivity: Doing more with the same. This is where challenger brands benefit most. These agile organisations are learning and shaping their markets, and a design system allows them to quickly adapt, pivot, and scale alongside their business.
While design systems can support both goals, each approach requires different considerations. Being clear about your objectives will help ensure that your design system investment delivers the ROI you’re seeking.
Conclusion: Getting ROI Right
A design system helps you enter the market faster, learn more quickly, and extend your reach, all while maintaining brand consistency and governance. Whether your goal is efficiency or productivity, the flexibility and scalability offered by a design system-based CMS can be a game-changer for your business.
To ensure success, it’s essential to understand your specific needs and objectives. By doing so, you can leverage a design system to not only meet today’s challenges but also adapt to the evolving demands of tomorrow’s marketplace.
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