Sitecore Can Improve Your Clients' Digital Marketing

Power. Logic. Ease of Use.

One of the primary reasons that you should be aware of Sitecore—and how it can help your clients—is that it’s the best experience platform for medium and enterprise businesses. And let’s get this out of the way for the naysayers: cheaper and simpler to use mean only that. In the long run it is my belief that you will experience more shortcomings with other platforms that require complicated martech stacks to be cobbled together. Sitecore provides a plethora of marketing capabilities in one central platform. The benefits are many.

(A quick disclaimer: We’ve been implementing Sitecore for more than a decade—we didn’t just jump on the bandwagon. We know where Sitecore is and is headed.)

There a few things that have become clear in digital marketing:

• Change is inevitable and unpredictable.
• Data is useless unless you can use it.
• Personalization is highly complex.
• Marketing operations is time-consuming.

Change is inevitable and unpredictable
How many different marketing technology platforms and software packages are your clients using? The latest Marketing Technology Landscape confirms that the options have quintupled just in the last four years. How much time do your clients spend on product evaluation, onboarding, and training on specific marketing features? How much time do you or your clients spend trying to splice data together, connect customers, and execute more impactful marketing campaigns?

For more than a decade Sitecore has been anticipating how the market would change and what would help companies be more competitive in acquisition, retention, and sales. The Sitecore roadmap has always been both logical and innovative. Today Sitecore customers continue to benefit from new and improved capabilities without needing to evaluate, implement, and test a myriad of the over 5,000 martech platforms available.

But, of course, sometimes there are needs beyond Sitecore. Sometimes there are niche tools that benefit only certain industries. Sometimes there are existing platforms that a customer just doesn’t want to change. And for these reasons, we love that Sitecore was always built to be future-proof and easily integrated with other tools.

Data is useless unless you can actually use it.
When you use many different platforms you are bound to have disconnected data. And bound to spend a lot of time trying to splice data together—or simply not using it at all. And scattered data is leading to more and more fragmented and ineffective marketing.

Personalization is highly complex.
How far do you go? The question is commonly asked: how personal is too personal or creepy? Isn’t this just part of the personalization process? On one hand, customers respond more favorably to relevant marketing and negatively to anything that doesn’t meet their expectations. And negative reactions tend to be more decisive. Technology isn’t a replacement for common sense. Have you noticed that a lot of marketers view personalization as some kind of wizardry in which they must predict all customer behaviors? It’s still okay to ask questions! But again this brings us back to questions about the complexity of people. We’re all so different. And continued advances in Sitecore’s Cortex will help marketers better deliver experiences that are connected, resonate and prompt people into positive action—or at least maintain brand sentiment. Let’s not forget that sometimes customers just aren’t going to buy, but maintaining that relationship is measurable and valuable!

Marketing operations is time-consuming.
The way we connect with people has become so multi-faceted that the time resources alone can be daunting. The more companies can use one platform to share customer information and data to execute the various campaigns and marketing strategies, the more efficient marketing will become. Imagine trying to orchestrate, splice, and connect data from different platforms and move towards executing highly-personalized marketing in real time! That sounds kind of exhausting and if nothing else, a waste of resources. Just think about the cost of training, managing multiple license subscriptions, passwords, renewals, upgrades, onboarding new staff… Companies are better off fine-tuning and making their operations more efficient, so they can avoid delivering marketing that begs indifference and leads to the demise of many customer relationships.

If the foundation of your client’s marketing technology stack is Sitecore, they’ll be much closer to being a leader in customer experience and the champion in the boardroom.