Sitecore Usergroup: The secrets to delivering a first class customer experience.
We are very excited to announce that we are hosting a Sitecore technical user group on the 27th September at a brand new location within Birmingham Cite Centre.
There are well attended and hugely valuable Sitecore user groups in London and in Manchester, although having spoken to many people, there seemed to be a consensus that there was a distinct need for a more central location within the UK to cater for those Sitecore users out of these two locations.
However, the truth of the matter is, despite being aware of the need for a more mature digital strategy, most marketers can only dream of delivering a personalised, tailored experience to their customers. Marketers are often forced to use multiple software tools and technology to gather the data they need. This fragmented approach can make executing a cohesive digital marketing strategy a big challenge.
This blog post will we delve into this a little further and discuss how marketers can start to create connected, personalised experiences with their customers to win them over for life.
Sitecore carried out some recent research with some of their existing customers, which highlighted that they had a common and distinct context marketing mindset and approach. The term context marketing was then born, and it delivers on the promise of personalisation that every marketer seeks.
What pages did they visit on your website last week?
What did they buy from you on their mobile phone when they were traveling to London yesterday?
Are they posting on social channels now about their London trip?
Context marketing is all about being relevant and on the channels of communication that choose. An important part of this is personalisation.
With advances in today’s web technologies, users are virtually demanding a personalised online experience. Companies who create a personalised web experiences for users can foster a higher level of engagement that results in increased conversions, and can win customers for life.
With the Sitecore Experience Platform, the ability to tailor a web browsing experience to a user’s demonstrated tastes and interests is now a possibility.
The platform allows you to personalise virtually any type of website content to any user. You can provide bespoke content to users that come from a specific campaign, for example, a click from a Facebook advert or people who are associated with a specific user persona you’ve created or who have completed a specific goal, for example completed a form on your website.
By using personalisation in your marketing, you will benefit from having as much consumer data as possible. A focus on collecting, and also connecting the data will allow you to then create individual, relevant customer experiences.
Engaging with consumers based on how they have interacted with your brand, and providing relevant and targeted personalised experiences requires a platform with contextual intelligence, robust content management and omnichannel intelligence. Only then can you manage a personalised experience.
Fortunately, for marketers who manage websites that are powered by Sitecore, the Sitecore Experience Platform allows you to communicate with your audience with context – to create a close bond – by carrying on a digital conversation with your customers, at scale, in real time, across all channels.
It has been designed to turn your website into a sophisticated marketing engine. From robust web analytics to user-based personalisation, it includes the functionality that today’s marketers need to manage a comprehensive, sophisticated digital marketing strategy.
Over the next coupe of months, in the lead up to Christmas, I shall be writing a series of blog posts on the Sitecore Experience Marketing Platform and delving into some of its features, including goals, personalisation and personas, campaign management and Sitecore analytics.
If you are ready to unleash the power of Sitecore Experience Marketing or would like to know more about how to get on the right road to creating a more digitally mature marketing strategy for 2016 and beyond, contact James.browne@4-roads.com or call 0808-189-2044.
How Digitally Mature Is Your Marketing?
Traditional marketing is on its way out. Over the years, we have been marketed and sold to death and we’ve actually learned to avoid ads. The more empowered consumer walks, reads, listens and looks right past them – they just aren’t listening.
Today customers are empowered and with that comes the ability easily find their own information and share it with others – meaning your directly marketed product and feature led initiatives are no longer seen as a trusted source.Consumers now have total freedom choose how they consume information and what they choose not to. Consequently, broadcasting generic marketing messages to large groups of customers on different channels is no longer relevant in your customer’s buyer journey.
The goal is for any business is to evolve from this traditional ‘push’ marketing where you simply chase prospects to a realisation that your customers are your most important asset and referrals and word of mouth are keys to future growth. Your new focus should be all about outcomes. Consumers feel satisfied when they achieve their desired outcomes – which should be easily achieved through interactions with your organisation.
A more mature digital strategy on building connected, personalised experiences with your customers will win them over for life.
This blog post will look at what is required of organisations today to keep pace with the now connected and empowered consumer, specifically, the challenge presented to marketers, and how they can fine-tune their marketing strategies to become more digitally mature, plus provide a framework for getting on the right road to digital maturity and winning customers for life.
Over the past 10 years, we have entered a revolution in how the world is becoming more and more connected. Today, customers can connect with others and share information about your brand with very little effort.
But essentially, consumers haven’t actually changed; it is how they make decisions that has. For example, information about your brand, your product or service has always been available with a bit of searching, but with the rise of social networking, technology has made it easier than ever for the consumer and the customer has taken control.
The bottom line is – this rate of technological and subsequently behaviour change is showing no signs of slowing down – our customers will continue to evolve – with or without us.
Fundamentally, a brand is a grand total of every experience, however big or small they have with you and today’s customer expects you to recognise them from their last interaction, and continue the conversation where you left off.
Largely due to these consumers growing demands, effective marketing today is a monumental task! Marketers are faced with having to deliver the right message, within the right context, at the right time, and on the right device. If the message isn’t right, or relevant, or hit at the right time, the customer (or potential customer) will go elsewhere – easy for them – a huge risk to their brand.
Similarly, as our customers are continually evolving, marketers are on a never-ending journey; meaning they must be more agile than ever, stay abreast with emerging communication channels and at the same time in-tune with their customers.
We are seeing the most exciting time in marketing right now, where the marketing function inside an organisation has the opportunity to drive real business outcomes.
This is the new era of marketing – this is Experience Marketing!
Experience marketing provides marketers a single view of the customer in real time, so they can personalise every experience, across all communication channels.
This new marketing era is not just for the likes of Amazon; it is for all organisations to embrace in every market. Optimising customer experience is affordable and generates real business results. If done correctly, it opens up the possibility to transform your organisation from a business with a traditional marketing approach to a market leading organisation where marketing is a key business driver with an important stake in strategic decisions.
Building connected experiences with our customers provides great benefits not only for your customers – who get better, more personalised experiences when they want them, but also for your organisation – as you can more easily achieve your strategic goals.
Yet despite this, many businesses still choose to ignore the needs of their customers and continue to roll out egocentric digital marketing plans instead of focusing on the needs of the customer.
According to Brian Solis, this is because we are in a time of digital Darwinism – an era where technology and society are evolving faster than businesses can adapt.
He highlights that if consumer behaviour is evolving as a result of technology, businesses either compete to get ahead of it, they perpetually react to it, or they belittle it. Rather than reacting to change or be disrupted by it, some forward-looking companies are investing in digital transformation to adapt and outperform their competitors.
This predicament is intensified when coupled with today’s marketers more often than not, grappling with trying to manage monumental marketing challenges, usually, on a plethora of different tools, managed in silos and disconnected from each other. In this case, these tools, rather than being an enabler and part of the solution, adds to the disconnected brand experience delivered to the end user, and then becomes part of the problem.
This emphasises that you could have the best software on the market, but without the right people with the right skills, and processes in place, you will not get any value from your tool. You must have the right people and processes to get any value from any technology solution.
Moving towards customer connection, across all channels to create a connected experience through effective experience marketing is not an easy task. It usually requires huge business changes to be applied, and new waters to be trodden.
New processes will need to be carved out and new relationships created and nurtured between different business units. Culture change is never easy, but the rewards are huge – digital maturity and customers for life.
Equally, for an initiative to be a success it is not just marketing which needs to adapt. More importantly, sales, operations, service, and finance etc. will all need to be part of the change programme and involved from the initial planning process. Digital maturity dictates that any business function that touches customers will to have an impact on customer experience.
It is not surprising then that research carried out by eConsultancy shows that 94% of organisations see the value in creating personalised experiences with customers, but 72% don’t know where to start.
The process can often seem overwhelming – this is where the Customer Experience Maturity Model comes in.
If you want to be part of the current marketing revolution, increase your marketing expertise and adapt, there is a whole new space opening up to you. Those marketers, which aren’t willing and choose to take the ‘business as usual’ approach will continue to generate the same one-size-fits-all generic content, delivered at every customer touch point, delivering indifferent customer experiences.
If you are on-board and want to connect with your customers and build lifetime advocacy, The Sitecore Customer Experience Maturity Model is a natural place to start.
The Customer Experience Maturity Model is the process part of the people, process and technology. The model has seven stages, which maps the customer experience maturity level of your business and offers guidance on how to progress upwards through the different stages.
The first step is to take the Customer Experience Maturity Model assessment, to ascertain your current level of digital maturity. Once you have done this, you can then effectively map your destination.
You can access the Customer Experience Maturity Model assessment here.
Request a personalised demo of the Sitecore Experience Platform.
At 4 Roads, we believe, the best way to assess whether a platform is right for your organisation is to see it in action. That is why we can offer and free Sitecore demo – to provide you with a quick evaluation of the platforms suitability for your organisation.
The Sitecore Experience Platform has been ranked in 2015, by Gartner, as the world leading Web Content Management (WCM) system. You can download the full report via the Sitecore website.
Whether you are considering Sitecore as a website platform, or already have a website powered by Sitecore and are looking for a partner to offer support services – a Sitecore demo with 4 Roads, is the logical step.
A Sitecore demo with 4 Roads is totally bespoke to your individual needs. By requesting a demo we will be in contact in the first instance to ascertain exactly what you would like to learn, and how you see Sitecore within your business. We will then devise a bespoke demo of the platform, which will cover all you need to know, either at your office, or online.
So, take a closer look at the Sitecore platform and request a demo today.
More details on Sitecore can be found here.
It’s a fascinating insight into how We Are Social launched and developed The Ship. What is equally intriguing was listening to what the simply-communicates readership has been getting up to from an ESN perspective. Of course each organisation is at a slightly different stage of the ESN journey. Some are in the process of launching and others have already launched an ESN and it was interesting to see how WAS compared. The readers had been polled before the webinar so there were some interesting benchmarks, for example organisations were asked ‘What were the main objectives of launching an ESN?’ Not too surprisingly, knowledge exchange, improving staff engagement and sharing good practice all rate highly.
Peter gives a valuable perspective on the importance of planning and talks about how he was brought in by We Are Social to help with preparing the launch which includes defining the purpose and objectives for the platform so that there is buy in amongst the organisation. The results speak for themselves. 75% adoption in just 3 months!
Are you wondering why 'The Ship'? Well the business was polled for ideas but according to Emma, it is a fortuitous name. Not only is it about everyone heading towards an agreed destination but it’s also an acronym for We Are Socials values – Social, Honest, Inspiring and Passionate.
The highlight of the week for 4 Roads was exhibiting at simply-communicate SMiLE London. The Smile face-face event is the perfect place to hear stories, best practice and case studies of Social networks within the Enterprise.
There were some wonderful presentations which gave honest insights from large organisations, like the RFU, Coca-Cola and IBM. If you didn't get a chance to attend SMiLE, then I would encourage you to consider their next event which will be held on 25th September 2015. What made a pleasant surprise is rather than tedious and long-winded presentations and death by PowerPoint that we all dread, they use an interactive Q&A format which lends itself to a much more engaged audience. More details on the SMiLE event can be found here.
SMiLE presented 4 Roads with the ideal opportunity to publicly launch our most recent customer case study on We Are Social, the world’s leading agency specialising in social media. My previous blog goes into more detail on how we implemented Telligent Community to drive employee communication and you can also download the case study here.
Now, some of you may have noticed that at the end of my last blog I mentioned that we would have some exciting news to share. Well I’m pleased that I’m now in a position to elaborate.
In association with our partners Shilbrook Associates, 4 Roads has been asked to build an online community which is being called ‘simply-succeed’. This is a dedicated online environment designed to give you the best possible chance of creating and sustaining a successful social platform in your business. We’re delighted that the decision has been made to build this platform on Telligent Community and it's being officially launched in April.
Both Lawrence Clarke from Shilbrook and Jon Allen from Telligent Community were on stage at SMiLE to launch simply-succeed.
The guys did a great of explaining that events like SMiLE are fantastic places to network but then for most of us, it’s back to the office and business as usual. What simply-succeed offers is that online space to further the agenda and replicate those expert tables so that they’re online 365 days a year.
3. Drive: build adoption, embed behaviours and deliver measurable value.
What I think is particularly unique about simply-succeed is that this a dedicated forum where you will be able to interact with other like-minded professionals who are facing the same challenges that you are. What is also helpful is that as you build your own core team you can create your own company private group where you can collaborate with experts and build your strategy and plan your launch.
The TES Community for teachers: https://community.tes.co.uk/ – TES is the world’s largest online community for teaching professionals with over 6 million members worldwide.
I’m very excited to announce that recently 4 Roads has been working with We Are Social (WAS) which is the world’s leading agency specialising in social media. The agency started out in June 2008 and has since grown to 500 international employees working across 9 global offices. Due to explosive growth, it became clear to WAS that they needed to review their internal communication strategy. The emergence of Enterprise Social platforms presented them with the ideal opportunity to think about how they communicate and collaborate throughout the organisation, and it started to occur to them that solely relying on email and telephone communications was not suitable long-term.
WAS went through a thorough evaluation of platforms and it became apparent that Telligent Community was not only a best best-of-breed social platform but it would also meet almost all of their requirements out-of-the-box. 4 Roads worked closely with the WAS design team to guarantee a smooth implementation which resulted is in us building an internal community which is fondly referred to as ‘The Ship’. Their team also worked with our partners Shilbrook Associates who did a fabulous job of advising them on how best to gain engagement and build buy in across the organisation.
WAS has been a phenomenal client to work with and it’s very apparent that with buy-in since day one, it will be plain sailing (sorry!) for The Ship. To read more about this project, download the WAS case study.
Some other exciting announcements will be made at SMILE but you’ll have to wait just a few more days before I can spill the beans. What I can say is that if you’re about to start a community project either internally or externally or you have an existing community that needs a rethink, keep your eyes peeled.
Hope to see some of you at SMILE next week!