Sitecore Blog: Marketing Technology

Marketing Technology

Kimberly McCabe, Community Manager

The Connected Journey

By Kimberly McCabe, October 25, 2011 | Rating:  | Leave a comment

 

Welcome to the Sitecore UK Marketing Blog! Our first guest blogger comes from Sitecore UK partner Cognifide. 

by Cleve Gibbon - Chief Marketing Technology Officer
Cognifide

The new normal is that these consumer journeys must:
• Execute seamlessly across all major devices
• Capture and measure every consumer action
• Deliver the optimal digital experience at each decision point
The aim is to get the customer to engage.  However, the level of customer engagement depends upon how effective as a business you can achieve the above.  These connected journeys must be personalised, targeted and focused in order to deliver relevant and consistent messaging throughout the buying cycle and beyond into customer support.  

And it doesn’t stop there.  Connected journeys are non-linear, span months not days, cross online/offline borders, and take consumers off-site to social places outside of a brand’s comfort zone.  The question marketing departments continue to ask is how best do we deploy technology to support these connected journeys?  

Today’s Connected Journey
The level of effort required to create and manage connected journeys today is high.  Company executives expect senior management to do more with less, which time and again is roughly translated into doing more with what they already have.  However, the real focus should be to stop doing more of the same:
• Stop building disparate, disconnected digital experiences.
• Stop locking away customer data in bespoke data stores.
• Stop designing in isolation. 

But stopping is not an easy thing to do with time-to-market pressures.  It is not uncommon for each digital experience in our connected journey to be created by a different agency and/or solution provider.  This building from scratch and in isolation not only de-stabilises internal IT but also vastly increases the amount of effort required to manage the “sticky-tape” connected journey.  Although both Marketing and IT appreciate the difficulties, seldom are they addressed. 

From Sites to Platforms 

Things are changing.  Forward thinking organisations are investing in a platform-based approach to customer engagement.  Platforms enable IT to innovate through technology to deliver consistent, integrated and connected digital experiences.  Using a platform to create and manage connected journeys, IT can:

• Consolidate customer data and promote a single customer view.

• Implement a Create Once, Publish Everywhere content architecture.

• Turn key consistent and reliable digital experiences (e.g. microsites).

• Track, measure and monitor multi-channel, multi-device campaigns.

• Centralise the re-use and delivery of device independent content.

• Build brand-specific APIs to enable third-party business transactions. 

For marketing, the platform aims to reduce the time to market to deliver personalised, measureable, targeted, end-to-end campaigns that are highly engaging.  For IT, the platform draws that much needed line in the corporate sand where IT can do what they do best; leverage technology to deliver services that add tangible business value.  

Fortunately, this is already happening today.  A centralised marketing platform can significantly drive down the cost of managing digital experiences.  For example, a brand that has over 1000 campaign landing pages and microsites, that are spread across the internet on various blogging platforms, hosting providers and creative agency servers, there is a clear business to consolidate those onto a single technology platform.  

However, for platforms to be truly useful and useable by marketing, cost cannot be the only driver.  The reality is that the platform is both competing and complimenting well-established industry leading marketing technologies such as WordPress, Unbounce, SurveyMonkey, and so on.  Finding the right balance between buy, build and assemble is critical to the successful adoption of a marketing technology platform.

Tomorrow’s Connected Journey

There are many different routes to delivering a marketing technology platform that enables brands to better engage with their customers:

• Buy One.

• Rent One.

• Build One.

• Assemble One.

Given the different shapes and sizes that both companies and marketing technologies come in, it is would be a restrictive today to buy, rent or build a platform capable of meeting your connected journey requirements of tomorrow.  Instead, assembling the marketing technology platform by buying, renting and building is the more realistic road to success.  However, the first step on this journey is critical and sets the technical direction for the platform roadmap.

Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Platform places content management firmly at the centre of its marketing technology approach.  It focuses upon creating optimal digital experiences and wiring them together to deliver connect journeys to better engage with customers online.  That’s the first of many important steps.  The remaining steps depend upon what other technologies the platform needs to integrate with to meet the needs o the marketing departments.  

The new normal is that these consumer journeys must:
• Execute seamlessly across all major devices
• Capture and measure every consumer action
• Deliver the optimal digital experience at each decision point

The aim is to get the customer to engage.  However, the level of customer engagement depends upon how effective as a business you can achieve the above.  These connected journeys must be personalised, targeted and focused in order to deliver relevant and consistent messaging throughout the buying cycle and beyond into customer support.  

And it doesn’t stop there.  Connected journeys are non-linear, span months not days, cross online/offline borders, and take consumers off-site to social places outside of a brand’s comfort zone.  The question marketing departments continue to ask is how best do we deploy technology to support these connected journeys?  

Today’s Connected Journey
The level of effort required to create and manage connected journeys today is high.  Company executives expect senior management to do more with less, which time and again is roughly translated into doing more with what they already have.  However, the real focus should be to stop doing more of the same:
• Stop building disparate, disconnected digital experiences
• Stop locking away customer data in bespoke data stores
• Stop designing in isolation 

But stopping is not an easy thing to do with time-to-market pressures.  It is not uncommon for each digital experience in our connected journey to be created by a different agency and/or solution provider.  This building from scratch and in isolation not only de-stabilises internal IT but also vastly increases the amount of effort required to manage the “sticky-tape” connected journey.  Although both Marketing and IT appreciate the difficulties, seldom are they addressed. 

From Sites to Platforms 
Things are changing.  Forward thinking organisations are investing in a platform-based approach to customer engagement.  Platforms enable IT to innovate through technology to deliver consistent, integrated and connected digital experiences.  Using a platform to create and manage connected journeys, IT can:
• Consolidate customer data and promote a single customer view.
• Implement a Create Once, Publish Everywhere content architecture.
• Turn key consistent and reliable digital experiences (e.g. microsites).
• Track, measure and monitor multi-channel, multi-device campaigns.
• Centralise the re-use and delivery of device independent content.
• Build brand-specific APIs to enable third-party business transactions. 

For marketing, the platform aims to reduce the time to market to deliver personalised, measureable, targeted, end-to-end campaigns that are highly engaging.  For IT, the platform draws that much needed line in the corporate sand where IT can do what they do best; leverage technology to deliver services that add tangible business value.  
 
Fortunately, this is already happening today.  A centralised marketing platform can significantly drive down the cost of managing digital experiences.  For example, a brand that has over 1000 campaign landing pages and microsites, that are spread across the internet on various blogging platforms, hosting providers and creative agency servers, there is a clear business to consolidate those onto a single technology platform.  

However, for platforms to be truly useful and useable by marketing, cost cannot be the only driver.  The reality is that the platform is both competing and complimenting well-established industry leading marketing technologies such as WordPress, Unbounce, SurveyMonkey, and so on.  Finding the right balance between buy, build and assemble is critical to the successful adoption of a marketing technology platform.

Tomorrow’s Connected Journey
There are many different routes to delivering a marketing technology platform that enables brands to better engage with their customers:
• Buy One
• Rent One
• Build One
• Assemble One

Given the different shapes and sizes that both companies and marketing technologies come in, it is would be a restrictive today to buy, rent or build a platform capable of meeting your connected journey requirements of tomorrow.  Instead, assembling the marketing technology platform by buying, renting and building is the more realistic road to success.  However, the first step on this journey is critical and sets the technical direction for the platform roadmap.

Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Platform places content management firmly at the centre of its marketing technology approach.  It focuses upon creating optimal digital experiences and wiring them together to deliver connect journeys to better engage with customers online.  That’s the first of many important steps.  The remaining steps depend upon what other technologies the platform needs to integrate with to meet the needs o the marketing departments.  


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