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Sitecore Seeks Differentiation via Marketing Automation

By Barb Mosher  | Published Jun 2, 2009

Sitecore Seeks Differentiation via Marketing AutomationWhen you are doing well in the market, it's possible that you could just sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor. But while you are sitting there drinking your strawberry daiquiri, the market is likely to be shifting and changes may be required.

Sitecore (news, site) understands this well. According to their VP of Product Marketing, Darren Guarnaccia, web content management has become a commodity, plateauing on functionality and UI. For customers, it has become frustrating trying to decide which Web CMS is the right one, when they all seem the same. So what do you do?

Sitecore's answer is to provide a solution to solve a specific problem. In this case, it's an Online Marketing Suite (OMS).

A Frustrated Marketplace

Guarnaccia told CMSWire that there are two things happening in the web content management market today:

  1. Customers don't know which web cms to pick because the market has become so commoditized.
  2. Customers are frustrated that vendors haven't evolved past the toolset mentality of editing content.

He says that customers are looking to have a bigger problem solved than just creating online content: Why do we need a website and what are we trying to achieve?

Sitecore Offers a Solution

Sitecore has listened to this growing market concern and come up with an answer. They have brought together web analytics, marketing automation and web content management to provide a single comprehensive solution called the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite (OMS).

Sitecore_OMS.jpg
Sitecore OMS

The Online Marketing Suite will help customers market and sell products and services by creating strong, actionable value at the persona and/or segment level.

Here are some of things you get with the OMS:

  • A Content Management platform to make changes
  • Built in Analytical Data
  • Ability to deliver dynamic content on that data
  • Multivariate and targeted A/B testing
  • Campaign Management - Advertising and Email
  • Lead Scoring and CRM Integration

sitecore_Campaign.jpg
OMS Campaign Management

Built In Web Analytics

Sitecore has developed its own web analytics for this suite. Guarnaccia explained that you can learn things from Sitecore analytics that you can't get from 3rd party solutions. All data is collected at the session level, providing more detail and the ability to segment visitors, target content and report on those segments.

Sitecore_Analytics.jpg
OMS Analytics
 

With the new privacy settings that come with browsers like IE8 today, traditional analytics solutions are not always able to provide the level of data needed to segment and profile your customers and potential customers.

CRM Integration

Sitecore can be integrated with CRM solution Microsoft Dynamics (and soon with Salesforce.com) to help accelerate sales and marketing initiatives. With reverse DNS lookup capabilities — providing detailed geographical information — potential customer data can be easily routed to the appropriate sales rep.

Lead scoring is automated for both implicit and explicit activity on the website including things like pages viewed, forms submitted, online campaigns. Even community engagement is tracked.

Taking an Organic Approach

While you can still integrate third party web analytic solutions with the Sitecore Web CMS, Guarnaccia said that Sitecore set out to reduce integration challenges by creating a seamless customer experience across all technology.

Although it was a lot of work, he said that it will pay off in the end. He knows this to be true because Sitecore has been using the OMS on their own website since December. They have learned a lot about their own usability problems that they weren't previously getting from traditional analytics.

Bridging the Chasm

Guarnaccia says that there's a chasm between the tools that tell organizations what they need to do and the tools that help them do it. The Online Marketing Suite was designed to bridge that actionability gap.

And while it is the first targeted solution suite they are offering, it won't be the last. Sitecore will be looking at different horizontal markets and providing focused technology over time.

There's a quote that Guarnaccia remembers well, "Customers don't buy products, they buy specific business outcomes".  Maybe everyone needs to memorize that.

You can view of Demo of the new Online Marketing Suite and get more information from Sitecore's website.

 

 

 

 

 
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2 Reader Comments

1 | Dalesh — June 2, 2009 10:04 AM

This is a great idea and one that would definitely do well in the market. It's good to see that companies really do listen to what their markets want and place the best possible solutions for these.

Thanks!

2 | Randy Woods — June 27, 2009 12:06 PM

I love the Sitecore marketing functionality. It has the potential to solve a number of real-world challenges that have cropped up for us during CMS deployment engagements. We spell out six scenarios where we think it can deliver business value in a recent blog.(http://tinyurl.com/ldqh4b) The challenge, I think, will be for organizations to understand their needs, and the needs of their visitors, well enough to take advantage of these capabilities. Without a decent visitor engagement model, it will be hard to leverage the Sitecore OMS capabilities.

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