This document discusses marketing challenges for mid-sized companies competing against giants. It addresses dilemmas around planning cycles, reporting metrics, using in-house vs partner resources, and aligning marketing and sales teams. The document emphasizes listening to customers, treating each customer as a single identity across channels, and orchestrating customer journeys. It presents a case study where a company increased sales, surveys, and social media engagement through personalized surveys, social marketing, and email campaigns using Sitecore.
8. DILEMMA: IN-HOUSE VS PARTNER
8
AVOID LARGE IN-HOUSE TEAMS
PARTNERS BRING IN QUICK
EXPERTISE & FLEXIBILITY TO
SCALE UP OR DOWN
GOVERNANCE IS CRITICAL
12. 12
CUSTOMER IS A SINGLE IDENTITY
“Personalization can deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend and
lift sales 10% or more”, McKinsey
“Personalization leads to a 67% transaction value, 300% conversion rate, and
7% annual revenue increase”, SmartFocus
13. 13
INTEGRATED CXP
• Integrated CX Platform that
allows marketers to deliver
content and experience
wherever the client is
• C.O.P.E.
• Facilitate Single View of
Customer (SVC)
14. 14
ORCHESTRATE THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY
Unknown Person
Subscription
Center manages
profile
Capture engagement in
CRM
Anonymous profile
created and client is
segmented
Personalized and Dynamic
content
Profile is
matured
Sees Brexit story on social mediaSees article on websiteIs served the next interesting article Subscribes Becomes Known
Receives Brexit email on mobile
device
Share network on social mediaInvited to Event Partner recognize interestEngages with prospect
Search delivers
next article
21. 21
21
Personalised Surveys
3 surveys surfaced to players
based on profile age range (4
categories)
Implemented using WFFM and
rules based personalization
Incentivized to complete by
awarding bonus apples
23. 23
Social Power
SXP powered Facebook page –updated
once per day with a Happy Hour
campaign.
Increasing likes massively, ensuring long
duration stay on FB page for exposure to
additional marketing.
24. 24
2Week Outcome
60% Increase in Sales
40,000 New EDM Names
37K Completed Surveys
1.25 Million Facebook Hits
1.75 Million FacebookVotes
More Likes than Major Banks
25. 25
Context
“With Sitecore we can engage our
customers in as personal a conversation
as they’d have in a branch, whether
they’re interacting with QTMB’s main
website, our mobile site or through
social media.”
— Chris Moses, Chief Marketing Officer
QT Mutual Bank
26. 26
Context
“ Sitecore gives QTMB the power to
present the banking information a
customer really cares about, without
their having to even think about it.”
— Sean Riley, eChannel Specialist,
Marketing, QT Mutual Bank
27. 27
AT A GLANCE
INDUSTRY
EXPERIENCE
WE ARE SITECORE
EXPERTS
UNIQUE MARKETING
TECHNOLOGY EXPERTISE
Our breadth and depth of
expertise across the
MarTech eco-system is
unmatched.
CX Strategy, Content
Strategy, DG.
CXP, MAP, CRM, Analytics
implementations.
Deep expertise in
Manufacturing, Financial
Services, High-Tech,
Professional Services,
CPG, Travel and Retail.
Deep expertise in the
B2B marketing.
Work for 45 Fortune 500
companies as well as
over 90 mid-sized
organizations and start-
ups.
Sitecore Gold Partner, since
2003.
Over 200 Sitecore projects
successfully delivered.
150+ trained Sitecore
resources. 4 Sitecore MVP’s.
Reusable Sitecore connectors
built to extend the ecosystem.
Industry accelerators and
reusable frameworks.
27
5 countries
350+ employees
Headquartered at NYC
28. The SitecoreValue
Revolutionizing the Relationship between Businesses and their Customers
Only Sitecore connects intelligence,
content and automation so
you can precisely market and sell to
individuals in context
Contextual
Intelligence
Content
Management
Omni-channel
Automation
appsprint
email
commerce
social
federated
Web
mobile
29. Sitecore’s value to digital marketers
Modular, open and connected Experience Platform
Analytics &
optimization
Real-time analytics
and optimization
enabled by
machine learning
Cloud
Get to market quickly
and scale reliably
Personalization
Personalization
contextualized to
individual customer
across channels
Omni-channel
Deliver omni-channel
experiences including
what’s next like IoT
and virtual reality
Holistic data
Single view of
customer via
integration of data
across all sources
[AKHIL] – Thanks Paresh. Hello everyone. Last week I met my old friend Caroline after 4-5years. She is one of those exceptional marketers who really know how to create demand for her brand. Earlier she was marketing manager with a Fortune 500 company but then she moved into a mid-market organization as the head of Customer Experience.
Believe me if you can - her journey as a mid-market marketer is nothing short of a Hollywood blockbuster. In the upcoming slides I have summarized the key Lessons she learnt through this transformation journey and detailed inputs about providing a superb Customer Experience by a mid-sized or an enterprising organization. Let me specify here that these real-life lessons are also valid for large enterprise marketers who are operating their division or LOB very much similar to a mid-market organization.
Hey Brendon, your inputs will be extremely valuable as we go through these points.
[BRENDON] – Thanks Akhil. We see situations like Caroline's all the time.
She has the experience and know how to drive demand for her new mid market brand, but has a fraction of the resources she had access to in her previous life in the fortune 500 world.
We are excited to discuss how some approaches and tactics that Caroline can take to maximize her digital marketing returns while working under time and resource constraints.
[AKHIL]- So, there are lot of things to worry about for the top 3 for Caroline include:
1. Smaller size – which implies the brand is relatively unknown and the biggest worry – a limited budget in hand.
[BRENDON] - With a smaller budget focus is key.
Each activity has an opportunity cost and Caroline should strive to clearly define her business objectives and audience needs first and foremost so they serve as guiding light, illuminating where to focus for the highest impact.
[AKHIL] – very true Brendon. Moreover, the good side of being small is that you are much more agile and can execute decisions much faster. E.g. Absolute software, a mid-size technology firm, based out of Vancouver and specialized in endpoint security and data risk management solutions, is able to challenge the biggies such as RSA & IBM in an overcrowded security solution market because of the agility in its product development. They manage their budgets through subscription model as you rightly said.
Ok, the second biggest worry is Lack of Resources
[BRENDON]- To expand on that it is not only lack of tools and resources, but fragmentation of them that can slow Caroline’s climb toward digital maturity excellence.
When evaluating tools and resources we need to have empathy for Caroline and her team and consider the impact of multiple tools that achieve their individual functional goal, but fragment the author experience, requiring Caroline and her to access multiple systems with separate user interfaces and at times manual data imports and exports.
It is important to define the personas of the marketing team to identify the best author experience based on their needs.
Whether a single platform experience such as Sitecore that offers web content management, analytics and personalization in one user interface or multiple tools that each achieve a specialized marketing need, unifying activities and data through integrations, Carolines and her teams preference should drive tool and resource selection and workflow.
Empathy for their day to day operations is key.
[AKHIL] – Last not the least, Limited experience and available knowledge in-house. Building such knowledge takes significant time
[BRENDON] – Digital can span many different specialties from SEO and user experience, to analytics mapping and personalization strategies.
To become an expert at everything while maintaining your day to day job is an almost impossible feat.
This is where engagements with full service agencies like eDynamic are essential.
Whether through retainer or project engagements, agencies can bring the bring the appropriate subject matter experts to the table to formulate digital strategy roadmaps and tactical executions that lie outside the natural skillsets available in a mid market team.
[AKHIL] – Wow Brendon, you really know how to keep Caroline happy despite all these worries
Lets see the 5 Dos and Don’ts that a mid-market marketer can’t afford to miss
[AKHIL] – All of us in mid-market struggle to decide how much time & effort to spend on Planning vs. Execution. The answer is simple and effective : use Plan for shorter horizon and set up specific KPI milestones. After execution on the plan, measure and compare status w.r.t. KPIs and then plan for the next phase.
[BRENDON] – Measurement strategy is key here.
Strive to clearly define your business objective and map them to clear, traceable KPIs and outcomes that show the effectiveness of an execution.
If you are deploying a personalization rule for example, define what a successful outcome is, such as more downloads, larger cart at checkout or increased social sharing.
When you measure the effectiveness of a personalization rule you are evaluating clear outcomes to determine if the effort was successful and should be duplicated elsewhere or if the effort produced equal or lower conversions.
This allows smaller teams to effectively use their time and resources for activities that produce results.
[AKHIL]- Analytics & reporting – one of the favorite topics for all of us as marketers. The good as well as the bad part is that we are capturing a lot of data and ask for more and more reports to analyze that data. We need to keep 3 things in mind:
(click) We are not research students who want to analyze data just for the sake of it. Instead, we need to focus on measuring our KPIs. Hence worry about getting insights that help measure your defined KPIs
(click) Right granularity is critical e.g. measuring just the number of visits on the website will not provide any clue about your customer experience, rather you need to know customer engagement index which is a view at each individual visitor rather than an aggregate number.
(click) The insights are of little use if they do not help in deciding the next course of action.
[BRENDON] – A dashboard approach is a great way to visualize this data.. Once you have define your measurement strategy think about how to best present this data through visualizations to help educate and align others with the organization to ensure you are all marching towards common goals.
[AKHIL] - I might be biased here but Caroline was very vocal about it.
(click) large in-house teams build inertia and increases dependencies on deliverables. Needless to say, managing attrition for CX technology skills is a BIG headache.
(click) Partners may bring speed to execution with a large team with required skills. The easiest part is scaling up and down on need basis
(click) All said and done, the entire philosophy depends on the strength of our governance process. If we do not have strong internal processes getting a partner on-board will lead to only confusions and mis-alignments
[BRENDON]- An a common misconception is that you need to issue an all encompassing RFP to engage a partner with the right skill sets to drive digital transformation. Think about engaging a partner in a monthly retainer model where you are data, what you know, to drive hypothesis, what you think , to plan and execute, what we can do. Work with a partner in this model to first define a roadmap and then tactically execute using business objectives and audience needs as your guiding light.
[AKHIL]: In B2B scenario, Marketing is measured on the metrics such as number of Marketing Qualified Leads. On the other had sales is measured on Deals Closed. This leads to a push and pull situation where marketing says that they have met their target of MQLs while Sales complain about the quality of MQLs and so on.
The best way to address this is by having a single set of KPIs for both Marketing & Sales. This can be as simple as Revenue Generated.
[AKHIL] – Coming to the meat of our discussion today. Customer Experience is the single biggest playing field for mid-marketers. If we can’t outdo large enterprise in an awesome CX then we might go out-of-business as well.
[AKHIL] – Our customers might leave implicit or explicit information that we marketers need to carefully listen to and action further.
(click) e.g. the keywords search in the search engine that brings the user to our website is an extremely rich source of information
(click). Search functionality on our website is again a very powerful tool if used wisely. Here K2 intelligence, a mid-sized investigative, compliance, and cyber defense services firm provides an actionable view to the search by segregating the people result and the content types
(click) The pages a user views, the assets she downloads can collectively give a 360degree of the customer interest areas. WPCarey, an asset management company does a beautiful job of scoring each interaction with the customer and adds it to her customer engagement index
[BRENDON]- It is important to define your audience personas so you understand the content that addresses their unique needs and the channels in which they are engaging with your brand.
For implicit personalization, strive to score your content based on it relevance to each of your persona audiences.
To continue the above example of WPCarey, they have content on their site that specifically addresses investor needs.
Sitecore allows you to score content by persona and segment, so in this instance if an anonymous user navigates to content in the investor relations section, we can use that implicit user path as trigger to show personalization content elsewhere on the site that highlights additional content that is relevant to the needs of an investor.
[AKHIL] – Gone are the days when marketers used to plan campaigns for segments of customers.
(click) Now every individual customer is one segment and hence need the right attention at that granularity.
(click) As per numerous reports Personalization definitely comes out as a mandatory arsenal in every marketing battle
[BRENDON] - The key here is map the map the relationship of your personas, their segmentation and the content and channels that meet their needs. Having this overlap allows you to present contextual, 1 to 1 communications based on the attributes of each individual who engages with your brand.
[AKHIL] – Customers interact with us through multiple channels or media. Our MarTech systems capture information for each of those interactions within different systems. If not architected correctly, we might end up leaving silos of customer information. E.g. when the customer searches a keyword and lands up on our website, that keyword is a rich source of information about her explicit requirement. Thereafter the customer might read an article or download an e-book. This information is captured within the Web Content Management System (CMS). If this information is passed on from CMS to the Marketing Automation Platform (MAP), then a personalized campaign can be targeted to this customer. In case the customer responds positively to the campaign and registers for an event, the same information from CMS and MAP needs to be exchanged with the Client Relationship Management (CRM) system. In order for the sales rep to close a deal with this customer, a complete 360-degree view of this customer is required and hence these pieces of information from CMS, MAP, and CRM needs to be leveraged by the Analytics system to present the desired view to the sales rep. Post-deal closure, the information needs to be seamlessly exchanged between CRM, MAP, and CMS to further nurture and cross-sell
(click): Create Once Publish Everywhere – needs to be enabled from day one to avoid maintaining multiple content repository for different channels.
(click): Single View of Customer or 360degree view is not a new concept. But implementing the same gets tricky with difference in technology platforms involved.
[BRENDON] – Again this is where a partner can be instrumental. They can work through a mapping of your data and how to best utilize it in both online and offline scenarios.
To expand of the sales rep example, we can pass data that summarizes all content and channels a customer has engaged with in the last as well as the last interaction allows the sales rep to have an informed conversion with them based on the desires they have explicitly shown.
[AKHIL] – Let me illustrate the example of an orchestrated customer journey.
We had implemented it for a mid-sized professional services firm. This solution was implemented on Sitecore - CMS, Salesforce - CRM and Eloqua - Marketing Automation Platform.
(click) The journey begins when the prospect clicks a social media campaign on Brexit and comes to the landing page. An anonymous profile is created in Sitecore (called the experience profile). Using the GeoIP services in Sitecore the profile is populated with location and organization details, if available. As the prospect reads the article and engagement score is assigned against his experience profile within Sitecore. Then similar articles are dynamically suggested to him and encouraged to subscribe to the newsletter. As he subscribes his profile details are updated in Sitecore and his engagement score is updated. Next time whenever he visits the website, a personalized content is displayed. This information is synched with Eloqua through an out-of-the-box connector built by edynamic. This helps automate a personalized email campaign through Eloqua where the content and customer information is pushed from Sitecore. The same is extended to social media. Customer is now invited for a relevant event . If he registers for the event, a trigger is sent to the sales team and his profile is updated within Salesforce using another connector built by edynamic. The sales person gets complete browsing and engagement history of the customer which eventually helps him close the deal.
[BRENDON] -
[AKHIL] – Last not the least, the most critical advise from Caroline
[AKHIL] – Every mid-market marketer has a time bomb ticking on the head to deliver immediately or deliver now. Lot of times under this time pressure the marketer chooses temporary fixes or solutions which later become a bigger problem.
(click): Hence, always keep a long term roadmap in mind before selecting a solution for your immediate needs
[BRENDON]
[AKHIL]- please type in your Qs and we will be happy to discuss them shortly. Greg, over to you.
Personalised surveys
Click 1 – show categories
Homepage personalisation based on survey answers
Case Study available on www.sitecore.net
Case Study available on www.sitecore.net
Case Study available on www.sitecore.net
Sitecore connects contextual intelligence, content and commerce management, and Omni channel automation for:
Faster time to market
Greater ROI
Reduced TCO
KEY TO KNOW
It is a modular yet connected digital marketing platform
Most people know us for our leading CMS solution – which is easy to start with
But it’s so much more….
We offer – as part of the platform - analytics, testing/optimization, automation and integration with best-in-breed tools
We fit in to your environment to suit your specific needs.
If you need CMS – great! We are the #1 leader
If you need more of an experience platform, perfect! Use just the capabilities you need as your team evolves in their digital maturity
The Experience Database (xDB) is at the core of our Experience Platform
It consolidates all of your customer interaction data, content, and automation in one place
Data can be brought in from any data source – your CRM (customer relationship management), PIM (product information management), POS (point of sale) or mobile, email or social platforms that you already have in place
It is constantly collecting and “learning”, assessing the resulting interactions to offer up the right “next” for your marketers
Our analytics are powered by Sitecore-engineered machine learning & cognitive services – for which we have 19 patents pending alone
All of which are available on Cloud
Sitecore is highly flexible – both as a company and as a solution. We want to fit to your ideal needs.
Let’s look at a few marketing organizations that we’ve worked with to see how they’ve leveraged ability to combine contextual intelligence, content management and automation.
Sitecore provides a single view of each individual customer, no matter where they are engaging with your brand
Machine Learning is putting analytics & optimization on steroids, going way beyond rules and personalization to be able to handle extremely large sets of data and information, for optimization previously unseen in digital marketing
All of that data is used to drive levels of personalization that were previously impossible because the experience was disconnected
It no longer matters which channel or tool is in your marketing stack, or what you plan to add in the future, with Sitecore you can manage and drive engagement across all your channels
By running your digital marketing in the cloud, you can get to market faster, without having to worry about IT backlog, or that your competitors are first to market. You can launch websites in as little as 30 minutes.