Chicago Meetup: Upping Your Marketing Game with Sitecore
Productive Edge’s Sitecore Meetup
Last Thursday, Will Rolloff and Ryan Kuchler hosted Productive Edge's Chicago Sitecore User Group Meetup in PE's River North office.
During the meetup, they covered an important topic, Sitecore Context Marketing. This topic is one that not a lot of companies are thinking of or using to its full potential. Post Symposium, PE will be hosting a webinar to dive deeper into Context Marketing both for marketing and developers.
Register For Sitecore Webinar- October 29, 2018 @ 11am CT
What is Sitecore Context Marketing and Why Do We Need It?
Sitecore Context Marketing intends to bring personalized content to the right users at the correct time. Context marketing is all about bringing users the most authentic and targeted experience for the best experience.
In the digital marketplace, the power is shifting away from organizations and enterprises and towards the customers. Providing a personalized experience is expected from customers and leads to benefits like stronger customer loyalty, increased web visits, larger shopping cart value and more.
Context Marketing: A New Way of Thinking
Before enterprises can fully use Context Marketing, they should keep a few themes in mind when thinking about the customer experience.
- Measuring engagement: The ability to see how a customer is engaging with your content and through what channels
- Viewing single customer behavior: Quantify specific customer data and personalize based on those user statistics
- Understanding customers’ journeys: Look at the journey with more of a holistic view and based overall content based on that view
End Result: Increased conversions and improved experience
Context Marketing: Before and After
Before and after using Sitecore Context Marketing, several areas see a large improvement, including: Customer Experience, Branding, Analytics and Customers.
Using Sitecore Tools: Marketers
Ryan demonstrated how to provide strategically-rendered content for users, based pages visited or tags associated. Through this, you can give beginner content to users who read articles tagged with “beginner.”
He also went into describing tracking interactions. Tracking interactions enables you to track goal attribution, but as a more complex scoring pattern to campaign. Score attribution is toward a campaign goal, so you can get targeted completions.
Additionally, he covered compiling profiles and personas based on interaction, and that driving what is shown to those users in the future.
Finally, he covered experience optimization, using versions, components and pages. Sitecore makes it easier to specify which components are applied to users based on any variable, whether its logged in user role or attribute or web interaction, time on site, number of pages visited. This information can guide content shown in future or attribution toward goal. This process creates A/B testing at a more granular level or based on subsets of your audience.
Requirements for Sitecore Context Marketing
Before going into some customizations for developers, they discussed some of the high-level system and architecture requirements as well as changes.
System Requirements
You’ll need a couple requirements in order to start using Context Marketing with Sitecore
- SXP 8.0 SP1 or later
- .NET 4.5
- Updated license file (8.1 or later)
- IP geolocation service
Solution Architecture Requirements
All versions need to have modular architecture and design as well as the ability to separate data from rendering. For Sitecore 9, some of the changes include: xConnect, DEF, Email, Forms and Marketing Automation.
Common Customizations for Developers
Will and Ryan pointed out some common customizations for developers in relation to Context Marketing. Attend the webinar to find exact customizations for these
- Identifying Contacts in Code
- Trigger Goals and Events in Code
Stay up to date with Sitecore Context Marketing
If you missed the meetup or want to stay up to date with the latest from Sitecore and Context Marketing, attend the next webinar, Upping Your Marketing Skills with Sitecore, hosted by Ryan and Will themselves.
Register for Sitecore Webinar- October 29, 2018 @ 11am CT
