Did you know that, according to CMS Wire, Sitecore is a clear choice for a variety of organizations? There are many reasons for this. Some include the many capabilities and impressive functionality of this content management system solution.

If you’re considering using Sitecore for your business or startup, maybe you’ve been having some issues with your digital marketing strategies recently.

What Is Sitecore Technology (and Why Do You Need It?)

Maybe you can’t seem to reach your customers as quickly as you’d like to. Or maybe they’re all going to your competitors instead of to you.

When you find yourself in this situation, you may feel stressed about all the customers you’re losing. You might also be stressed about how much you’re struggling to maintain your business’s sales and growth.

Fortunately, with Sitecore technology, you can improve your digital marketing strategy. In this article, we’ll explain what Sitecore technology is. We’ll also explain why you need it.

Finally, you can reach your customers with the right digital marketing tactics. Read on to learn more.

What is Sitecore?

If you’re asking yourself the question, “What is Sitecore?” we’ll answer it here. Basically, it’s a type of digital marketing system that is complex, combining automation omnichannel technologies and contextual intelligence with a content management system.

Additionally, it has marketing automation applications and tools that make it easier for you to reach your customers at the right time and place.

Sitecore also makes it easier for you to manage your website or business’s multiple websites.

The reason Sitecore is so effective is because of the quality of the technology it runs on. With its contextual features, you can track your customers’ behavioral patterns, interactions, and locations.

This all occurs within the Experience Database (also known as xDB), and both historical and real-time analyses are available to you.

This is then combined with different marketing channels, all of which are automated. These include, for example, print, commerce, email, social media, mobile, and web.

With these two combined, it’s possible for you to personalize all of the interactions you have with every customer throughout every step of the customer journey.

This means that you’re in control of your customer’s experiences and branding.

Instead of having to hope that your marketing strategies will work, you’ll know they work.

Sitecore CMS and Sitecore DMS

To understand how Sitecore works, you need to know how each type of Sitecore technology works. Even though both CMS and DMS are elements that work together within Sitecore, by reviewing how each of these works, you’ll understand how it works as a whole.

Sitecore CMS

CMS stands for “content management system.” You’ve probably come across this term before since any business or startup that wants to reach its customers effectively has a CMS in place. Sometimes, a CMS is called a web content management system, too.

Technically, Sitecore as a whole is a web content management system (WCMS). That’s because Sitecore not only manages your content, but also the customer-facing, external websites.

The name of the Sitecore CMS is the Sitecore Web Experience Manager. This management system is designed for the management and scalability of high-quality content.

One of the main features is that you can create your content only once, after which you distribute it to every single marketing channel. This process can also be automated with the omnichannel automation feature.

You can also create customizable rules so that your content is tailored to specific website visitor types.

Additionally, through the Sitecore CMS, you can manage all your websites (even ones that aren’t Sitecore websites) and do multi-site integration.

You also get Mobile-First responsiveness and multi-lingual capabilities. As a result, no matter where your visitors are visiting your website, they’ll be able to access its content.

Sitecore DMS

“DMS” stands for Digital Marketing System. Within Sitecore, this includes its automation capabilities that are omnichannel and its contextual intelligence. The name of the DMS system within Sitecore is the Sitecore Experience Platform.

By working in tandem with the Sitecore Web Experience Manager, you can deliver your content in a way that’s cross-channel and uses customer intelligence.

Through the Sitecore Experience Platform, you have access to customer insights that are data-driven.

As a result, you can optimize your branding and websites with this information to improve performance and branding designed for customer engagement.

Features of the Sitecore DMS include a data repository that’s centralized (Sitecore xDM and integration with additional databases like your CRM), scoring, customer profiles, and a variety of testing capabilities.

The DMS also includes a module made for the streamlining of your customer’s experiences with online shopping. This module is called Sitecore Commerce.

Within Sitecore Commerce, you get three options. These include the experiences of post-purchase, point-of-sale, and pre-purchase.

As a result, you’re with your customers during every step of the customer journey when they’re online shopping with you.

Why You Need Sitecore

Now that we’ve reviewed what Sitecore is and how it works, we’ll review why you need Sitecore. In addition to being a full-fledged digital marketing and content creation solution, there are some impressive benefits that come with using Sitecore.

This way, you can decide if you want to use Sitecore and get started by doing Sitecore implementation.

Personalized Customer Data

One of the most impressive features of Sitecore is that you have access to impressive personalized customer data. When you’re using this solution, you’re getting data about every data point, behavior, and interaction every single customer has with your business.

As a result, you’ll have the information you need to increase your returns and deepen customer engagement.

Omnichannel Delivery

When you’re using a less effective CMS and DMS system, you might end up with many different types of content siloed into different areas. This not only makes it more challenging to make your branding consistent. It also worsens productivity.

After all, if you’re constantly managing different channels, then it will take you longer to get all your content out there.

You’ll also have to do analysis separately for every single channel, which gives your marketers much more work.

With Sitecore technology, you don’t have this problem. Everything is done from one place with Sitecore, and the customer experience can be delivered anywhere.

Your customers will have positive experiences with your business or startup, no matter what device or channel they’re on, or which touchpoint they’ve reached during their customer journey.

Seeing the Forest and the Trees

When you use Sitecore, you see the forest and the trees. This is because of the xDB, or Sitecore Experience Database. Through this database, you get access to every single piece of data related to your customers’ experience.

Then, it takes this large amount of information and presents it to you in a connected way, where you can see the entire world of customer engagement all at once.

This is even the case for data that comes from systems that aren’t Sitecore based, or from your own CRM.

This means that you can see the entire customer journey in front of you, where it’s working, and where it isn’t.

Additionally, you can zoom in and take a look at how the customer journey experience works for every single customer. This all comes from the same data bank.

So if your customer journey is mostly working, but there’s a certain segment of customers who need a change to their experience with your business or startup, you’ll know.

AI Personalization

Sitecore has AI-powered auto-personalization. This makes Sitecore the only CMS and DMS solution out there with which you can use AI to automatically identify trends with your visitors and modify elements of your pages to deliver a 1:1, unique experience.

It’s also the only solution that allows you to automatically create customer segments.

The Power of xProfile

Another feature Sitecore comes with is xProfile, also called the Sitecore Experience Profile. While the xDB begins to collect data on customer interactions, Sitecore XP makes a profile for each individual who interacts with your business or startup.

What makes the xProfile so powerful is that Sitecore improves these profiles over time.

It adds more information about who each customer is, what they buy, where they live, how much time they choose to spend on your site, and what they click.

As you get more information for each individual, you can improve their experience over time, ensuring that they return to your site and become part of a loyal customer database.

Understanding the Entire Customer Journey

The data that you collect through Sitecore covers every single interaction you have with your customers. You can follow each customer through the entire customer journey, giving you a picture that’s end-to-end.

At the same time, you protect customer privacy. It’s also a low-cost solution. No matter what the source, you can collect the data you need and use it from one specific location.

Engagement Analytics

You already get a huge amount of analytics information when you use Sitecore. In addition to this data, you also get engagement analytics that is actionable. This is through Engagement Value. With this feature, you can rank interactions visitors have with your website.

You can also score these interactions. As a result, you can prioritize which leads you to want to follow up.

All the while, the Path Analyzer is working. This feature tracks the ways in which your leads engage with the content you’ve put out there.

This includes the different paths they go on while visiting your website, on a level that’s page-by-page.

With all this information, you’ll know exactly how your customers and visitors are engaging with your website.

Cross-Channel Campaign Automation

One of the best ways to keep your customers engaged is by reaching out to them at the right time once they’ve interacted with your website. This is called nurturing, and it’s a big part of any digital marketing strategy. This way, your customers always have your brand at the top of their minds.

When you’re using the cross-channel campaign automation available within Sitecore, you can easily utilize drag-and-drop to plan triggers and interactions.

Your customers will hear from you when they’re supposed to, getting the information they need depending on where they are in the customer journey. The entire process is simple and well-organized, as the Sitecore logo suggests.

Flexibility With Other Solutions

Because of the APIs with Sitecore xConnect, your developers can easily gather and sync data between the Sitecore solution and any other sales- or marketing-related system you’re using. This includes Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce.

Additional solutions you can integrate Sitecore with include PIMs, ERPs, POS, CRMs, and more.

If you aren’t sure where to get started, you can always get in touch with Sitecore support to learn about how to integrate it with the other solutions you’re already using.

You can also find more information on the Sitecore Symposium website.

Need More Information?

Now that you’ve learned about what Sitecore technology is and why you need it, you might need more information. Maybe you want to learn more about how you can use it specifically for your business. Or you want to learn about other solutions that work well with it.

Whatever information you need, you can find it on our blog. Simply read some of our blog posts in the Business Products & Services section of our website.

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