Top Reasons You're Not Utilizing the Complete Power of Sitecore - How to Fix it?

Online consumers have grown to expect a seamless experience across any channel or device. In the quest to provide unmatched customer experiences, brands look for platforms that can deliver on it. Sitecore is one such dynamic platform that helps businesses overcome their customer needs and customization preferences.

Here’s a complete guide on what privileges can you have for your business with Sitecore. Before jumping on it, let’s have a look at some hurdles that your team might encounter and find it hard to implement Sitecore in a true manner.

Why Teams aren’t Utilizing Sitecore to its Fullest Potential?

Sitecore is known as one of the most powerful CMS platforms worldwide allowing brands to improve their customer experience through personalization, marketing automation and much more. Yet, with all its power many organizations are still not seeing a return on their investment. Organizations who want to make the most out of their Sitecore investment, cite the following areas amongst their major concerns and points of contention:

• Truly deploying personalization
• Complicated content management requirements
• Understanding Sitecore’s advanced analytics
• Making strategic use of marketing automation
• Lack of proper strategy and vision for their digital presence
• Lack of in-house skillset to operationalize the components-based modules
• Not having the confidence or technical ability to implement the features
• Lack of clarity on overall digital goals

How to Get Started with Sitecore? The Right Approach

Sometimes brands do not tap into the maximum potential of Sitecore because properly implementing personalization can be time-consuming. While the implementation requires some structured thinking to strategize and set up, getting started with personalization is easier than what most brands think. Sitecore's flexibility offers teams the ability to start small and add competencies gradually. Here are some ways teams and organizations struggle to make the most out of their Sitecore investment and tips to help you avoid these pitfalls.

1. Tackle Personalization by Understanding your Data

Personalization has become a need rather than something that is "nice to have". It drives better engagement and creates solid relationships between a brand and its consumers. Data is the first and foremost instrument that you need to carry out a sense of relevance, timing to drive repeat visits, impact purchases, and engagement. Context is everything when it comes to personalization. Simply having a quality data set can lead to the best decisions. To make sure your personalization efforts don’t go to waste, capture data to create a more holistic picture of your customers.

Sitecore platform brings that powerful personalization with its ability to collect data from multiple sources such as CRM, consumer's browsing history, website, and external databases. You receive an authentic overview of your customer base and insights about their shifting behavior patterns. The API layer in Sitecore equips organizations with the right kind of secured insights so that you can curate different experiences for a wide range of personas, across your digital channels. To fully use personalization, decide how and where to begin. Consider questions like

•  What exactly can be done with Personalization?
•  What do I need to consider while planning Personalization?
•  How much time and effort Is needed for learning?
•  How do I get started?

2. Pivot your Customer Analytics Approach to Understand Behavioral Changes

A majority of marketing professionals aren't happy with their digital experience platforms as they don't produce sufficient data or analytics to understand consumer behavior.  Sitecore's Experience Analytics enables you to make smart decisions about your marketing expenditures and how to make them even more effective. With effective personalization and marketing automation, you transform the way you understand customers. A special focus on the full customer experience is given through integrating information and data from mobile apps, interactions, emails, and social media. It allows you to understand your consumer's level of commitment towards your brand.

Three special features of Sitecore are,

•  Intuitive interfaces and data visualizations to aid you in grasping insights quickly
•  Bring data together from a myriad of sources
•  Unique AI feature to recognize trends, signposts, and patterns. It supplies suggestions for strategies as well.

The most important part is to plan for analytics. It has several categories of reports such as dashboard, audience, acquisition, behavior, and conversions. Learn everything about what they have to offer to understand how it can help you to analyze the performance and optimization of your website.

3. Succeed with Evolving Business and Technology through Marketing Automation

In the fast-paced market, marketing automation is one of the most indispensable parts of a successful business. Having a good product doesn't mean anything if no one seems to know about it. Marketing automation can help to get the right information to the relevant customers when they are seeking it. It boosts productivity with a set of tools to simplify the marketing initiatives. Marketing automation provides teams with:

•  Targeted and relevant communications using all your customer data
•  Push streamlined content across all channels
•  Craft meaningful conversations using the unique intuitive drag-and-drop interface
•  Foster customer relationships for greater customer value

If you wish to take your customer experience to the next level, consider Sitecore’s automation as it helps respond to customers with highly tailored and personalized marketing communications. Keep the dialogue going while keeping a track of every interaction. Similar to personalization, you can start introducing marketing automation and go at your own pace.

4. Do Content Profiling to Track Visitor Interests and Behaviors

Content profiling is a technique to categorize your pages based on various niches and organizational interests. With this technique, you can easily track user behavior in that niche to understand the user activity and preferences as they continue to navigate further on your website.

Sitecore’s Content Profiling technique allows you to keep track of your audience to research what type of content and categories they interact with more. Based on user interests, you can decide which profile (category) has more potential to generate more leads and which one needs more attention. The content profiles functions on these three basic elements you can leverage through Sitecore:

1. Profile Values - As a user navigates through the website, each item or page they visit is assigned a “profile value.” As they keep on visiting these profiles, the value will continue accumulating. The path they opt to navigate through a category will help you identify the potential and areas that need improvement. 

2. Profile Keys - You can consider a profile key as a category or specific aspect of your content profile. A numerical profile value can work as a profile key that you can research later for purposes.

3. Profile Cards - Profile cards carry the accumulated profile values and keys. 

All these elements are built-in and instantly available to use in Sitecore. However, you can customize these for your business concerns, and even make new profile values from scratch for your needs. The best strategy for any business is to understand how customers behave and expect. And then you can mold your business areas in that regard. Sitecore just allows you to do the same with which you can excel in your business growth.

Partner with Us to Make the Most out of Your Sitecore Involvement

If you're still concerned about what you can do with Sitecore and want to be more involved and ambitious, then you're in the right direction. The balance is to find out what you want to explore and plan a strategy according to it. Embracing agility is the best approach to continue. Learn more about marketing automation, advanced analytics, content management, and personalization. Utilizing Sitecore's expansive capabilities can be an exhilarating and advantageous journey to embark upon. The first few days can be quite daunting but the effort is worthwhile.

As a certified Sitecore partner, we work with mid-markets and growth brands to help them get the most return on their investment. From advanced analytics to robust personalization, we help organizations deliver truly contextual experiences. Need help with your Sitecore investment? Explore Icreon’s Sitecore Platinum Partner Services.