Measure. Report. Analyze. As marketers, we are told to do this every day. And it’s true. To truly understand our audience and the effectiveness of our efforts, we must track everything and optimize appropriately. While there are plenty of reporting tools available to marketers, few of them offer full integration into other tools or platforms that we use on a daily basis, such as our content management system (CMS).
But then there is Sitecore. Sitecore has quickly become one of the most popular .NET content management systems chosen by enterprise level organizations due to its powerful scalability and ease of use for both developers and marketers. But what really sets Sitecore apart is its incredible integration with leading services such as SharePoint and Google Analytics, along with its extensive suite of built in products, such as the Digital Marketing System (DMS).
Sitecore’s DMS provides marketers with a variety of powerful, integrated tools to not only help them understand who their visitors are and what they want to accomplish, but to also dig deeper into their interactions, engagements and habits with your site. With these insights, marketers can improve their efficiency of their efforts by using Sitecore’s Digital Marketing System to assign goal values, improve their targeting, manage campaigns, optimize through testing and personalize their content.
Why does this matter? By optimizing your website for the people using it (visitors) you greatly increase the chance that you can turn that visitor into a lead, and that lead into a conversion.
Who uses Sitecore? Sitecore is used by over 2,300 mid to large organizations worldwide with over 27,000 websites in the Education, Government, Healthcare, and Technology industries, just to name a few.
If you currently use Sitecore, or are looking for a new CMS, check out what it can offer you and how the Digital Marketing System can bring your online marketing efforts to the next level. Below are the key elements of the DMS that are essential for any Sitecore marketer to understand and leverage.
The Engagement Value of Goals
Setting and measuring goals is crucial in any business initiative. With Sitecore DMS, marketers can establish goals for a website and set numerical values for each one based on its relative importance. In today’s online landscape, gaining traffic to your site is no longer enough. Website owners are now demanding quality traffic over quantity. Setting engagement values for your goals will help you track and measure how your visitors are engaging with your website.
Some goals, by nature, are more valuable than others. By assigning engagement values to each goal based on their importance, we can identify how valuable each website visit is. Keep in mind that engagement values are subjective to the individual setting them – they must determine how valuable each goal is in comparison to the others.
Examples of website goals and associated engagements value points:
– Subscribe to a Newsletter: 25 points
– Register for a Webinar: 50 points
– Ask for a Quote: 75 points
If engagement values and goals have been set up on your Sitecore site, every time a visitor accomplishes ones of your goals, they will accumulate points which contribute to their overall score. Once they have left your site, the total of their points becomes the value of that specific visit. Tracking this data will help marketers understand the value of their visitors and also help them determine which traffic sources result in the most valuable visitors.
Engagement Analytics
Sitecore’s DMS allows marketers to analyze the real-time engagement value of visits, the profile of traffic sources, search keyword potential and entry page potential which will help determine which channels are most effective, and which should be optimized. The element of Sitecore’s Engagement Analytics that differentiates it from other software is that it allows marketers to determine the value associated with every key metric, bringing relevance and efficiency to the forefront of all of your marketing efforts.
For example, marketers not only have the ability to identify the top organic search keywords that are driving the most traffic to their site, but it will identify which ones lead to higher engagement values, and which ones failed to drive conversions. This type of analysis is available across multiple metrics and channels within your site. Sitecore’s Engagement Analytics will help identify trends and analyze engagement analytics ensuring that your marketing efforts can be optimized to achieve their best results.
Campaign Management
Sitecore’s Campaign Management tool helps marketers create and optimize integrated campaigns from both on and offline sources such as paid advertisements, social media, email newsletters, QR codes, television ads, billboards, etc. By setting up campaigns in Sitecore, marketers can leverage vanity URLs for landing pages to track the traffic, engagement value and the overall effectiveness of their campaigns.
Optimize Through Testing
In order to optimize website conversions, Sitecore believes that we must test everything. This is a simple and cost-effective way to test a hypothesis, learn about your visitors, and optimize your content based on what your users find most engaging. Sitecore offers marketers two types of testing: A/B Split Testing and Multivariate Testing.
A/B split testing occurs when testing only one section with multiple variables. For example, you could test two calls-to-action against each other on a page to determine which one leads to more conversions. In this case we would have two test pages running.
Multivariate testing occurs when testing multiple sections with multiple variables. For example, along with testing two calls to action, you could also test four different header images and two different titles. This multivariate test would yield 12 different combinations that could be served up to a web user. Multivariate tests are basically multiple A/B tests being run on the same page at the same time.
Your tests will run until Sitecore has determined that it has reach statistical significance – a point at which there is enough data collected to determine which variation can be declared the winner based on the engagement value goals associated with the page. And since this testing is fully integrated into Sitecore, you can simply click and push that winning tested version to your live site. Amazing.
Rules Based Personalization
Rules based personalization helps marketers focus directly on each unique visitor to their site, giving them the ability to personalize both the content and components of a page based on your visitor’s digital fingerprint. A user’s digital fingerprint can include their device, operating system, keywords searched, IP address, language, day of the week, goals, location and much more. By creating conditional rendering rules within Sitecore, we can personalize the content and components of our webpages to specific users.
Let’s say a visitor comes to our site from a certain geographic location. Using Sitecore’s conditional rendering rules, we can ensure that the content and components of that page are personalized to that user’s location. For example, if we sell tickets to events across the country, when a user visits our site from a specific city, we can personalize the content they see based on that geographic location.
Personalizing content and components for our visitors will not only help us improve the relevancy and visitor engagement but will also help increase leads and conversions.
Are you a Sitecore user, or thinking about making the switch? If you’d like to learn more about Sitecore and the how the Digital Marketing System can help you optimize and improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, feel free to contact me with any questions. I’d be happy to help and discuss the benefits of Sitecore and how its DMS differs from other popular marketing tools
bv02 is a Certified Sitecore Partner with certified developers and marketers that can help you achieve your Sitecore goals. Find out how we can help with your Sitecore initiatives today!
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