Sitecore 101: What every marketer needs to know about Sitecore

What every marketer needs to know about Sitecore – a leading Content Management System (CMS) that fuels data-driven marketing.
Marketers are increasingly behaving like scientists by using data to experiment, iterate and ultimately improve customer experience. In order to do so effectively however, you need a state-of-the-art marketing laboratory.
In this video tutorial, George Smith, Sitecore MVP and Regional MD for Horizontal, explains how marketers can use Sitecore as a laboratory in which they can conduct experiments with data to unravel customer trends and behaviours.

You can view the webinar here.

“If you believe that your business can find competitive advantage through improving customer experience, then you need a powerful suite of tools that can automatically orchestrate customer experiences, nudging their behaviours and guiding them through the various experiences you offer,” says Smith.
Smith takes us through six powerful Sitecore tools that will help turn your marketing department into a science lab.
1. Real-time personalisation
No one customer is the same. Marketers are essentially matchmakers who match customers with the right content at the right time along their purchase journey.
“Sitecore is a magical probability engine that in real time observes the behaviour of a customer and everything they do on the site to determine what kind of customer they are,” explains Smith.
Rich data is gathered for every customer including whether they came to the site via a Facebook ad or a display banner, for example; what device they came in on and their location and language, amongst many other things.
“These all hint towards the probability of the customer we’re dealing with,” says Smith. Sitecore then automatically serves them relevant content through auto personalisation – a tool that is only going to become more powerful as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence advance.
2. Market on any digital platform
Sitecore allows you to go beyond simply marketing via your website to advertising on digital billboards, ATMs and point-of-sale systems, amongst many other platforms.
“You can use the same Sitecore content and personalisation capabilities on any digitally-enabled screen,” explains Smith.
3. Control without coding
As a marketer, you no longer have to spend your valuable time learning front end code or figuring out the back-end of a CMS.
With Sitecore, you have complete control over all the key elements of a website that you can decouple from each other and manage individually. These include:

1. Architecture of the page:  Simply drag and drop Sitecore components where you need them.
2. Branding control: Change the structure of your site, while keeping your branding consistent across all pages.
3. Functionality: Create anything from forms to surveys without any coding.
4. E-commerce functionality
5. Data: Sitecore offers an advanced analytics system.
6. Content: Manage your content in one place with tools like version control and deploy it wherever it needs to go, whether it’s to your site or via an SMS.
7. Workflow and permissions: Give different team members access/permissions to different parts of the site.
8. Digital asset management (content hub): Improve the efficiency of your marketing department by storing all your images and campaign assets in one place where they’re easy to search for.

4. The ability to orchestrate a customer’s experienceA user will have multiple interactions with a site, whether they’re booking a ticket, watching a video or reading an article. Sitecore allows you to track this behaviour automatically and nudge them down the sales funnel by serving them relevant content and reminders at each stage.5. The opportunity to make IT happyEstablished 20 years ago, Sitecore is a mature enterprise technology that reduces friction between marketing and IT teams as it allows marketers the flexibility to experiment and innovate, without compromising on security.6. Partners to support youSitecore is used by some of the biggest brands in the world. A global Sitecore Platinum Partner like Horizontal can assist you on your journey towards data-driven marketing.“If you want to compete in this digital world and sell products online, you need a platform like Sitecore that will be your marketing lab where you can test, learn and understand,” concludes Smith.