Sitecore benefits for content strategists and digital marketers

Sitecore is more than a content management system (CMS). Its email templates make communication faster and smoother, and its integrated email and marketing automation automate your outreach, such as birthday campaigns. You get deeper insights into past purchases, website behaviour and content engagement, to improve every customer's digital experience.

With marketing automation, you nurture relationships with your website visitors and customers by adapting your message to the content, channel and media of each interaction. Sitecore does this with real-time, automated responses, triggered by what users do on your website. For example:

1. Trigger: a contact fills in and submits a form.
2. Automation: based on what the visitor filled in, automated, personalised messages give them the information they're looking for.
3. Behaviour and triggers: the contact comes back to your website. Because you know them, you show a personalised experience that guides them to the next step, for example booking an appointment online.
4. Automation: an automated "thank you for your appointment" email goes out, with personalised content, for example based on the location of the appointment.

You see how a user flows through an automated campaign, manage personalised online experiences for each contact, and build more detailed contact profiles.

Sitecore gives digital marketers many ways to track how (potential) customers arrive from social media. When you share a post with a link to a landing page, Sitecore's campaign ID tells you where your visitors come from.

Did visitors find your page through a Facebook ad, or a Google ad with specific keywords? If you monitor and analyse this well, you can take the personalisation of your website and content even further.

Personalisation is one of the most important factors for brands and customers today. Customers expect content that fits their interests and needs. But you need a lot of data and good segmentation to get personalisation right.

Sitecore's analytics give digital marketers better audience segmentation. For example, personalisation lets you:

• show different content to contacts based on their location
• hide a registration form from contacts who already filled it in
• change the text in a banner based on the site a contact came from

To get started, Sitecore's Rule Set Editor adds rules and actions to specific components on your pages. It checks whether a contact or segment meets a condition and shows the right content.

With the Experience Database, marketers get a 360° view of their customers to build consistent omnichannel experiences. Sitecore also shows how valuable a visit is and how visitors move through your content: analyse navigation with the Path Analyzer, and track events, goals and outcomes with the engagement value they generate.

Experience Analytics gives marketers and analysts overview and detailed reports to spot patterns and trends in the experience data from your websites and other channels, in these categories:

• Dashboard: an overview of key analytics, with a selection of performance indicators
• Audience: who your visitors are
• Acquisition: what drives traffic to your website
• Behaviour: how visitors engage with your content
• Conversions: the percentage of visitors that reach a goal, so you see how your marketing performs

You analyse several metrics and use the reports to improve your websites and the engagement of your visitors, both anonymous and identified (often called contacts).

Content Hub is one central place for everything content marketers need: building trust with your audience, improving conversions, connecting with customers and generating leads. Creating content for multiple channels and brands is a challenge, and Sitecore Content Hub improves the quality, speed and scale of your content creation.

You plan new content by subject, persona, campaign or whatever your organisation needs, ahead of time and across channels. Your marketing team gets a full set of collaboration tools: share files, preview content, edit together in real time, manage projects and more. Content Hub measures how effective content is, so your team sees how each item performed in each context and can optimise it for future campaigns.

Finally, by adding metadata to your content items, you manage metadata properly. That's essential for the content you spent hours planning, reviewing and creating to be found and used. Without accurate metadata, personalisation and localisation are virtually impossible.

Sitecore is a complete marketing platform with an easy interface for every aspect of digital marketing. It has everything digital marketers need to deliver compelling digital experiences.