On Thursday, 1st October, I attended the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite (OMS) launch in Central London. The event promised to outline the highlights of OMS, which comes standard with Sitecore 6.1 and the upcoming 6.2, as well as champagne--perfect.
Now, I should probably give you a little information about myself. I work for ClearPeople on the marketing team, although many of my wonderful colleagues are developers, I am pretty clueless to how they exactly do what they do. As far as I am concerned, when it's broken, they fix it. There, my knowledge ends. Sitecore has a nice name for people like me, ‘non-technology user’ , meaning, the person that thinks her computer is broken when she accidently forgets to turn the screen on. I don’t have a background in development or technology, but do enjoy reaping the benefits of anything that makes my life a little easier. It also helps that when I see my Sitecore changes go live on the ClearPeople website, I do get an ever-so-slight smile and feeling of success.
With OMS, Sitecore has strategically placed the next stone in the path of web content management. We all understand that gone are the days of static web content, users are looking for tailored web experiences and seek value from the sites they visit. This idea of value is what really jumped out and resonated with me at this launch, as I believe it as the heart of a successful online marketing strategy. Value can be anything that the consumer or site visitor seeks and finds easily; information, assistance, a place to vent, a product to buy...anything really. Once the site is able to deliver to a visitors specific need, a relationship begins to blossom. Each time your website delivers something of value, the consumer becomes more trusting, more willing to give in return; personal contact information, engage in discussions, make a purchase or donation. What your exact ‘conversions’ or the actions a visitor takes, are determined by the nature of your business. Sitecore has thus produced a brilliant marketing tool, and basic good web manners.
By assigning each page of web content a value, you are able to measure a visitor’s journey through your site, and begin to assign them a profile. The example at the launch was a photography site, if a person’s path indicates they are an amateur user, content relevant to this would unassumingly be displayed in pre-determined flex spaces. Sitecore OMS allows you to deliver elements of value to your visitor. As they continue to navigate through your site, and are presented with more elements of value, so grows the relationship.
But the effects of this value, and in many cases the effects of marketing as a whole can be ambiguous and hard to measure. In these recessionary times, the return on investment must be tangible and thus, the increasing importance of online marketing strategies. Sitecore OMS may have been in development before the plunge of the economy, but for them, it was a fortuitous turn of events. Sitecore offers a way to not only provide real time ‘value’ and the beginnings of a relationship, which are flecks of gold dust in and of themselves as far as I am concerned, but to measure them as well.
Instead of coming up with my own words for this bit of analytic magic, I will just let Sitecore do the talking,
“What are the first time visitors doing? Which pathways are they using to get to the most popular content? How did your different audience segments behave? You'll know the sources they came from, what they searched for on and off site, the goals they reached and content they consumed – all critical in understanding conversions and building online success. “
The crux of Sitecore is easy web content management, and in the launch event, Simon Bartolo, Managing Director of Sitecore UK made effort to say, ‘we aren’t a web analytics company’. But, it was nice to see, in the preview of 6.2 they are continuing to make content management easier as well, through some very cool ‘drop and drag’ tools, but that’s for another blog and perhaps another champagne event?
