Five hard truths for marketers driving digital experience
On 28 August, Sitecore’s Digital Wisdom for Smarter Marketing summit comes to Sydney’s Hilton Hotel. This one-day conference will focus on emerging trends and challenges unique to your market. From experienced and thoughtful keynote speakers to informative breakout sessions, attendees will discover winning digital marketing strategies and tactics. Find out more information and register your interest to attend by clicking this link.
But before the event, gain a preview of the insights your will learn with this Sitecore guide to the five hard truths marketers must learn to drive digital experience.
Today, senior marketers are expected to drive their organization’s digital experience and steer its digital-first vision. Making this transformation is critical for success, but martech stacks have never been more complicated.
And many marketers just don’t have the defined strategy, budget, understanding or buy-in from the rest of the organization to make change happen. This puts you in a difficult position. There’s no point trying to leverage technology if there’s no plan, process or budget. Or expecting support and investment from the boardroom when you can’t effectively measure the impact of digital experiences.
Even if you’re working towards resolving these issues, data and content challenges are still holding you back and significantly impacting customer experience and revenue. If you’re going to make your digital-first vision a reality, you need to face the truth. With 5 hard truths for marketers driving digital experience, this feature will help you understand what’s holding you back and how to move past it to own the experience.
Truth #1 – The C-Suite is just not that into you
CMOs are taking the lead on business-critical objectives for their organization, but not always with the full support of the leadership team. Most C-level executives don’t really understand the technology, processes or outcomes, so they completely underestimate the effort it takes to deliver highly effective digital experiences. Yet the C-Suite still needs to approve the investment, which isn’t going to take priority if you can’t measure the impact on ROI. And most senior marketers are limited by their ability to do this. You need to get buy-in from your executive team, but if you’re speaking completely different languages, this misalignment could seriously impact your ability to execute effectively.
First steps: Coordinate the right conversations
- Get to know your executive team and speak their language — develop an alliance strategy that focuses on driving efficiencies through your people and processes.
- Articulate what digital-first looks like for your business and decide where to invest for greater impact.
- If you can measure your ROI, you can manage it — and secure further investment for your customer experience initiatives.
See alignment in action – Volvo
Since 1927, Volvo has been one of the best known and most respected automotive manufacturers in the world, selling 571,577 cars in over 100 countries in 2017, with global sales rising by 7% from 2016. Volvo is currently going through a digital-first transformation: The Digital Experience Initiative. The goal is to deliver 20% of sales from online channels, in order to support the company’s wider mission to simplify and improve the consumer’s life. It also ties in with Volvo’s broader goal of becoming a globally recognized, luxury brand. Delivering an agile, innovative, and efficient digital experience at the global scale has already begun to pay off. In 2017, Volvo’s total web traffic increased by 31%, with 48% more consumers using the car configurator online tool. What’s more, their mobile site was named “best-in-class” by the L2 2018 Automotive Digital IQ Index report.
Truth #2 – Personalization is not one-size-fits-all
It’s no secret that personalization is essential to delivering excellent customer experiences. And 67% of senior marketers claim to be experts at achieving this. Yet almost half of businesses (49%) don’t personalize the experience across channels and only 30% of organizations think personalization is a high priority. The fact is, it’s very easy to overthink personalization, which can lead to standardized practices that don’t suit your business. If you feel like you’re squeezing a square peg into a round hole, then you’re probably not taking the best approach. And even if you’re collecting volumes of data at every touchpoint, do you really trust it and know how to get the best out of it?
Get past personalization paralysis
- Start small with simple personalization and scale up over time.
- Put together a framework based on your business KPIs and test creative ideas that talk to your audiences.
- Be smart and measure your resource usage.
- Personalization requires cross-departmental input, so get buy-in on your clear vision.
- Continually review and adjust tactics to get personalization just right.
Truth #3 – AI alone won’t save you
Artificial intelligence has long been pitched as a marketing silver bullet for automating repetitive tasks and improving customer service. Just to be clear, pinning all of your hopes and dreams on AI won’t automatically make your customer experience better. Algorithmic insights will undoubtedly have a tremendous impact on the world, but we’re not there yet. Yes, AI can augment and empower your human intelligence. It has the potential to facilitate your personalization, identify patterns in user journeys, and automate manual tasks. But your business will only benefit once you have a clear plan for how you’re going to drive business value through the application of AI.
First steps: Make AI more accessible
- Machine learning can help you apply data to create meaningful customer connections – leading to more transparent insights and accurate personalization initiatives.
- Having a strategy allows you to use marketing intelligence to make smarter decisions, drive more efficient data analysis, deliver personalization and increase efficiencies.
- Make sure you also have a team in place that allows you to focus on your objectives and review any technology gaps you may have.
See AI as amplification – Carter Jonas
A leading UK property consultancy and estate agent with a broad customer base across the residential, commercial and land markets, Carter Jonas relies on personal attention and highly customized digital engagement to capture and keep prospective customers’ attention across channels. Working with Delete, Carter Jonas implemented a Sitecore digital engagement platform that not only creates a single customer view, but records and evaluates every customer interaction. The company’s new website integrates and personalizes a previously fragmented customer experience through targeted content, automated responses, and tailored conversion funnels. Since the launch, Carter Jonas has seen significant growth in website traffic, on-site engagement, conversion rates and lead-based inquiries.
Truth #4 – Your content crisis won’t solve itself
It’s hard to produce enough tailored content when customers are demanding a more personal experience and channels are continually evolving. With the added pressure to be first to market with high quality, engaging narratives, your content crisis is a constant source of stress. One that isn’t going away. You aren’t creating content fast enough because you don’t have the people or budget to make it happen. And you can’t even begin to round up enough resources to produce the high volumes of content needed to power authentic personalization. Yet, quality content remains the foundation that good customer experiences are built on. You need to know where to invest your time and effort if you’re going to solve this problem.
First steps: Control your content
- Small wins with smart technology can have a huge impact on your output.
- Identify your greatest strengths and weaknesses within the four phases of the content lifecycle — planning, collaborative creation, delivery and optimization.
- Prioritize your strengths, strategic needs and ideal business outcomes, so you can bridge the gaps.
- Automate certain tasks to improve the efficiency and productivity of your content production team and scale up to meet your multi-channel content needs.
Truth #5 Customer data is your kryptonite
Strong business decisions are rooted in good data – you need it to validate your position to the C-Suite, hyper-personalize your content, and fuel AI models. But before you can make data your competitive advantage, you need to know what to do with it. You probably have plenty of the raw stuff, but not enough of the insights needed to build better customer experiences. And if you don’t trust the data you have, it’s going to pollute your personalization initiatives and affect data privacy. The cost of not taking this seriously is too great – particularly when navigating regulations such as GDPR. Every company will need to be able to capture, combine and secure data, while improving accuracy and trust in the data’s validity. Yet, so much data is sitting in inefficient silos, making it very difficult to access and action the information. And if you’re using the wrong technology, you can’t make any of this right.
Make your data more actionable
- Start by applying your existing knowledge to the data you’re collecting and create a process that uncovers valuable insights.
- If you can connect customer needs to a structured plan from the outset, you can untangle your data disaster and move forward.
- The ideal next step is to store your customer data in one accessible and secure system so it’s actionable across all of your marketing programs.
See data as differentiating – British Red Cross
Two weeks after launching a new Sitecore-powered donations platform, designed to scale rapidly for peak demand, the British Red Cross put it to the ultimate stress test; taking on 100% of online traffic generated by the One Love Manchester charity concert. Technology partner Friday had just three days to test and harden the platform before the event, which was broadcast to 22.6 million people in 43 countries worldwide. Over the weekend of the event, traffic was 7,400% higher than the previous weekend. During the threehour concert itself, nearly 700,000 users visited the donation site, with peak traffic of more than 33,000 simultaneous users and up to 823 donations a minute. The platform handled an average of 398,000 requests a minute at a blazingly fast response time of just 0.1 seconds. Conversion rates increased by 9% overall and by 15% for mobile. Since its launch, the platform has processed more than £6m in online donations. For the One Love Manchester campaign alone, it enabled the British Red Cross to raise over £800k.
The facts speak for themselves
1. See where the C-Suite disconnect lies and bridge the gap
A seat at the executive table doesn’t guarantee understanding or support for your digital and customer responsibilities. Work with the C-Suite to develop an alliance strategy that prioritizes investment in the right areas.
2. Get the personalization pay-off you’re looking for
It’s easy to overthink it, but by its very definition, personalization is personal. Devise a fit-for-purpose strategy and start small to make personalization your superpower.
3. Augment and empower human intelligence through people, processes and data
AI is not a silver bullet, but if you’re clear on how you want to drive business value through marketing intelligence, machine learning can help you on your way.
4. Scale up to meet your growing content needs
Producing enough of the right content is a daily battle, but the only way to get past it is to scale your output using smart technology, based on the strategic focus of your organization.
5. Turn raw data into pure insights
With the right technology platform, you take control and gather, manage, secure, trust and act on your customer data — making valuable insights your competitive advantage.