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The answer to this question largely depends on what exactly your organisation's needs are. There are a lot of content management systems (CMS) available that could potentially fulfil your organisation's digital needs; but, there are only a handful of CMSs that would be able to completely fulfil your digital objectives. In order to find the best CMS for your organisation, you'll need to take into consideration what features and capabilities are most important to you.
Your CMS should, at the very least, allow you to easily create, edit, and publish content. The easier it is to use, the more time and energy you can put into developing a content strategy. If you find yourself needing to make a lot of changes or updates to your content on a regular basis, you'll want a CMS that has strong organisational features, so your dynamic content is always accessible and easy to find - even as it's moving around or changing on your site.
In addition, some content management systems have the ability to integrate with strong authentication mechanisms to improve security and prevent unauthorised access to sensitive information. When choosing a CMS for your business, be sure to check that it integrates well with your chosen enterprise security provider or third-party authentication systems.
What is Sitecore?
Sitecore is a powerful enterprise CMS that enables businesses to innovate and grow rapidly. With Sitecore, you can manage your content, perform tests and optimisations, personalise your content, and automate your workflow - all in one place. This makes it an incredibly powerful tool for delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. Additionally, Sitecore also collects and analyses your visitors' interactions with your site, both online and offline. This data helps your team understand what's happening on your site and how to use it to improve the user experience.
Sitecore's architecture enables developers to deploy and manage code across multiple sites using a single instance, which reduces the amount of time needed to make minor changes - a huge advantage for developers! Website development using Sitecore offers a great and improved experience for developers, making it easier to manage code and make changes. Sitecore development provides an opportunity for developers to manage and deliver content easily. This is helpful because it allows developers to separate their work into distinct environments. In addition, this feature has several advantages, such as scalability, security, administration, and performance.
On the other hand, for Marketers, Sitecore offers various features. Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) provides marketers with the ability to personalize content for customers based on customer needs, wants and past actions. This way, marketers can create more relevant experiences for their customers. Additionally, Sitecore's Email Experience Manager (EXM) feature helps marketers send emails through an automated process. By using the scheduler and the reusable content features, marketing automation can become less painful.
Benefits of Sitecore
Sitecore was first launched in 2001 and has since then been able to make use of the .NET framework in order to offer its users a more flexible, scalable, and secure experience. As an enterprise-level .NET-based CMS, Sitecore is most notably known for its Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) feature. This allows for a 360-degree view of your website's visitors, giving you deep insights and data on their behaviour and interests. This information can be incredibly useful in marketing automation activities or powerful personalisation.
Sitecore is world-renowned for its intelligent framework that authors and developers can use to build websites using codeless templates, which keeps data and design separate. It is used by thousands of businesses that operate across multiple sites and languages. Known for its continual evolution, Sitecore is a CMS platform that was built from the ground up to revolutionise web applications. Sitecore is a powerful content management system that allows you to publish content across any site or channel. It features advanced personalisation with AI capabilities, as well as other interesting and powerful features like marketing tools and integration capabilities. With each update, Sitecore is offering new innovative tools for its users, making it an even more powerful CMS.
Why Sitecore Needs to be Upgraded?
A Sitecore upgrade will deliver a range of improved capabilities, including development, marketing, and editing. It will also strengthen your Sitecore website by delivering powerful features that the previous version system doesn't have - such as machine learning, advanced analytics, and improved personalisation capabilities. By upgrading to a new version of Sitecore, you will align your business with today's demands and deliver better digital experiences to your customers. This could potentially save you a significant investment in time and resources.
Upgrading to the latest Sitecore version, version 10.1, will provide you with new infrastructure and itemised integrations that aim to improve the experience for different business user personas, including developers, digital marketers, and administrators. As part of the upgrade process, be sure to itemise and track all integration points from the current active Sitecore environment. This will ensure a smooth transition to the new version and help avoid any disruptions to your business operations.
If you're upgrading to new infrastructure, you'll likely have to whitelist and grant exceptions to integration points across your Sitecore instance. That can be especially tricky if the network or infrastructure team is separate from the Sitecore team. Sitecore provides tools for upgrading and migrating analytics data, but it's realistic to evaluate whether or not that should be included as part of your upgrade project.
Sitecore 10 comes with a new and improved launchpad! It's now easier to see the difference between Commerce, Marketing Applications, Content Editing, and Access Management. And the Sitecore Experience Database (xDB) is now less likely to cause performance issues when used for analytics and personalization purposes. This is because the content management and STD reporting roles have been separated, which reduces the amount of data that is being consumed.
However, as with any other web development project, upgrading to a newer version of Sitecore can be a tricky process. Our best recommendation is for you to take the time to plan the upgrade out carefully.
Top Case Studies About Sitecore in 2022
Danone and The Mother’s Journey
Danone Nutricia used engaging content for new mothers to dramatically increase growth.
Challenge
- Achieve marketing and sales ROI by moving beyond low-performing traditional advertising and outbound marketing techniques.
- Become brand of choice by providing relevant customer advice and personalised experiences to customers.
- Measure and optimise customer experience quality around the impact of the content, tools, and services on its loyalty website Nutricia For You.
- Move into e-commerce and start selling directly to mothers in addition to traditional channels.
Solution
- Sitecore Experience
- Platform™ 8 with the Sitecore Experience Database™.
- Experience Analytics.
- Personalisation and testing.
- Commerce Connect.
- Email Experience Manager.
- List Manager.
- Experience Automation.
Results
- Revenue wins:
- Eight-fold growth in month-over-month revenues since launching its “Mother’s Journey” program.
- Sales growth: 75% each month with an average monthly re-buy growth of 140%.
- Download increases: App downloaded by 28% of new mothers in Benelux in its first year post-launch.
- CX success: Competencies increased across marketing and partner stakeholders.
- New revenue stream: Created a sales channel built on direct, one-to-one relationships.
- Personalisation benefits: Conversion uplifts from 19% to 205% across sales, membership signups, and engagement.
- AB and MV testing outcomes: Delivered an ROI more than 95 times the cost to set up and execute a single test.
Chick-fil-A
- Increases online revenue through customer engagement and loyalty.
- Extends legacy of customer focus, community service, business innovation, into digital world.
Challenge
- Increase customer engagement and loyalty.
- Increase online revenue.
- Extend focus on customer, community service to digital presence.
- Personalise digital interactions.
- Leverage storytelling to inform, engage.
Solution
- Sitecore® Experience Platform™ (XP) (v8.2) (v9 planned).
- Sitecore Path Analyser.
- Sitecore Analytics.
Results
- Leveraged context marketing to personalise digital content
- Integrated online ordering to increase revenue.
- Through cross-selling, online breakfast catering orders rose 450%; Engagement Value rose 143%.
- Targeted campaigns raised new product page view 44%; catering orders 16%.
- “Fan” customer segment story page views rose 175%; Engagement Value 85%.
Atlantis, The Palm
Creating 5-star omni channel experiences Atlantis, The Palm, Dubai delivers a best-in-class digital experience to match its world-class resort destination.
Challenge
- Acquire new customers.
- Serve a multi-national audience representing different needs and buying patterns.
- Increase revenue through cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
- Increase loyalty through ratings and reviews.
Solution
Create scalable and powerful marketing experience that personally services multiple audiences managed and executed by a single agile team.
Results
- 46% increase in value per site visit.
- Lowered bounce rates by 35%.
- Personalised offers drove conversion uplifts ranging from 50% to 1,500%.
- Increased time on page and the number of pages visited, per session.
Conclusion
Content management systems can be built in three different ways: traditional, decoupled, or headless. The CMS architecture you choose depends on how complex your website will be and how much flexibility you want in terms of how editors and developers work together, which channels you can deliver your content to and how quickly, and how easy it is to make changes to content across channels.
As a world-renowned CMS, Sitecore requires a significant investment to build and support. In order to successfully utilise its marketing capabilities, you need to staff and train technically savvy digital marketers and dedicated content creators and managers. Make sure you understand the differences between digital marketers, content creators, and content managers so that your CMS doesn’t hold you back from providing the best possible experience to your visitors. With a clear understanding of these roles, you will be able to take advantage of your CMS' full power.
If your organisation can afford both the license and implementation, Sitecore is an excellent CMS for your business. It is a remarkably powerful integration platform and superb marketing solution.
Contact us now to help upgrading your Sitecore.