Content Marketing
Technology Evaluation and Website Creation
Problem:
A small, cloud-based software company in E&P wanted to incorporate methodologies and technology to better understand their customer. They recognized the importance of tracking customer behavior and using the information to provide a seamless end-to-end customer experience, but lacked the internal expertise to manage a project of this magnitude.
Gaining a complete view of a customer's journey is challenging. You need not only their purchase experience but all the data before and after the transaction - from first awareness to their post-purchase experience (i.e. loyalty programs) in the hopes of building a long-term relationship.
The benefits of monitoring customer behavior and engagement include:
- A holistic view of the customer's interactions across all touch points
- Understanding the "why" behind customer behavioral analytics
- Visualizing a "future-state" customer experience to spur innovation
- Serving as a change management and governance tool
- Communicating and aligning an organization around a customer-centric model
Solution:
In order to accomplish our client’s end-to-end customer goals, we recommended they adopt a data-driven marketing strategy and establish a technology stack that would offer:
- Seamless marketing automation
- The ability to track digital interactions
- Personalized content based on the visitor
- The ability to provide a 360 view of customer engagements
As a small company, our client wanted to avoid purchasing, integrating and managing several platforms, and were solely interested in a CMS-Marketing Automation combo. Working together with their IT department and Lead Developer, we began evaluating Adobe, Episerver, Sitecore and Hubspot to find the ‘best fit’ for the organization and their desired business objectives.
Ultimately, the client chose Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) complete with the Email Marketing and Marketing Control Panel Modules which would give them the ability to:
- personalize content,
- run A|B tests for website optimization,
- monitor the effectiveness of email marketing,
- have visibility into all of these interactions plus their website traffic,
- create several independent websites all managed in a single platform, and
- integrate with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM system.
As an embedded marketing team for our client, we worked daily with the stakeholders to create the business requirements, manage the development of two new websites, provide the functional and UX requirements, and create web-enabled demand generation campaigns to drive conversions for their products. We also created a lead scoring system that would be used to help write the integration requirements between the CMS & CRM systems, and managed their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy.
Outcome:
- Increased efficiency - We worked with the development team to setup XP’s Content Editor so that content could be published easily and efficiently for future marketers that aren't HTML proficient. We also created the taxonomy for the asset, image and component libraries with associated metadata, so assets could be reused on multiple pages with only one master reference file.
- Analytics - Once their campaigns were created, we used Experience Analytics to collect and track data on content performance and effectiveness.
- Improved SEO ranking - XP optimizes for search engines with components like URL structure, page titles and headers, meta description and meta tags. We implemented all the SEO descriptions and tagging such that their websites appear in the number 1 and 2 positions when searching specific phrases, keywords and user intent-driven questions.
- Lead qualification - We used the Experience Profile functionality of Sitecore, to monitor individual user interactions that contributed to our lead scoring system that allocated specific points for visitor interactions as they engaged with the content. This allowed us to qualify leads and conduct experiments to improve conversion rates.
- Mobile optimization - XP, like many CMS platforms, incorporates responsive web design principles and automatically tailors content for different devices, however there are still UX design requirements for mobile that are slightly different. We created these UX requirements and manage the QA testing to ensure a consistent experience independent of device.
By implementing a responsive and intuitive CMS with an integrated marketing automation module, our client was able to manage the customer relationship holistically rather than on a disjointed individual tactic-by-tactic basis. The seamless hand-off between Marketing and Sales allowed for early identification of high-performing content based on engagement and lead scoring, and enabled the ability to allocate resources (personnel and budget) to support the marketing efforts that were delivering high-quality leads.