Since the birth of advertising, the pursuit of personalization has been the governing principle of its growth. In the recent decades, the inflow of humongous information allows us to access data about customers, and create advertisements to sync with their needs.
From simply getting across the right message at the right time to the right person, we are shifting to an approach where we try to answer the perspective of customers. In short, the motivating force for marketing is to create a meaningful experience for the customer, which is produced from a culmination of holistically observing her as a person living her life.
Recently, under the brilliant tagline “Stop marketing better – start marketing differently,” Sitecore explored the realm of context marketing. Context marketing is largely the capacity to send across content which sync with the experience of your customer. Such a synchronization is possible by gathering information and producing insights using the interaction with your brand, past experience with competitors and the current demands of your customer.
Sitecore Cloud is designed to harness the scope, powers and swiftness of context marketing. We try to find who they are without a map of where, when, how and most importantly, why. This is the target of contextual marketing. In the words of Rebecca Lieb, “Personalization is no longer the be-all and end-all, it’s now being overtaken by technologies that allow for the establishment of even more profound relevance and connection, both in marketing and overall customer experience.”
In May 2017, Sitecore introduced the next-gen PaaS (platform-as-a-service) native support for the community of Sitecore solutions. With Microsoft Azure’s PaaS development and deployment environment, Sitecore Cloud allows marketers to carry out digital initiatives in the framework of customer interactions with the brand. The recent decision to introduce Web Experience Manager (XM) to Azure has thus been expanded to offer the complete Sitecore Commerce and Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) on Azure.
Initially, customers are provided the option of basic web-and-mobile content management which can then be extended to cover regions like e-mail automation, commerce and others. The choice can be made depending on budget and environment. Such flexibility allows companies to choose a framework which will be in sync with their future vision. Along with the dynamic nature of plans, Azure provides the benefit of its swiftness and feature-rich capacities to allow organizations to market at a quicker pace, scale their activities according to the demand and to significantly control their total cost of ownership.
Benefits of Sitecore-Azure integration
Commenting on the advantages of integrating Azure’s powers with the intelligence of Sitecore, Ryan Donovan-the senior VP of Product Management at Sitecore, pointed out that the integration of Sitecore and Azure, facilitates swifter digital marketing. It reduces the previously encountered long queues for executing campaigns. Since its inception, Sitecore has designed its platform to house Microsoft technology. The idea of bringing digital marketing cloud to Microsoft Azure is a testimony to their symbiotic relationship of development towards providing their customers with high-quality marketing in a shorter time period.
Setting a new benchmark in the digital marketing industry, Sitecore Cloud accompanied by Azure, challenges to deliver an entire digital marketing ecosystem, which includes integrated campaigns, AR/VR digital journeys and Internet of Things within an hour! The plan is to bring to the company’s fingertips the power of marketing their brand as a response to their customer’s immediate needs, framed in the window of long-term relationship. A successful case study can be found at Kodak Alaris. Siddhartha Bhattacharya – VP Information Management, Global Marketing recalls how they changed their focus from being product-centric to customer-centric, and easily managed customer challenges using Sitecore Cloud on Azure.
In short, couched in Azure, Sitecore Cloud harnesses the capability of Microsoft’s world-class data centers to provide marketing and IT team the following benefits:
- A Dynamic Environment: Along with the option of complete management of the cloud by Sitecore, both partners and customers at Sitecore can also manage their own deployments without difficulty.
- Not days or weeks, only an hour: The Azure Marketplace is a point-and-click away from deploying Sitecore XP/XM. It is easy to deliver the entire customized Sitecore environments by using the Azure Resource Manager templates.
- Scaling as time demands: Depending on the growth of programs and campaigns, companies can scale up and out through the pay-as-you-go plan.
Have you experienced Sitecore Cloud yet? Check our solutions as a Sitecore partner and Microsoft Azure.
Related blogs:
Deliver unique brand experiences with Sitecore’s Experience Marketing Cloud
Real Time Personalization in Sitecore Experience Profile
