Companies are trying to outdo each other today in the field of digital marketing. The influx of customer data, the interactions that they have with the brand through multiple channels, all of it, are fragmented pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle that an organization tries to piece together. Building a long-lasting relationship with the customer gets your brand to go beyond just ‘likes’, ‘clicks’ and ‘tweets’. It is about knowing the customer as a whole, treating each of the million customers as special and delivering a personalized experience for each of them.

Sitecore stands apart from the crowd of marketers with its experience marketing cloud that promises to deliver a real experience in real time as opposed to simply converting customer presence to sales. The Sitecore Experience Marketing cloud does not treat marketing in a clinical manner, by limiting it to merely bringing more sales and revenue to the company. Rather, it uses a holistic approach by focusing on the customer as a whole, knowing himand catering to what he needs and wants.

Real marketing Vs. Digital marketing

According to Darren Guarnaccia, CSO for Sitecore, while organizations made inroads into experience marketing andinitiated campaign management across all channels like email, website, mobile, and social, they still struggled to connect these channels and leverage the connected experience.In other words, as companies got entangled with the technical aspects of digital marketing, the human touch to real marketing got lost; this is where Sitecore surged ahead with its experience marketing.

Guarnaccia elucidates the journey of Sitecore that began as a web content management and mobile marketing platform, going on to have email capabilities, a nurture engine and marketing automation added to handle the timing and multi-channel elements. Its foray into e-commerce now means that it can execute transactional elements as well.

Sitecore’s integrated Experience Database is a data repository that hosts consolidated information about a customer taken from multiple marketing channels. This brings to you all the customer data in one place, giving you an in-depth insight for each of your customers, thus enabling to you know the real person behind the product purchase.

When we say customer data, it translates to all the interactions a customer makes with the company brand across all the channels like social media, email, website and mobile. This gives you a 360-degree view of a customer’s profile, online behaviour and a record of the multiple ways they have engaged with the brand across all channels.

Personalized Experience

Every customer is different and consequently his needs are unique. Experience marketing is all about giving a human touch to the digital relationship with your customers, paying attention to their unique needs, gleaning information about each of the customers through their interactions with the brand and providing personalized content based on their preferences and tastes in real-time. This also means that the brand concentrates on pushing those products to the fore that the customer wishes to have and not the ones you think the customer needs to have.

Sitecore provides simple tools to observe customer behaviour, for example, where they are in the product cycle, how they behave, what interests them, and so forth. Predictive intelligence anticipates their moves and allows you to customize their experience in real-time.

Sitecore’sdata collection is automated. The data repository carries up-to-date information about dynamic customer segments based on criteria like behaviour, cross-channel interaction, location, campaigns that interested them, etc. which makes it a very handy tool to manage and deliver your brand experience across all your digital channels, automatically.

Whether or not your content has worked can be instantly tested and measures to refine or optimize its performance can be done via predictive analysis in real-time.

This, according to Mark Floisand, Sitecore’s VP of product marketing, is the key factor that sets apart Sitecore from its competitors. He says,

 “Everything is connected automatically, it is already a complete, integrated platform.Our competitors certainly aspire to reach that level of integration, but right now, their data is mostly an amalgam of disparate systems.“

Implementing the experience

Sitecore provides a range of cloud provider choices that makes hosting and implementing the Sitecore Experience marketing cloud a breeze. Once implemented, you can be ensured of the following benefits:

• Quick and easy deployment
• Scalability as per your requirements
• Management of system updates, patching, and maintenance

A single connected experience like this that allows you to customize every customer’s brand experience and consistently deliver optimized content in real-time across all channels, makes building long-lasting relationships with customers easier and no longer a lofty dream.