The future of marketing is digital. Whether the focus of your digital marketing strategy is on content, social media or email marketing, it’s important that you have a solid CMS (content management system) that can integrate all the moving pieces of your digital marketing campaign. As a CMS hosting expert, PointClick uses the Sitecore CMS platform for many of our customers’ CMS needs. We’re big Sitecore fans, and here’s why:
- It’s simple. Content editors and marketers can have complete control over their digital marketing strategies. Our customers tell us all the time – they want a CMS that gives them complete control and is also easy to use.
- It provides everything you need in a single, unified platform. The Sitecore CMS platform combines web content management, marketing automation, email marketing, social media, e-commerce, optimization, and analytics into a single platform – giving users complete control over their digital marketing.
- It’s easy to use. Since all components of your digital marketing are integrated into a single platform, it’s really easy to use.
- It’s a great choice for digital marketing. The bottom line is that the Sitecore CMS platform is built for digital experiences.
Not only do we think the Sitecore CMS platform is remarkable — it has won the awards to prove it. Sitecore CMS was named leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant in Web Content Management for the fifth consecutive year in a row. It also won the CMS Critic’s People’s Choice Award for Best Enterprise CMS.
The advantage of being Sitecore experts is that we are privy to Sitecore CMS best practices, because we live and breathe the platform every day. So we are pleased to share the “10 Things You Should Know About Using Sitecore CMS Platform for Digital Marketing”.
10 Things You Should Know About Using Sitecore CMS Platform for Digital Marketing
1. Content Supported in a Variety of Languages
If your business is expanding globally, you’re in luck. The Sitecore CMS platform makes it easy for you to build a multi-language website. Not only is it easy to build a site in several languages to service your customers across the globe, but it’s also easy to manage a multi-language site. What this means is that if you make changes to your site, the changes will be integrated across all sites. You can make each change unique to a specific language or share it across all languages. Also, there’s no need to make software changes to support new languages.
2. WYSIWYG for Content Editing
The WYSIWYG editor makes it easy for just about anyone to edit web copy. If you know Microsoft Word, you can use this editor. The user can easily click and edit copy directly on the web page with the Page Editor interface. The editor is fully customizable and offers users several formatting controls and the ability to easily embed media assets, including video and images. For the more technical users, there is also the ability to view in HTML.
3. Responsive Design on Mobile and Multi-Devices
The responsive web design of the platform transforms the content to any format, including mobile phones, tablets, PDF or RSS. The version of the site that is displayed on the device is also minimized to allow for faster navigation, which leads to improved overall performance, regardless of the device.
4. Content Reuse, Aggregation and Syndication
The Sitecore CMS platform allows for the reuse of content across multiple documents or web pages. Also, editors can aggregate content from various external data sources, allowing for seamless creation of web pages and documents that share content from a variety of sources. The Sitecore CMS platform provides a seamless experience for content and digital marketing.
5. Manage Multiple Sites at Once
One of the greatest things about the Sitecore CMS platform is that with only one license you can manage multiple domains, sub-sites and microsites at once. As a result, you can publish content to one or more locations and share content across many locations at once. This is an important benefit for large enterprises that may have several sites for different companies, brands and/or products.
6. Integrates With Social Media
The Sitecore CMS platform easily integrates with forums, newsletters, web-forms, RSS feeds, blogs and surveys, and works seamlessly with social media – a critical component to any digital campaign. Since launching Sitecore Social Powered by Komfo in November of 2014, Sitecore added social media management and marketing capabilities to the platform, including engagement metrics and analytics to provide the user with real-time insight into customer behavior and the ability to personalize the digital experiences to each customer in real-time.
7. Full Control Over Content
As an editor, it’s important that you have complete control over your content. The Sitecore CMS platform gives users the ability to schedule the publishing, expiration or archiving date of content. There is also a built-in content staging area where you can edit, review and approve content prior to publishing externally.
8. Organize Content With Item Buckets
If you are in charge of distributing a lot of content, Sitecore makes it possible for you to manage the amount of content you create with an “Item Bucket.” The folder can be used to store large amounts of raw, unstructured content. You can transform any folder into an Item Bucket and create subdivisions of items without concern that the basic structure might be affected. Item Buckets allow the user to organize content in a logical format that increases the performance of the search engine. A single Item Bucket can contain millions of content items without slowing down the user experience.
9. New Launch Pad Screen
If you are using Sitecore 8, you will notice a brand new launch pad screen that allows you to navigate to different areas of Sitecore – similar to the Desktop, Editor or Content mode –without needing to log in or out. Instead, you can click on the launch pad button located at the top left corner of your screen.
10. Sitecore Tracks Marketing and Sales Campaigns
The Sitecore CMS platform makes it possible to obtain measurable results and real-time facts, so you can transform your traffic into leads. You can set numeric values to activities on your website to find out how engaged a visitor is with your content. The engagement value scores can be included in a customer’s profile and you can monitor them throughout the sales funnel. The marketing automation tool allows you to set up activities to be triggered when a customer achieves a certain goal; for instance, an automatic email with specific content, or a call from your customer service rep. The marketing reports also allow you to understand what campaigns and channels are working for you so you can optimize.
Let PointClick Help You With the Sitecore CMS Platform
If you are interested in learning more about the Sitecore CMS platform, or how PointClick can help you integrate a CMS platform to assist you in your digital marketing, contact us today. We’d be happy to answer your questions, and we look forward to hearing from you.