CMS Transition: Is it Time to Take Digital up a Notch?

Face to face interaction is going to be problematic for some time – we don’t know when this pandemic will be over. It’s a tough and super-competitive time in the hunt for digital business and mindshare.

It makes sense that digital engagement and interaction is more important than ever, and let’s face it, it’s not something we all do especially well. Customer journeys are still wildly fractured, and our knowledge of customers is still silo-based across the martech stack.

Basically, digital marketing often has the memory and retention of a goldfish. Five seconds later there’s no corporate memory of our most vital asset – the customer.

Our digital platforms quickly forget who our visitors are. We forget the steps they’ve already undertaken and we don’t personalise the experience to reduce friction, and to deliver that one thing that really resonates with a customer – that your brand knows them, values their business highly, and remembers them.

Until very recently, the realm of truly significant customer experience has been a mightily rarified space, integrated and world-class platforms were extremely costly, and took a lot of effort to get right.

Two market events have absolutely removed those barriers:

1. Enter the Cloud: Software and platform-as-a-service started to break the barriers to enterprise systems. Costs dropped in the race to subscription models and you don’t need to manage a mountain of servers in-house.
2. Vendor targeting has changed: The other huge shift has been the simple fact that enterprise vendors have maxed out their initial customer base. Big end of town vendors started to look at mid-market, as their previous hunting-grounds became congested and extremely competitive.

As a result, platforms like Sitecore are very affordable to companies who initially wrote them out of initial tenders as prohibitively expensive.

The Codehouse Ecosystem Experience

At Codehouse, we believe in the Ecosystem Experience – a philosophy that uses Sitecore as the connective tissue between data and the human experience across your martech stack. Fundamentally, Sitecore is a single platform to manage digital communications across channels – it uses a single metric to measure success whether we are measuring website conversions, or email campaign success.

Of course, Sitecore has a deep API to connect embedded lines of business systems. We don’t recommend a rip and replace approach to platforms where your team is already comfortable and productive – but, honestly, most martech solutions are barely used. If you’re not getting value out of your disparate systems, it may be time to examine what a comprehensive and integrated solution can provide.

Retire your old CMS?

Let’s take a quick look at why you should consider retiring your old content management system, and use this unforeseen pause in business-as-usual to significantly re-craft your digital offering:

• Cost: Right now, market leaders like Sitecore are affordable, and you can have the same power and capability as the largest brands on Earth. Sitecore is close in cost to its less capable, mid-market competitors like Kentico and Episerver. Of course, Sitecore leaves entry-level players like WordPress in the dust.
• Need: It’s beyond time that your company connected the story for your customers, and for your marketing efforts to deliver measurable digital marketing conversion uplift using personalisation and the connected Ecosystem Experience.
• Spread: Channel and platform proliferation has resulted in Frankenstein systems, with numerous solutions serving just one area of digital marketing. It’s a nightmare to manage and learn, and worst of all, it’s almost impossible to measure cross-channel marketing success, given every platform has its own analytics.
• Speed to market: Leaders like Sitecore have invested heavily in accelerators that allow agencies to build faster, more robust solutions using pre-built componentry for advanced website functionality.

Sitecore expertise

Agencies like Codehouse are harnessing all the above to deliver truly amazing business results – that’s why we’ve won 10 Sitecore awards – and it isn’t costing the earth to achieve, due to the maturity and interconnectedness of platforms like Sitecore.

Our 3-step path to digital maturity is designed to be fast, deliver proof points based on small, digestible project phases, and iterate to a full Ecosystem Experience.

As we transition out of the Covid-19, your brand has the opportunity to get closer to your customers – and deliver them the experience they deserve. It’s time.