Sidewalk custom cms vs integrated platforms

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CUSTOM CMS VERSUS INTEGRATEDPLATFORM

©2015 SIDEWALK - CUSTOMER EXPERIENCED | WHITE PAPER: Custom CMS v/s Integrated Platforms - 1 / 14

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FROM CUSTOM BUILT CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS TO INTEGRATED PLATFORMS

A SIDEWALK WHITE PAPER ON WHY YOUR CUSTOM CMS

WILL KILL YOUR DIGITAL PROJECT, YOUR TEAMS MOTIVATION

AND THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF YOUR ORGANIZA-

TION ALTOGETHER.


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BACK THEN . . . FLASHBACK:

As a digital marketer 15 years ago (it wasn’t called that back then, we know), you just

invented the ultimate in “marketing and communication techniques”:

I will inject the personalised content I want my visitor to read at the precise moment that my visitor thinks he needs to read my content. On top of that, I’ll capture all his moves, write these moves in a big database and cross / upsell my more expensive products.

The rest is world domination . . .

THE SCOPE WAS CLEAR:

- a Content management for non-techies

- use content from PIM/DAM, CRM or other back end systems

- Manual user management & product distribution matrices

- Cookies, Registration, . . .

The “process” of starting a “project process” would start with a “kick-off process

meeting”. Remember?

A painstaking depiction of the invention of hot water (not “How hot?”, but “What is

water?”). All would gather around the camp fire, look at “Mr. Stupid” who came up

with this idea and wait for that moment when the CEO asks: “How much will it cost?”

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BACK TO THE FUTURE:

Back “then” CMS vendors vended technological solutions for showing hypertext

mark-up language text on a screen. Just build the intelligence on top of that!

So, yes, you were at the mercy of a bunch of highly paid engineers and Redbull® /

IceTea® / Pepsi® slurping über-nerds that couldn’t care less about what your visitor

got to read on your site.

If you had the chance of working with some visionary technical lead (read: one with

some common sense) and some crazy UX/UI team, they’d understand your “needs”

and would back you up - somewhere along the road - until budgets ran out and you

got sacked. Or worse, demoted to service desk expert (You’re good at communica-

tion, right?).

To do what you wanted to do, these so-called customisations (customisation from

scratch or from any other scratch stage), you needed days, weeks, or months of de-

velopment. Available resources (India, Pakistan, China, . . .) and truckloads of money

too. And then, then you had some kind of Frankenstein system that needed to dry-

run for weeks and weeks, because the first registrar on the site broke the thing by

clicking the SEND button. You had a myriad of different obstacles, constraints and

incompatibilities with other systems to manage.

LIFE WASN’T GOOD THEN! You have to exaggerate at least a little to make your point.

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THE GOOD PART IS NOW. Of all of the above, some vendors of “integrated systems” have put their money

where their mouth is. They came up with updates and upgrades of their products

(in waves, following available third-party technologies, or inventing some). Some

consolidated their system, leaving the responsibility to developers. Other solution

vendors have tried hard, and failed even harder.

The few vendors that are now leaders in all kinds of “Quadrants” and other compar-

ison lists have managed to fulfil this promise: the promise of empowering marketers

(online / offline), to activate a full set of tools, utilities and pretty cool stuff. And all

these goodies were integrated into one communication platform (or experience plat-

form). In the process they gave expensive development teams an open framework

where they could work fast, without risk of overengineering-by-customisation but

with excellent ROI and low cost of ownership.

Suddenly marketers stopped bickering with the IT department about what market-

ing needed for their next big campaign. And IT? They focused on what they loved

best, not reinventing a Content Management System every 6 months. Instead they

went looking for process or specific issue improvement (Cost per Lead, Time on task,

…). Even the CEO and the CFO had smiles on their faces. The number-crunchers and

report-lovers had the times of their lives. Organisations were switching to a culture of

measurement and optimisation to prove the ROI. All kinds of CxO’s found a common

ground to talk. Not to talk about which solution they needed, but what they could

do with it.

Nowadays, having an industry grade vendor delivering an Integrated Platform which

contains a complete suite of tools for communication proves to be very cost-effec-

tive. You don’t have to manage a lot of different applications, connectors, hosting

levels, contracts & subcontractors, third parties, internal departments, etc . . .

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THE NON-BELIEVERS OF INTEGRATED PLATFORMS?

They quickly stopped nagging about vendor locking and blackboxes.

Sadly today (2000 years later), many organisations, companies (big & small) still

struggle with this customisation-hell. This situation hinders growth and is a constant

killjoy when it comes to innovation. Developers are languid and their managers are

reluctant to take more risks.

If we modify the system, “where” will it break? Ah, yes, uh, gosh, . . . well, uh, I-donoo . . . !

Choosing for an integrated platform is actually more about common sense (saving

big money and winning momentum) than changing the organisation (called Change

Management) as such. Using an integrated platform benefits from the thousands of

other customers using the same platform, the same tools, the same features.

It’s a vendor, you can shout at him!

BACK TO BASICS

The basic challenges today (2000 years later) remain the same, but technologies

and opportunities have evolved. You still need to track, trace and analyse all your

visitors’ movements (not only how the website is doing). You need to gather and

aggregate all this data in a system that works seamlessly with your back end (be it

ERP, CRM, Cash register, PIM/DAM, warehouse management, . . . ). Once this data is

made available, you need to activate it on your “content”. On top of that, you need

your system to be device (desk / tablet / smartphone)-ready. EVERY-WARE

Contextualisation and personalisation (your visitor reads WHAT he should read

- according to you) will boost conversion on the site. All of the other touchpoints will

use and augment (I/O) the data warehousing.

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Offline media, iBeacons, apps, adds, even other sites (by federation - sending or

getting information on sites that are not managed by your organisation) need to be

tracked, traced and managed by your system. You need to avoid breaking the cus-

tomer experience flow.

Now, huge loads of data need to be read, interpreted, reported and shared. Site An-

alytics are cool, but do you know what your visitor is doing before, during and after

he visited your website?

Once the setup is done and the foundation is laid, you’ll need some tools to get

cracking! We prepared a short list of some of the tools we, at Sidewalk get (out -of-

the-box) with Sitecore XP as an Integrated Experience Platform.

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THE TWELVE COMMANDMENTS WHY YOU SHOULD GET RID OF YOUR CUSTOM BUILT CMSDON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH, HERE WE GO:

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GEO-IP LOCALISATION OR GPS LOCALISATION:

When loading the site (desk / tablet / mobile) we know where the visitor is. This lets

us choose country, language, version, culture, dialect, . . .

LANGUAGE FALL-BACK:

When everything else fails (content / language / culture void),

then the visitor gets content anyway.

DEVICE DETECTION:

When your visitor is sitting on a bus checking your website on his smartphone, you

will not want him to drop-off because he has to scroll down 10 times before getting

this CTA.

OMNI-CHANNEL TOUCHPOINTS:

All this said, wherever your visitor checks your website (GEO-IP / Device / timestamp

/ . . . ): you will need to know what he did. The next touchpoint may not be on the bus

but in the couch on the tablet multi-tasking with the tv screen and the kids, or at the

office (no kids there, right). The same data, not the same experience.

BACK-END CONNECTIONS (PIM-DAM / CRM / ERP / CASH REGISTER / . . . ):

Speaking of data. Where will you get yours? Data (not only “content”) is everywhere.

Working with many organisations and brands, we notice a lot of opportunities for

our customer (and for us, yes) to set up connectors to their existing data. Ranging

from CRM, ERP, cash registers or all the visitor data that you just captured has to

be matched with your customer data. As an example, 20 years of CRM data in your

database is great. What if you could sanitise, aggregate and optimise this data using

visitor data? Connectors can (but don’t have to) work both ways. We know, security

and stuff . . .

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THIS IS A LIST OF FEATURES, TOOLS & NATIVE MODULES THAT SHOULD BE AVAILABLE IN INTEGRATED PLATFORMS!

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Your existing product information (in a PIM) and assets (in a DAM) are a blessing if

you need to (intelligently) propose your best product offering for the best visitor

(converting customer). Your PIM/DAM should not only be serving product owners in

your organisation.

CONTEXTUALISATION & PERSONALISATION:

From that moment onwards, when we know (and YES we do) who did what, where

and how, we will deliver him, the visitor, the best offering he was expecting. On the

bus he’ll get a mindboggling teaser urging him to click this wonderful CTA. The tablet

offers him to register using the two-field webform (looking for the remote now). At

the office (maybe even depending on the hour of the day - NSFW!) you will give him

the time to adjust his mind and look, read and choose.

As the data comes from some hassle-free data warehouse, somewhere in the Cloud,

your marketers will be able to come up with the most brilliant schemes (we have to

be clear about that too) to allure, mesmerise and convert your visitors.

Hey, don’t forget that you also know what the previous touchpoints were. Now, you

can act accordingly. Frustration level for the visitor: ZERO! You, the hero.

VISITORS PROFILING:

While your visitor is strolling through these predictive journeys, you are (at first as an

anonymous visitor, then as a known visitor) capturing his every move. These moves

will sort out what kind of persona we are talking to. Mr. Mark Eathing or Miss Aaith

Thea. Your back end (PIM-DAM / CRM / ERP / cash register / . . . ) will be queried to

propose the matching data, content, action, . . .

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MARKETING AUTOMATION & ENGAGEMENT:

When you have loads of data and even more ideas to contact your visitors, you really

don’t want to hire someone to push a button just for sending a “thank you”-email,

a confirmation, a reminder or an “It’s has been a while”-email or anything that can

be automated. You need an intuitive dashboard where you can set up the commu-

nication flow. If a visitor has filled in a download form or was tagged as “called by

helpdesk”, something big has to happen. But not per se by a human. The creation of

those processes have to be managed by the people that communicate to your visitor

(marketers, sales, content creators), not by your developers. They are having a ball

doing amazing optimisation to the platform.

MAILING PLATFORMS:

We, at Sidewalk, activate email content the same way in which we manage website

content. It’s another channel and it’s still very up-close-and-personal. The same data,

content and profiles are used to send out personalised emails with the same touch-

point value (track & trace) as the website. The connected databases are used to

populate the mail and the visitor database (in the platform) is augmented every time.

We are done with bulk emailing that burns your data with frustrating non-personal

messages.

A/B & MULTIVARIATE TESTING (MACHINE LEARNING):

Now you have data, content, profiles and process automation. It’s time for you to

start testing. Do we know if the visual of the cat works better than the visual of the

dog? What will have a higher conversion rate, a fancy email with pretty visuals or a

plain text email with your name and phone number on? When the CEO’s assistant

says, “I think that . . . “ you now shut’m-up by slapp’n him with the test results. Works

like a charm, every single time.

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ANALYTICS & REPORTING:

OK, we have data, content, profiles, processes and we’ve even tested. All those visi-

tors’ moves, the site data, the aggregations and inbound/outbound communication

is accessible for you on site level (what page works best), content block level (what

content block/visual/title has a nice ratio), profile level (what) and visitor level.

Hey, you might even use a tag manager for all other analytics reporting tools.

FEDERATION (MANAGING EXTERNAL SITES):

Some of our clients tell us they have a multiplicity of custom built sites where “If we

touch them, they are going to break.” So we use a federation model that allows us to

not only place (personalised) content on a non-Sitecore site, it also lets us capture

visitors’ moves on other sites that are not managed by the integrated platform.

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At Sidewalk we are happy to work with the Sitecore team. They promised us a rose

garden, we got one without the thorns. They allow us and our customers to focus on

what’s important. NOT THE TOOL BUT WHAT YOU DO WITH THAT TOOL.

Every time we launch a new site or we finalise a Sitecore migration, we notice that

the integrated platform has become a common ground for all of the silos, depart-

ments, n-levels (or internal enemies) to start talking about WHAT they want to do.

Not about HOW.

Sidewalk is devoted to providing the best possible Sitecore expertise for optimised

online communication, customer engagement and customer intelligence. Our mar-

keting Intelligence and e-Business integration completes 20 years of “digital” knowl-

edge and expertise. All embedded in the company.

SIDEWALK is an end-to-end digital communication company (a little broader than a

plain agency) with great Sitecore expertise (www.sitecore.net as Marketing Experi-

ence Platform). We have over 25 Sitecore-certified developers, a bunch of strategists,

UX/UI’s and the necessary evil of accounts & sales. All Belgian locals, all focused on

marketing, data (big & personal) & communication strategies (yes, in plural).

SIdewalk is part of the Comma Group (www.commagroup.be), a cluster of very high

skilled pros focused on all things digital.

SITECORE is a .NET-based Experience Marketing Platform, positioned by Gartner

as the most visionary product, by Forrester as a strong performer, by us as the right

tool that delivers what all marketers are dreaming of. Without having to reinvent hot

water or pay for the invention (again).

ABOUT SIDEWALK & SITECORE

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CONTACT US: [email protected]

@SIDEWALKTHUNDER

WWW.SIDEWALK.BE

Our offices are strategically located to cover Belgium.

We have an office near you:

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Sidewalk custom cms vs integrated platforms

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