The Sitecore Experience Platform on Microsoft Azure. Empowering modern marketers to put the customer at the center of everything they do

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1 The Sitecore Experience Platform on Microsoft Azure Empowering modern marketers to put the customer at the center of everything they do

2 Table of contents The modern CMO... 3 The CMO s mission... 3 The value of an end-to-end experience platform... 4 The ideal experience platform... 5 The Sitecore Experience Platform... 7 How the Azure cloud empowers your marketing team... 8 Why Sitecore on Azure?... 9 Conclusion... 9 Copyright 2015 Sitecore. All Rights Reserved. This document may not, in whole or in part, be photocopied, reproduced, translated, or reduced to any electronic medium or machine readable form without prior consent, in writing, from Sitecore. Information in this document is subject to change without notice and does not represent a commitment on the part of Sitecore. Sitecore is a registered trademark of Sitecore. All other company and product names are trademarks of their respective owners. 2

3 The modern CMO What a difference a decade has made to the role of the CMO, proving the adage With great power comes great responsibility. Modern CMOs must not only act as organizational strategists and brand evangelists but also understand their market and customers on a level never before achievable. Despite the added pressure, the bottom line hasn t changed: ensure that the pipeline is full of new leads and organize and align marketing departments to eliminate data silos and drive customers from acquisition to close. So what s changed? The modern customer is so much more accessible than in years past, thanks to technology. Clues sometimes big, sometimes small about preferences, purchasing habits, and business drivers are sprinkled all over the internet and back-end systems, giving Marketing the chance to take them all in and piece together a complete customer profile. The trick is knowing where to look and how to put it together, and it s up to the CMO coordinating with IT to make it work. Only after time-consuming integrations between marketing systems could these insights be seen in the past. But marketing technology has experienced tremendous leaps and gained maturity, and now marketers can get instant feedback on the success of messages, imagery, and products. Marketers are presented with instant triggers and indicators that give them real-time insights into the needs, wants, and motivations of their customers. In a connected world, winning the hearts of customers boils down to three simple functions: Know your customer Turn data into insight Shape every experience Modern CMOs must not only act as organizational strategists and brand evangelists but also see and understand their market and customers on a level never before achievable. The CMO s mission Imagine being able to merge insight from customers social media interests with their viewing history from multiple disparate online websites. Now, combine that intelligence with what you already know about these customers from your CRM system and merge that with purchasing history stored in your ERP system. Take all that information, and analyze it against what the customers are reading, what they re downloading, and how they re viewing it. 3

4 Now take all of that information and figure out how to blend it together to create single customer profiles. Use that information intelligently in all your sales and marketing systems, and build and react to it in real time. The mission begins to take shape Imperative Objective System Requirements Know your customer Deeper understanding Centralize the capture and analysis of customer information Turn data into insight Deeper targeting Analyze the information based on a set of parameters that you provide Shape every experience Deeper engagement Respond instantly to the customer with adaptive marketing This paper provides context and insight about those new CMO imperatives and the machinery required to be successful and introduces you to the Sitecore Experience Platform, which was built from the ground up to bring it all together, including your own customer data and systems. The value of an end-to-end experience platform The new age of empowered customers can be a dream or a nightmare for marketers. Companies with disjointed or contradictory messaging and broken flows are seen as laggards in the eyes of the engaged customer. No matter how they engage with your brand, customers have grown to expect consistent messaging and experiences that flow from one medium to another. Taking advantage of connecting with customers in the digital world is a pure footrace. To capture all this insight and do something with it in real time requires marketing and back-end systems to seamlessly work together. It s already happening for some, and those who are engaged and proactively managing their customer experiences are winning. As product differentiators blur together more and more in the eyes of customers, the thing that stands out is their experience with your brand. Was it good or bad? Do you get me? It is this basic, simple human emotion that determines if you can build true brand loyalty with your customer base. With modern customers shifting away from person-to-person interactions and more toward digital media, companies must shift their approach to stay in the hunt. Marketing technology has made it possible to connect with large numbers of customers in a deep and meaningful way. Your customers are telling you what they want through their searching and purchasing actions, their social media opinions, and in all the things they do digitally. When they educate themselves on your products and your competition, you have access to them. When they purchase products or services adjacent to yours, you have access to them. You know about their wants and needs through the actions they engage in. And you can instantly test and retest tactics for honing your story, messaging, and delivery. 4

5 For marketers with the right tools to bring this information together and use it, this is a great new world. Ultimately, the goal of being agile and optimally responding across multiple channels is to drive: Deeper understanding: knowing that certain actions and triggers indicate a customer s interest and how to respond to drive your customer to purchase Deeper targeting: getting closer to customers and providing what they really need when they really need it by understanding more about them and their signals Deeper engagement: winning customers and fostering deeper, more loyal relationships that are more profitable and grow broader engagements with those customers The Sitecore Experience Platform centralizes everything and automates repetitive and realtime tasks. It analyzes a customer s actions and interaction with the brand; looks for indicators that the customer may be ready to buy; and delivers the right message, at the right time, on the right media, to deliver maximum impact. The ideal experience platform To truly drive a customer-centric, market-driven presence, the marketing team must know its customer, turn data into insight, and shape every experience. This requires interactions across multiple channels and systems and substantial orchestration and automation to scale. Know the customer Capture every interaction your company has with the customer, whether in store, on social media, in the press, or through traditional marketing channels. Tap into big data for trends, social media insight, and additional data sources for cross-reference insights. Make the information available centrally and instantly for use in real-time responsive marketing efforts. Integrate with your CRM system to see history, trends, and formal engagement. Deliver a real-time message or offer to entice them generally without ever actually meeting them. Turn data into insight Instantly access the centrally stored customer interaction data. Instantly analyze the data, identify alignment with trends and triggers, and understand what these interactions mean and imply, given their context and history. 5

6 Incorporate what you have learned and derived from big data into your responsive interaction. Predict what message or offer will have the biggest impact on the customer, test, and react. Shape every experience Deliver contextually relevant content directly to customers, based on what you know about them and the insight it provides. Support real-time responsive messages and offers to customers across multiple channels. Learn what works and what doesn t, and tweak future responses. The Sitecore Experience Platform Marketing teams are tasked with seeking, capturing, and maintaining customer loyalty to ultimately help drive revenue. In this pursuit, marketers often find themselves struggling to bring lists, content, and marketing tactics together to build campaigns and customer-facing marketing efforts. This often means pulling information from complex, disjointed software systems that are not compatible with each other and merging those with other internal systems just to hit key deadlines. While all this is happening, the customer is looking at your product and interacting with your brand, and you re not there to capture it. The Sitecore Experience Platform brings all that together and allows the marketer to focus on tactics and actions that will increase marketing performance and have a direct impact on sales in real time. It was purpose-built from the beginning to collect all the interactions your customer has with your brand and unite them to give you a single, connected, and usable customer profile not fragmented, cobbled-together customer data. Customers who are fully engaged represent an average 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth compared to the average customer. Actively disengaged customers represent a 13% discount in those same measures. Source: Gallup, Why Customer Engagement Matters So Much Now, July 22,

7 With Sitecore, companies have the power to differentiate their products and brand over the course of the purchasing journey and predictably drive the customer journey to completion through better engagement and experiences that produce loyal customers for life. There are many components that go into an end-toend marketing system and making it work well. From gathering customer actions and reactions to managing CRM information for a campaign and responsively delivering real-time messages to customers in response to mobile phone queries all of these pieces need to work together, requiring coordination and orchestration. The Sitecore Experience Platform makes millions of customers feel like they are one in a million. It allows marketers to know every customer, turn data into insight, and shape every experience with precision. Sitecore AIDA is marketing performance optimization technology that simultaneously collects, evaluates, manages, and analyzes customer intelligence from patterns, behaviors, and decisions gathered across multiple digital channels. AIDA is not a product but a framework that identifies actionable insights and analytics to enable marketers to maximize results from their marketing programs. Analysis Sitecore automatically tracks all interactions with content across channels. Analyze customer experiences, knowing you have comprehensive data, without needing to tag and track every campaign in advance. Measure the performance of content, experiences, and campaigns. Insights Get meaningful insights about your customers from every interaction. Automatically analyze interactions to reveal what s working and what s not: Sitecore helps you discover your customers likes and dislikes so that you can deliver better, more relevant experiences. Decision Test, measure, decide, and act quickly. Sitecore helps you deliver the most relevant experiences through tracking goals, personalizing content, and becomingly increasingly predictive in producing compelling customer experiences. Automation Build an intimate relationship with each customer and replicate this success across thousands of customer profiles. Sitecore marketing automation lets you respond immediately to customers actions with lead nurturing content and triggered campaigns they need most, on any channel. 7

8 How the Azure cloud empowers your marketing team Be where your customers are Marketing teams spend endless hours coming up with ideas and messaging to develop customer loyalty and position their brands for success. Too often, though, IT implementation and budgets can t keep up with the speed of execution a modern marketer requires in order to stay relevant. The cloud trend makes it possible for marketers to reach their customers in multiple channels where they live, play, socialize, and buy at the speed they require. The Azure cloud enables marketing teams to access customer data all over the world and react to customer preferences in real time anywhere. Enable your team to engage new targets and continue the conversation with current customers by delivering the right message at the right time, on the right channel. The Sitecore Experience Platform enables marketing to: Build long-lasting relationships with everyone who comes in contact with your brand no matter how Recognize all prospects as individuals and tailor what they see and read to meet their wants and needs Cross-sell more effectively, leveraging valuable consumer insights and preferences Combine a multitude of point solutions into a single, integrated marketing platform that shares data across systems seamlessly When opportunity strikes, be ready Marketers can t always predict when traffic through their sites will spike. A famous actor tweets how much she loves your boots and posts a link. Suddenly five million people are bombarding your site and retweeting and talking about them on Facebook... can you meet the demand? Can you pivot fast enough to know each incoming prospect s preferences and tailor your site well enough to attach two or three more items? Can you get them to come back, or was this just your 15 minutes of fame? Sitecore gives marketers the power to take advantage of these waves and ride them. With the power of Azure, you can scale up and down seamlessly to meet demand so when fortune strikes, you re ready. The Azure cloud empowers your marketing team to capitalize on its efforts and maximize brand value regardless of business fluctuations and global location. With the Azure cloud, you can assist your marketing team in its ongoing pursuit of customer loyalty. 8

9 Why Sitecore on Azure? What could possibly make Sitecore even more beneficial to your company? Imagine all the values of the cloud, supported by the power of Microsoft s enterprise-grade cloud computing platform, Microsoft Azure. The Sitecore Experience Platform on Microsoft Azure enables the CMO to lower TCO, deploy faster, and maintain a global presence. Deploy Sitecore on Azure and easily scale up or down* while paying only for the power and storage consumption used. With Azure, new deployments can be up and running in a matter of minutes and marketing teams have the tools needed to rapidly respond to changing customer preferences. Furthermore, IT teams no longer have to worry about when they can handle updates, patching, and maintenance. With Azure s 99.95% uptime and 24/7 tech support, Microsoft handles all the maintenance required to keep everything secure and reliable, freeing up valuable and scarce IT resources. The Sitecore Experience Platform on Microsoft Azure tracks outcomes, actions, and types of visitors across all touchpoints, providing marketers with the data to deliver a comprehensive, personalized view of each customer. Everything is centralized and managed in the cloud, so marketing teams can easily access customer data and focus on what it takes to create and maintain that highly coveted customer loyalty: engaging each customer in a personal, long-term relationship with the company or brand. Conclusion Marketers know that the game of customer acquisition and retention has advanced to a new, higher level. Customer expectations continue to evolve into a desire for completely customized products and discussions. Marketers must find a way to accommodate this to catch up to the competition or stay ahead in the game. The Sitecore Experience Platform enables marketers to do just that, and by deploying on Microsoft Azure, their ideas, content, and messages get to market faster, helping them gain competitive advantage. Microsoft Azure at a glance 99.95% uptime 24/7 tech support Global network across 19 regions Interoperability with any operating system, language, tool, or framework Ability to scale up or down as needed* Used by 57% of Fortune 500 companies Familiarity of Windows Speed to market The only enterprise-grade cloud Infinite scalability* Always on Accident protection Pay-as-you-go Interoperability *Customers will need to ensure that they have the proper number of content delivery servers from Sitecore to meet scaling requirements. 9