Sitecore Empowers CMOs to Conquer Omnichannel Marketing Challenges

The modern day CMO does not have to worry about securing a billboard spot in the most prominent space. They have far more complex challenges that make marketing nothing less than playing with a live wire!

Modern-day marketing has spun far away from traditional marketing that had billboards, print media and flyers at its heart. Today, it is content that does the work. To quote Seth Godin, Marketing influencer, “ Content marketing is the only marketing left. “ And content marketing is not restricted to a single medium. It takes the omnichannel route distributed across social, web, email, and so on.

Apparently, most marketers also seem to agree with Seth. According to HubSpot’s 2018 study, 72% of marketers said that having a good content strategy was a major key to their success in 2018. Although marketing has evolved considerably in the past two years, it is evident that, even in 2020, marketers are laser focused on content marketing.

However, when it comes to leveraging content marketing, marketers still face several challenges. They are:

• Content creation at scale
• Omni channel content publishing — website, blog, social media, press releases, etc.
• Content repurposing — Converting top-performing blogs into images, videos, podcasts, third-party blogs, etc.
• Protecting intellectual property — Safeguarding created assets from rights infringement, misuse or unauthorized use by third parties.
• Campaign management — Planning, forecasting and budgeting marketing campaigns.

Let’s take a deeper look at each of these challenges and why they are roadblocks to a CMO’s success.

Content creation at scale

Of all the challenges that a modern marketer confronts, the biggest of them all is the difficulty in creating content at scale. Content — be it textual or visual — holds the key to attracting and bringing in visitors. Creating rich content that educates, persuades and generates leads and converts prospects cannot be done by a single person. Even with an entire content team at their disposal, CMOs are finding it difficult to churn high-quality content on a consistent basis. There are several facets to content creation that makes it challenging.

First is identifying the topics that customers would be interested in knowing. This calls for an in-depth research of user persona, their expectations, their challenges and possible solutions. The research to understand these scenarios and to craft a content strategy that provides solutions is a feat of its own.

Even if a solid content strategy is in place, a CMO needs a team consisting of copywriters, content strategists, illustrators, video creators, and web developers to push out content at scale. Once that is done, the next step is to analyze the data, cull out the patterns and insights and incorporate it into the next content calendar.

Omni channel content publishing

Publishing a blog. Crafting an industry benchmark report. Issuing a press release. Releasing a product video. Sharing an infographic on social channels. There are several mediums that a marketer has to leverage in order to make the brand visible in front of target audiences.

Creating separate content for each of the mediums separately is unproductive. The marketing team as a whole consisting of content marketers, programmatic ad managers, social media marketers, etc. must repurpose existing content to squeeze maximum value out of it.

Content repurposing offers several key benefits. To harness them, the marketing team as a whole must have visibility to all the assets being created.

Protecting intellectual property

Marketing is a creative process. The results of the creative process belong to the organization. Even a simple ad copy is high-value intellectual property when it is used in the right place, at the right time and in the right context.

Similarly, there are several other forms of intellectual property as well — designs, illustrations, company logos, brand playbooks, etc. all of which has to be protected from third party misuse.

The challenge in protecting these intellectual property is that they are widely distributed across the internet, making it easy for anyone with visibility to steal the idea and recreate it. Content that is plagiarized and recreated can severely undermine the efforts of the marketing team.

Campaign management

Marketing teams work in a close knit environment with high interdependencies between the content, design, email marketing, SEO and social media teams.

Managing all these and obtaining a bird’s eye view of how it ties back to the organizational revenue goal is something that every CMO worries about. There is a pressing need for marketing automation and management tools that can help CMOs get the data they need to improve customer experience.

How Sitecore’s capabilities empowers marketers

Sitecore is a customer experience management company that has been recognized as a leader in the Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms. It provides web content management and multichannel marketing automation software that empowers CMOs and marketing teams to turn their challenges into competitive advantages.

How exactly does Sitecore empower marketing teams? With its range of content capabilities that is bundled in the Sitecore Content Hub TM.

What is Sitecore Content HubTM

One of the key challenges that teams within any organization faces is the difficulty in sharing information. Passing critical information to colleagues on a timely basis becomes difficult when different teams use different systems. In a marketing scenario, the use of disjointed systems could slow down the roll out of campaigns. This could negatively impact the RoI of time-sensitive campaigns, especially in a scenario where scaling up and distribution of content is already a challenge.

Sitecore Content Hub TMaims to reduce or eliminate all those challenges that marketers face. As the name suggests, Sitecore Content Hub TM is a hub of sorts that simplifies the task of managing, creating, collaborating, searching and downloading content at scale. It bridges together disjointed systems giving marketers a unified view of the entire marketing journey. It also facilitates omni- channel marketing where content is distributed in multiple forms across diverse channels.

Sitecore Content HUB TMapproaches content creation and distribution like a supply chain network. It creates the technology for marketers to create, distribute and also manage the flow of content from ideation until delivery. To facilitate that, Content Hub TMis made up of five key components.

1. Sitecore DAM™ (Digital Asset Management)
2. Sitecore MRM™(Marketing Resource Management)
3. Sitecore CMP™(Content Marketing Platform)
4. Sitecore PCM (Product Content Management)
5. Sitecore W2P (Web-to-Print)

Sitecore DAM™ — ML-based Digital Asset Management (DAM)

In one sentence, Sitecore DAM™ is a tool for storing, managing, and finding assets. It creates a centralized repository of images, videos, web page layouts, artworks, video, 3D mocks and even documents. It eliminates the need for marketing teams to have scattered storage solutions that complicates digital asset management.

One of the key capabilities of Sitecore DAM™ is its ability to preview files in browser before downloading or sharing with others. It also has an efficient metadata management system that makes it easy to search and find assets in a flash.

Sitecore MRM™ — End-to-end marketing project management

Sitecore MRM™ is part of the Site Content Hub™ which helps marketing teams organize marketing campaigns and content production. In other words, it is an end-to-end marketing project management tool that helps marketing teams channel all resources and assets towards a specific objective or purpose.

Every marketing campaign takes the form of a multi-layered project with dependencies on copywriters, designers, digital marketers and SEO specialists. With Sitecore MRM™, it is possible to align the works of all these teams in an organized manner so that campaigns can be rolled out on a timely basis within specific timelines.

The unique feature about MRM™ is that it offers each personnel in the marketing team tailor-made features that are relevant for their role and responsibility. For example, copywriters would have access to ad copy deliverables and the tools required to create and store assets. This heightens collaboration within the team making it possible to pull off any complex project with ease.

Sitecore CMP™ — Intelligent content marketing platform

Speed and scale. These are the two most important priorities of any content marketing team. Like we discussed before, creating high-quality content with speed and scale is one of the pressing challenges of any marketing team. The challenge can be mitigated through proper planning of content deliverables, orchestrating content resources and also by determining the various channels through which the content would be distributed.

Sitecore CMP™ is an intelligent content marketing platform that allows marketers to create a content strategy from scratch, set deliverables for each owner and also make collaboration possible across the entire content marketing workflow. It also gives access to metrics and KPIs dashboard that indicate how well the strategy is working.

Sitecore PCM™ — Dedicated module for Product Content Management

Content is not just for marketing. It is also for informing customers about a product’s features, its actual dimensions, mode of use and related data. It is critical for online stores and B2B eCommerce websites that have to win customer trust before persuading them to make a purchase.

But, when there are thousands of products for which diverse information has to be updated on a detailed basis, life can become difficult for marketers. It is here that Sitecore PCM™ can come to the aid.

It is a dedicated module for product content management that helps maintenance of product data that is fed into e-commerce web sites, print catalogs, ERP systems, etc. It also allows marketers to integrate existing product data with marketing content so that customers can be offered a single source of truth. Furthermore, Sitecore PCM™ helps automate product content updation with automatic layout creation for product content like spec sheets, measurements and so on.

Sitecore web-to-print (W2P) — Tool to take digital assets to print media

Despite the proliferation of digital media, print media still holds significant value. Adverts in magazines, newspapers, journals, etc. can heighten brand recall and also establish brand identity. But, it is not productive to spend marketing resources to create separate assets that can be published in print media. The need of the hour is a dedicated tool that can take digital assets to print media in quick time.

Sitecore web-to-print (W2P) is that tool that marketers can swear by. It helps generate custom printable digital assets for use in print media. What makes it unique is that it facilitates enforcing brand guidelines even when the print is going to be used outside the organization.

Benefits of Sitecore Content HubTM

Sitecore can be considered the best tool in a CMO’s toolkit. The obvious benefits that it brings to the table include:

Unified marketing operations

From website to social media or even to email and beyond, Sitecore TM makes it possible to create a unified view of the marketing operations. The CMO is spared from having to hold separate meetings to understand the state of affairs and the future direction.

Tightened marketing collaboration

Sitecore brings marketing personnel with diverse backgrounds and roles together on the same page. It creates a single platform where data can be seen, shared and also collaborated upon for quick roll out of marketing campaigns. In other words, it helps achieve RoI on time-sensitive marketing campaigns.

Content creation & distribution at scale

Blogs, website pages, social media posts — using Sitecore Content Hub™ content can be created and distributed at scale and with speed. It eliminates one of the biggest challenges that all marketers have come to experience first-hand without any exception.

Protection of digital assets

Digital assets including visual designs, website layouts, company logos and also other creatives can be protected easily with Sitecore. It ensures that the intellectual ownership of the digital assets remains vested with the creators preventing any misuse or plagiarism by third parties.

Final brief

Be it a startup that wants to expand its digital footprint or a century-old brand that wants to revamp its digital presence, Sitecore can rise to the occasion as the right marketing platform to do it all. As a customer experience management company, Sitecore offers several product features that can help CMOs set ambitious goals and achieve them without breaking into a sweat.

Originally published at https://suyati.com