How Mature Is Your Content?

One of the first priorities when working with our Sitecore customers is looking at content across marketing channels. A common issue our teams see is inconsistency in brand messaging leading to an unsuccessful content strategy.

The key to the success of any organization is knowing what works and what doesn’t, in order to improve your bottom line. With your web, email, social, mobile and other channels operating in silos, how can you measure them against each other and implement cohesive online marketing strategies?

Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Platform provides an elegant, integrated solution that connects marketing channels, engagement automation, and engagement analytics with external tools and databases.

In order to implement a strong platform like Sitecore correctly we need to scale the solution to the customer’s needs in phases.

Phase 1: Educate

If we were to build a maturity scale, phase 1 would first look at companies that put content managers and authors in a room and constantly educate them on the latest and greatest brand messaging. This is a very manual process and very painful when there are multiple updates being made across multiple channels. This is also a highly reactive marketing model, with limited visibility to the end user experience limiting cross channel integrations to zero. Marketers in this state typically have a siloed understanding of the end customer interaction.

Phase 2: Identify

In phase 2, companies get smarter and mature in this process as they become more aware of the end-user experience, which accelerates their ability to identify problems that impact customers, their employees and even their partners. This state is obviously an improvement from the reactive marketer but still causes heartache when the companies try to identify root causes and resolve inconsistencies to content.

Phase 3: Leverage

Phase 3 progresses the effective marketer to leverage analytics, which extends visibility across the content-delivery chain. This enables the marketer to resolve content inconsistencies more effectively, thus giving them the ability to make prioritization decision based on business impact. Marketers at this level of maturity just start to see more clearly and are able to integrate operational tools like CRM into their arsenal of marketing weapons.

Phase 4: Optimize

The thought of optimization is actually an afterthought to the less mature marketer, but as marketers take the next step into phase 4, they are focused on optimizing content for the best end user experience across channels. This level of optimization offers visibility across all channels, enabling content to be optimized across the content-delivery chain. At this phase, real-time analytics and CRM data begin to provide vast insight to teams on how effective their content is across channels, enabling teams to make quicker decisions.

Phase 5: Centralize

Last but not least, phase 5 describes the pervasive marketer leveraging predictive analytics and collective intelligence to prevent problems, allowing for continuous optimization of content across all channels. Now that interactions across channels are at the highest level of complexity, the marketer is able to implement a centralized decision engine using optimized content at every turn.

When looking at deploying content across channels, it is critical to understand where your organization is in this maturity model. But more importantly, it is imperative to understand where you want to be and how to get there.

Next week we will be hosting an event that will detail the journey of personalization. We will walk you through an approach and an example of how to overcome the conceptual simplicity of personalization and actually deliver it, in order to create additional value for your customers, your prospects and your brand.

Join us on March 12^th in Chicago to learn more about the channel of “Me” and see where you fit as a marketer.

Register here: http://www.rosetta.com/about/events/sitecore-event-03-12-2013.html