Importance of Content Marketing

Is your site adapted to comply with the new criteria in content marketing? Here are some tips to see you through:

• Align Your Goals with Google’s – Google’s aim is to offer the finest experience in search – one that is excellent and one that provides relevant results instantly by addressing the searcher’s demand. Given the new Panda and Penguin rules in place, content is starting to matter more than ever. Build effective content that is deserving of a superior ranking.

• Make Use of Unique SEO Strategies- A number of times users are looking to get more from just text and images, irrespective of how outstanding the content might be. This is why visual content such as video and streaming visuals can spruce up the entire package! Post online interviews with leading HR firms, well-known faces in the industry, online workshops to enhance candidates resume etc. and more. Accurately carried out, visual strategies can get your target audience hooked.

• Answer the Reader’s Issues – In the online world, nearly each and every current online career portal is equivalent to a product counter, operating on the condition that users only want to look for a job – not to answer any query. Present your services with elaborate data and help guides, useful articles and career guidance information rather than just posting arbitrary content. Answer the reader’s issues, and he will be happy to search from you.

• Opt for a Long Term Strategy; Not a Short-Term Link Building Strategy – With great content, it is easier to determine sales has been increased and traffic has been boosted. With link building, you will only be able to determine an increase in search engine rankings. Agreed, it is complex, if not impracticable, to find out how links transform into sales. But, instead let link building become a result of superior content. It is important to note that link building is a temporary ploy, while content marketing is a detailed plan of action.

Career Portals NEED Original, Unique Content

Writing and positing original content in a career portal takes precedence over all else when it comes to internet branding. Great effects are seen with exclusive content, and the more superior content you post, the more exceptional will be the result.

• Why ‘Panda(e)-monium’ is Important – Do not attempt at ignoring Panda and Penguin updates. It would be wise to stay updated and conform to the new guidelines from Google as they are likely to get even more stringent. But there is a huge plus to seen in this – the new updates are a huge boost in the arm for creative and fresh content producers! Develop practical, captivating and constructive content with only the proposed quantity of “best practice” SEO strategies and you’ve already crossed half the mile.

• Enough with the Over Optimization Already! – No doubt, increasing ROI (Return on Investment) for content is important. It is important to generate and maximize revenue from content; else, it will cease to be a sustainable venture. Income from web ads, e-business, affiliates and conversions are fantastic. But this income has to spring from integrity, hard work, and utility.

Essentials of Online Content

Employ these handy set of pointers for organic and fresh content:

• More Is Better - If you continue to update your pages regularly with fresh content, Google will reward you by recognizing you as an industrious Webmaster and will mobilize the freshness factor in your favor. The total quantity of new content inserted in the site is crucial; simply increasing new links in an old page will be detrimental to your site, as Google can chastise this conduct.

• Familiarize with Keywords – Written matter that centers on a given topic is simple for users to process, and the same goes for Google. A page that emphasizes on a single keyword imparts a precise message to Google that the page is clear, sharp and distinct – in short, fruitful. Jamming the content unnaturally with keywords will be bad for your business.

• Know Interlinking – Smart jobsites employ clever and thorough interlinking approaches. If your page talks about “engineering careers” and links to leading engineering company sites etc. Perhaps then it not would be a good idea to link “Engineering Careers” to tooth care, gum disease or something radically different.

WHY MOBILE?
Mobile has been the new frontier for a few years now. Just as the web changed the way we interacted and marketed to our customers, mobile is forcing us to re-look at everything we are doing today with email, website, and social—in a completely different way. According to Gartner Research, more people will use mobile phones than PCs to get online by 2014.

Let us talk business to business (B2B). Over 70% of the work force in the US is mobile and statistics show that 64 % of B2B decision makers are checking their email on mobile devices. This means that whatever we marketers are doing today, we need to extend that to cover this new frontier.

On the business to consumer (B2C) side, customers now use smart phones and tablets to interact with businesses 24/7, from anywhere – at home, at work, on a bus. And companies that embrace this always-on behaviour such as the taxi service Uber with mobile pickups, GrubHub and Seamless for food delivery, and Hotel Tonight’s app for last-minute bookings – can disrupt entire industries.

How should you extend your demand generation efforts and explore new frontiers by leveraging mobile in a more effective way?

Who is the mobile subscriber in the US?

Females: Of female mobile subscribers, 50.9% owned smart phones compared to 50.1% of male mobile subscribers.

Asians: 67.3% of mobile subscribers of this ethnicity own smart phones, followed by Hispanics (57.3%), African Americans (54.4%), and Caucasians (44.7%).

25 to 34 year olds: 66% of mobile subscribers in this age group own smart phones.

Unsurprisingly, those with the highest incomes are more likely to own smart phones.

The global market: A spin to this trend

In Asia and Africa, more people are accessing the web through mobile devices and may not even have a computer.  The tablet market is growing and it is something we need to pay close attention to. It is important to understand your audience and how they are using mobile devices.

CUSTOMER BEHAVIOUR

The first step, like in any other marketing exercise, is to measure what you are doing.  If you are not tracking the devices on which your customers are reading their emails or accessing the web, you will lose out.  There is a very good document by Return Path on email tracking and deliverability that I would urge you to read.

The ‘how’

Google analytics has a lot of really interesting data on ‘how’ people are accessing your website, visiting your home page or other landing pages.

The ‘when’

The second thing you need to know is ‘when’ your audience is using the mobile devices. There is a lot of data that shows that mostly customers use their mobile devices towards the end of the day and not during business hours—either pre-office or after hours.

What we also see, interestingly, is that they use it both inside and outside the home. Within the home it is used for reading material as well as emails. While outside, it is about being in transit. Common activities on mobile devices include email, some social, gaming and a lot of reading.

Here are the activities performed on a mobile device.

There is also a difference in the way people interact with different devices. Smart phones are used for summary information while tablets are more in use for in depth study. Research reveals the differences in the way people use the two kinds of devices.

EMAIL AND SEARCH

There has been a great increase in the number of email opens on mobile devices. An increase of 80 % has been reported in the first six months of 2012 (http://litmus.com/blog/email-client-market-share-stats-infographic-june-2012) but 48 % of marketers still do not know how many mobile subscribers they have.

Apart from email, search is a big component of mobile activity and you can leverage this depending on your business. The nature of mobile is such that people are very actively searching for information and if you are able tab into this urgency and become visible through mobile search action items like quick to call or download (more on these) it becomes effective.

MOBILE IN CONTEXT
When you are thinking about a mobile strategy, it is all about the context.  There are four classic questions you need to ask.
1. Where? Where is your audience looking at your content? Are they on a train? Are they on a transit? Get your analytics to give you some insight on this.

2. When? Is it during business hours? Is it during lunch time? In the same way you do your email marketing—when you choose when to send out your emails between Tuesday and Thursday or Friday morning—it is good to know when people are looking at your content.

An important aspect to the ‘where’ and ‘when’ is that people don’t really have a lot of time. And that means that anything you have to communicate to them has to be really concise. If you have a call to action (CTA) then that has to be really prominent.

3. What? What is your audience doing? There are two aspects to this. We saw that emails and search is being used and the customer is accessing your website. But there are other actions you might want them to do. Do you want them to forward a link? Do you want them to do social sharing and pass information through facebook or twitter feeds to their followers or friends? Do you want them to register or take a poll? So, really understand the ‘what ‘— determine what you want your customers to do and what they typically do. This is an important input for your mobile strategy.

4. How? Depending on your business, understand what platform to use and how. Determine the kind of design you need to build and the usability of the device. You can also leverage certain device-specific features. While Android leads as the most popular OS, the most popular manufacturer is Apple.

EMAIL MARKETING FOR MOBILE

When you think email for mobile as opposed to the desktop, there are a few things to consider. Here are the top considerations while communicating for the small screen.

1. Relatively limited real estate: Most of the action has to be done by the finger tips and not the mouse. The finger is the new mouse!
2. The context: Where, when and how your customer will be accessing the email.
3. User environment:  The audience might be in a crowded place, a bus, plane or train. It can be fairly chaotic. So how can you get this customer to look at your content in the distractions?
4. A clear call-to-action: Have a concise, tight call to action.

Best mobile-friendly email practices
Here, a few simple rules:

1. Use large fonts
2. Scale for the device
3. Clear large CTAs
4. Reduce clutter
5. Use images sparingly
6. Get to the point
7. Consider single columns
8. Make actions obvious
9. Create for tapping not typing
10. Create for one-hand usage
    (Courtesy: Litmus and Campaign Monitor)

A few more points you need to consider:

- Your key content is “above the fold” so recipients can see it without having to scroll.

- There is ample space between links and/or CTAs so readers can use their fingertips as a mouse.

- Your call to action buttons are prominent to increase tapping accuracy.

- Your message focuses on a single conversion (or minimum conversion opportunities).

- The “From” name is readily identifiable, and the most important content is placed at the beginning of the subject line.

What is scalable design?

There is a lot of debate on what kind of design to build. There are essentially two kinds of email designs: Scalable and Responsive.  Of course, there are pros and cons to both.

In the case of scalable design, you have an email built with tables just as a normal email but it is elastic. So on a smaller device, you see the email with clarity. The calls to action are clear, so by default, you use large fonts. You have greater coverage across more platforms.

In responsive design, you use CSS code. It is similar to website design. You put a code at the top of the page for example:  If your screen width is 480 pixels or less Then load a different set of styles.

The downside to responsive design is that because it has got CS S code, the durability of the email is impacted.

Test your email

To understand what works and what doesn’t, we use litmus internally and it’s a great tool.

We use it to test design across platforms such as android and iPhone; and to check that the email displays correctly.

WEBSITE AND LANDING PAGES

You may be interested in making a mobile-friendly website. There are some very interesting things to consider here. The foremost? It is not just about shrinking your website and making it fit a small mobile screen. When we talk about the ‘When’, ‘Where’  and ‘How’, it is also about the context and typically, when people are searching or looking for your website on a mobile device, there is a  certain urgency to it. It might be that they are in a different stage in the buying cycle or they might be looking for something and understanding this context will help you define how you should cater and more importantly, how you should craft your mobile face to the world. ? Are you making it easy for them to connect with you or putting obstacles between them and what they seek?

In order to do that, one of the first things you need to do is to take a web page and prioritize all your content. The priorities will change depending on the real estate available.  If you have got certain key criteria, for instance, you want to put up your ‘sign up now’ button on the top part of the screen—that is a clear CTA. Other elements will go below.

Depending on the real estate, you would take the content blocks and determine how you would like to present those. Like email, website design also has the concept of Adaptive Vs Responsive.

What is your mobile strategy? Are you trying to make an existing website work passably well on mobile devices or building a completely unique mobile experience from the ground up?

Most large organisations with big mobile infrastructure projects would typically go the adaptive route.  Adaptive design is server-side, meaning before the page is even delivered, the server (where the site is hosted) detects the attributes of the device, and loads a version of the site that is optimized for its dimensions and native features. The sensor detects what your page looks like and accordingly, the web servers present the content. You may have noticed that sometimes if you are on the go and are trying to visit a website, you actually get routed to the web app. Now this happens because they are using some kind of an adaptive design where the server says ‘oh you are on a Samsung Galaxy or an iPhone 5, would you like to download the app instead’. It is a complex mobile-first approach needing technical resources.

Responsive design is client-side, meaning the entire page is delivered to the device browser (the client), and the browser then changes how the page appears in relation to the dimensions of the browser window. Ironically, in email, responsive design is considered truly mobile. This is not the case for a website. The scalable layout uses CSS and JavaScript and simply put, the ‘device’ not the ‘server’ decides the format in which the content will be presented. This means the customer device needs to do some heavy lifting and what this means in turn, is that, you will have to make your site less code heavy and fairly light, especially if you have customers who are not on very robust wireless connections with their mobile carriers.

Testing your site

It all comes down to testing. There are a few paid services and Adobe has got a great tool too. And then there are the free ones. Designer Matt Kersley has a very useful page (mattkersley.com/responsive) where you can test out designs. Google has its own useful page (howtogomo.com).

MOBILE SEARCH

Now that we have talked about email and the web, we need to look at Search, a very powerful and easy-to-use mobile component.  There are a lot of mobile-specific formats that extend your reach and help optimize your campaigns. Here are some of the search formats:

1. Text adsText: ads on mobile devices, just like those on your desktop computer, contain three lines of text and a URL that links to your website. You can customize your text ads to be mobile-specific to drive a better response from mobile users. Research shows that mobile-only campaigns help drive an 11.5 per cent average increase in mobile click through rates compared to campaigns that combine mobile and desktop ads.And then there are text ads with location extensions. These are basically a couple of extra links. For example, phone numbers. If you are a B2B organisation, for instance, and have got regional offices, it is very useful to put your local phone number for customers to be able to contact the local sales rep.
2. Click-to-download:You can use this format if your organisation creates an app. If you’ve got some form of a document or a widget that you would like your customers to experience, then click-to-download is another action point that you can incorporate in your search.
3. Text ads
4. Click-to-call:Relating to the phone number is what Google calls Click-to-call. The customer can not only see the number but also call the number. So you can get convergence point out of your search advertising using mobile.
5. Location Extensions:This is a big opportunity. If you are in a situation where you can leverage it, mobile is the way to go.
6. Ads with offers
7. Mobile Ad Sitelinks:What this format does, is if you have a big website with say 200 or even 5000 pages and you are doing a specific mobile only campaign, it enables you to direct your customers to that specific area on your website. Create unique URLs, do ad campaigns and direct customers to those pages—this format acts as a convergence point.

Google mobile sites

There are some really good tools out there in terms of building mobile sites. If you want to create a mobile only campaign for search, you can leverage Google mobile tools and this happens almost automatically. It will convert your webpage into a mobile friendly version and what’s more, you can even host it through Google, creating your own URLs that cater to your campaign.

eBOOKS AND WHITEPAPERS

What I also wanted to mention here is ebooks and whitepapers. One of the standard marketing devices that most B2B organisations use are whitepapers, leadership thought material, ebooks, industry articles and so on. You can do some really interesting things by publishing content in the channels used by your customer. Typically in the past, they would be printed and then uploaded online with PDFS. But now, this can be taken a step further. Content can be published through iTunes, Amazon, Android market place—and given that a lot of people are doing their reading after hours or in transit, you suddenly make your material a lot more portable. It can either be free or charged if it is a substantial material. You can also take the help of other applications that will convert your content as well as distribute it across the market places.

VIDEO

Everyone is using video these days and a lot of people are now watching YouTube videos on mobile devices and not desktops.

Here are a few key considerations while working on a video for a mobile:

1. You are working with a small device so avoid really small text
2. Be careful about the ambient noise: use highest quality audio at highest possible volume
3. Keep your pictures bright
4. Make sure your URLs are linkable
5. If demonstrating something, close up on what you are showing rather than just pin pointing at it.

This is all almost common sense but practical tips to make video mobile friendly.

QR codes

For B2B audience, you can use QR codes in a lot of interesting ways. The first one is to use it on your business cards. Rather than a static card that makes people call you or visit your website, make your customers scan your QR code. The good news is that they would have your information on their mobile device even after losing your card. If you are doing any trade show or any kind of promotion, QR codes become really useful. For eg, if you are giving away coffee jugs, notepads, t-shirts etc and you want your customers to visit your website, your social media, take a poll or a survey; or  follow on your twitter… just point their phones to a code. QR code generators are freely available… just explore!

Finally, while looking at a mobile strategy for demand generation, take a step back.

Be strategic: Think it through. Remember, mobile is not a rework of another initiative such as a web site. Do not make a technology choice first and get started with ‘we need an iPhone app’ thought. Don’t blindly imitate a competitor. Don’t limit your mobile presence to a publicity tool or simply a ‘have-to-have’. Let go of your ‘we already know our customer base’ assumption.

Here is what will help. Appoint a mobile champion. This person from within your organization should gather a cross-functional mobile task force to work to determine your company’s approach for each of the questions listed. Benchmark your competition, understand how your customers use mobile through focus groups and surveys, talk to your agency partners, and brainstorm internally.

We live amidst a data flood that is overwhelming businesses and employees. All of us are now walking data generators. Our mobile phones, online shopping, social networks, electronic communication, GPS-enabled devices and other connected appliances produce torrents of data as a by-product of their ordinary operations.

For marketers, it’s crucial to understand that everything their consumers do leaves a digital trail—a trail rich in information that can be analyzed to produce actionable insight. The question is, how can marketers use this wealth of data to drive breakthrough strategy and campaigns, and improve their own performance as professionals?

Making the leap calls for marketers to surmount challenges around data complexity, business relevance, and skills and governance. First, understanding the data and turning it into business-relevant insight is itself a significant challenge. The 3 Vs of data—volume, velocity and variety—make it difficult for marketers to make sense of consumers’ digital trails. Second, CEOs and boards don’t care about 99% of the metrics that marketers track. To win a seat at the head table, marketers must speak to the metrics that do matter to CXOs, such as revenue, profit, ROI and shareholder value. Unfortunately, not enough marketers are actually tracking end outcomes such as revenue, or are unable to because marketing data is spread across over multiple systems and databases—which is another impediment to data-driven marketing. Finally, marketers also need to overcome common skills and governance issues. New skills and roles (such as that of the data scientist) are required to make sense of the deluge of data.

While the challenges are daunting, six fundamental steps unite companies that are succeeding in driving business results through data-driven demand generation. They are:

1. Understanding what you want to achieve
2. Creating a solid data foundation
3. Tracking critical touch points in the customer lifecycle
4. Integrating your systems
5. Testing and learning
6. Visualizing and communicating results

Understanding what you want to achieve: You can’t expect to develop a strategy or execute a tactic using data without knowing what you want to achieve. This is at the core of any data-driven marketing: making decisions based on analysis to prove or disprove hypotheses. As an aside, I want to reiterate that when you think about targets, you should think about metrics that interest CXO-level decision makers such as revenue, margin, profit, cash flow, ROI and shareholder value.

Creating a solid data foundation: Reliable data leads to robust decision making. If you treat data as a portfolio and determine the data profile that’s right for you, you can improve performance. Data highlights behavioral patterns. Lead management models can be very helpful in this regard, allowing you to identify important touch points and develop a workflow.

Tracking critical touch points: Monitoring touch points allows you to leverage data to highlight behavioral patterns. Touch points to think about include digital and traditional events, right from awareness to consideration and purchase as well. A well-defined lead management workflow, and disciplined approach to tracking codes and attributions go a long way in revealing the patterns that underpin customer behaviour.

Integrating your systems: Marketers need to understand technical infrastructure such as Web hosting, data warehousing, and how data flows in and out of business infrastructure. In addition, they must recognize that every business utilizes a variety of applications behind the technical infrastructure. So do make sure that you have some basic knowledge of how each of those applications work; and get your systems talking to each other.

Testing and learning: Testing and learning enables marketers to make progressively better decisions. Optimization has a direct impact on results and increases confidence levels. At eDynamic, we’ve witnessed marketing optimization techniques lead to a tripling in conversion rates for outbound campaigns even as communication costs have dropped. We’ve benefited from higher-quality leads, lower costs, and an improved customer and prospect experience.

Visualizing and communicating results: My sixth and final recommendation to marketers is to make sure they tell a compelling story by visualizing and communicating results. It doesn’t have to be pretty, but it does need to show business leaders that marketing is delivering business outcomes. This is hopefully the easiest suggestion of the lot. After all, as marketers, effective communication is one of our core skills!

(Source: Lenskold Group)

To sum up: the richness and magnitude of the data out there is overwhelming, and so are the resulting opportunities. Marketers who wish to drive breakthrough results, develop their skills and gain the CEO’s confidence should use the six fundamentals outlined in this blog to take their demand generation program to the next level.

For a deeper look at data-driven strategies for demand generation, watch an on-demand webinar I recently recorded . I hope it helps you refine your own demand generation program.

One of the greatest challenges marketers face is converting website visitors to leads; in a 2009 MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Survey, 69% of respondents stated “generating high quality leads” was their toughest task

Content management systems that incorporate content optimization, personalization, community, marketing automation and analytics capabilities along with content can help engage customers early, nurture them through the sales cycle, and turn them into highly qualified leads.

Getting Them in the (Virtual) Door

Most of the “foot traffic” to your website likely comes from search engines — that’s no surprise. But Google and other search engines don’t just search and return your corporate website URL; search results can also display your blogs, videos, white papers and other articles, and of course, paid advertising.

So while a Web CMS can help you manage your basic website HTML content, many web content management platforms also include:

• Common search engine optimization tools, such as human/search engine-readable URLs, 301 redirects and meta tags/titles;
• Blogging tools, including tag management and commenting options;
• Multimedia content publishing tools, including video, slideshows and PDFs.

SEO-optimized, multi-channel content, managed from a single Web CMS space, can significantly enhance your chances of being found online.

Start the Conversation

Your successful SEO efforts have brought the traffic to your door. Of course, not every visitor is the same, so how can your website deliver the right content to the right people?

That’s where your content management system comes in. A CMS platform that provides analytics and personalized content delivery tools can, in real-time:

• Determine where the visitor came from (organic search, PPC, link);
• Analyze what brought the visitor in (search term, ad, click stream);
• Using pre-determined rules, serve content that aligns with what that specific user is looking for.

Your rules tell your Web CMS what content to deliver to your home page based on what visitors searched for and where they came from, engaging them with content relevant to them as soon as they arrive on your site

Allow the Visitor to Respond

So, you’ve started the conversation by proving that you have what the user wants, and showing them right up front. The next task is tricky — how do you get the user to give you actionable information, such as an email address?

The answer is more personalized content — specifically, content that is compelling and offers high-value to the user. Since you are asking them for something valuable to them (their contact info), you need to offer value in return. Your Web CMS can serve up this content, be it a video, white paper or demo, based on the information gleaned in the previous step and any additional analytics information it can acquire — the longer the user stays on your site, the more pages they visit, the more data your CMS has to help segment your visitor and build a profile of them.

Your CMS platform can also manage security, make sure all forms and information submitted are secure, and integrate with CRM platforms, ensuring the relevant prospect data is captured and ready to be picked up by the sales team.

Nurture to the Finish

Now it’s time to really establish the two-way dialogue. With the prospect’s email address, and all of the analytics data your CMS has captured to this point, you have the ability to deliver, directly to prospects, highly targeted and personal content.

Many CMS systems now provide advanced tools for campaign management, such as A/B testing and automation. These tools enable marketers to target prospects with precise email messages and offers at the appropriate time, quickly and easily.

As you can see, a full-featured content management system allows you to take the familiar prospect buying cycle one step further, enabling you to control the interaction by personalizing the web and email experience for the prospect. Your CMS can help you learn more about your prospect and what they’re looking for, so you can deliver a highly qualified lead to your sales team that’s educated, engaged and ready to buy.

Blog first published on CMSWire

How can you get the best out of Sitecore? Begin with building a strong foundation starting with the architecture of the website.

Templates

Templates are the starting point for Sitecore architects who analyze the site’s requirements, break it down to the basic tangible entities and then work to further understand the content structure of the final site.

Templates are ‘normalized groupings’ of fields that constitute an entity structure in Sitecore. These entities can be single fields or a group of related fields.

To create a good template structure, you have to be cognizant about the following details:

• Identify all related fields that are common to an entity and can be further repurposed in other templates
• While creating a template, fields should be grouped in logical sections, which are based on relevant categorization of data
• In scenarios where a predefined structure of items is to be created, branch templates need to be defined after sub-items have been created
• Field names should be chosen carefully so that business users can identify and understand them with ease
• Define separate fields for display name, breadcrumb title as well as navigation title fields for a page item
• Minimize the use of RTE fields within the template and keep the templates small
• Have default values in the form of standard values
• Make basic template components which can be inherited as foundation templates

Content Structure

Once the templates have been created, you need to begin work on creating the content tree or the content architecture of the site. This structure will help you manage the content of your site.

Here, your checklist while creating the content architecture:

• Content structure hierarchy in Sitecore can impact the performance of your site. So be extra careful. As standard practice, we would not recommend having more than 100 items under any item node. Maintain the hierarchy in a way that it reduces the number of children per node
• For better and faster content editor experience, indexes should be configured correctly for automatic updates
• Identify access restrictions for items in order to provide access based on minimal requirements
• Plan content structure based on site map. Place all the items which are accessed using a URL as descendants of the web site item
• Use Clones instead of Proxy item as they allow to proxy an item/item sub-structure and allow for overriding the values
• Identify the security related requirements in multi-site in one instance environment and design your site structure and media structure that meets the separation requirements
• Maintain only a few versions of each item in the implementation

Presentation

After the content structure is ready, get started on creating the presentation of the Sitecore architecture. Presentation of the site is the layer which the users interface with on the site

• To start with, make sure that you store the layouts inside/Sitecore/Layout/Layouts/, sub-layouts inside /Sitecore/Layout/Sublayout. You can create sub-directories within these as needed with added access restrictions
• Do not have more than two or three layouts per device and handle the different structures using placeholders and sub-layouts respectively
• Assign the layout details in the standard values not on items or template definition items. When applied at item level, any changes to the layouts require a lot of effort to make changes to all items. When applied at standard values, such modifications become easier.
• If different items based on a template require different layouts, then create a new template that inherits from the existing template
• Use Field Renderer object to render the fields on presentation. This would provide the native CMS inline editing features for the pages. Use DefaultFieldEditor module from shared source for allowing inline editing of fields that are not displayed
• Caching options should be configured whenever the controls are used, based on the control definitions
• Make use of Sublayouts vs xslt while creating complex presentation items. It makes managing the code easily and also allows effective debugging of the code
• Site should be compliant to content authoring using page editor. It should not require access login to the desktop interface for content editors. This can be achieved by coding using Field Renderer object or by using Sitecore tags like sc:Text, sc:Image tags — these provide for editing in page editor out of the box

Caching

Another topic that I would like to take up here is the site performance. It is important we develop any website in a way that the code is optimum and fast. Sitecore enables you to do that and besides such codes, it allows various other features and options to improve the performance of your site

Sitecore allows monitoring and management of the website cache. You can improve site performance by keeping caching tuned to the best functioning of the website. Following these critical guidelines:

• Combined size of all the caches should not exceed available memory
• Use Sitecore Debugger, Firebug, /Sitecore/admin/stats.aspx, and /Sitecore/admin/cache.aspx to measure the performance of the sites
• During cache monitoring, if the Delta value keeps changing consistently with the size of the cache being more than 80% of the max size limit for that cache, consider increasing the max size for that cache by 50%.
• Tweak Pre-fetch cache appropriately by caching key items deemed to be required for the site.
• Tweak the different layers of caches for your application and perform the respective measurements to see the optimal settings for your site

Implementing these effective practices will definitely help you in creating a robust architecture for your Sitecore website. I will be talking about more areas of improvements in my upcoming blogs.

• Ease of doing business: The producer wants the task done in the simplest possible way.
• Ease of connectivity: The producer is often frustrated while getting information so stay away from multiple logins that most carriers provide. Make it easy!
• Tools that improve productivity and sales: Help the producer sell faster and more—efficiently.
• Improved engagement and better customer service: The producer is focused on relationships and needs to feel he has been serviced well.

What the producer thinks of the carrier’s website

This is very important. Producers often feel that carriers’ websites need to be simplified and made easier to navigate. Roughly four in five producers in 2012 agreed that they are more willing to place business with carriers that offer useful websites. This is very real in terms of transactions and revenues. Also, almost eighty percent producers agree that their primary carriers’ websites help them provide better service and enable them to sell more.

Producer’s interest in online tools: Emerging trends

Producers desire more online functions with online applications, e-signatures and marketing tools. Quite often, they work with several carriers simultaneously. This ease-of-use stands out as a critical need and is driving a trend towards digital engagement.

Digital maturity curve of distribution portals

This curve allows carriers to understand where they can map their path to engagement with the producers. In the early 2000s, it was all about informational portals that were more brochure-ware and disseminated simple information. In the mid to late 2000s, there was a wave of transactional portals. These offered improved content, productivity tools, e-applications, line of business integration, albeit with limited personalization.

Currently, we are witnessing a shift towards digital engagement between the carrier and the producer. These portals are personalized and collaborative, ensuring a two-way dialogue. They seamlessly integrate with the producer’s environment and offer more mobile and cross channel features — these are especially important for the producer who is constantly on the field.
So, where do you stand?

Five keys to digital maturity

1. Ease of doing business

A majority of producers, as we all understand, are more willing to place business with carriers that offer useful websites. Let me share this with you:
“Carriers provide way, way too much information. They need to keep it simple and easy. They forget that as independent agents we have 10 companies, 10 usernames, 10 passwords, 10 different web pages, and a thousand different products…. We’re busy; we sell. We do not sit and play with computers.”
— Male independent, age 62, mail/web-based survey

KISS (Keep It Simple S$#*%D)

This is exactly why ease of use is important. When you are thinking about the experience of your portal, keep it simple. Remember, ease of use = ease of doing business. Navigation should always be guided. Page structure and page layouts should be improved. Help should be contextual. Remember, a portal without help will not be very well accepted. The site has to be search enabled. Last but not the least; be very careful with the terminology. The terminology that is relevant to you might not be very useful to the producer out there in the field.

Look and feel

Keep it engaging and make it easy for the user to find information. We also recommend you ask for feedback from users through surveys and insight from analytics.

Solve the multiple log-in problem

Fifty per cent of the carriers we work with have a problem of multiple log in. A lack of a unified single access policy makes it cumbersome for producers to use the portal. It is important to have a single unified access to tools and ensure integrated access to external producer’s environment.

Personalization

Carriers should personalize experience based on the channel, tenure and experience of the user.

Self managed

Ability to manage quick links and personalize are some of the out-of- the-box capabilities of leading portals today.

Subscription

One size does not fit all so it is critical to allow users to subscribe to content, information, training etc. A subscription strategy is really important as it allows producers to pick and choose what is important to them.

Integrated experience

It is important to offer seamless access across carrier’s capabilities, including access to line of business capabilities.

Mobile access

Mobile has become very important with the younger demographic. Accessibility is the key today and it is essential to provide mobile access to capabilities to improve accessibility in the field. This will in turn improve productivity of the users.

Personal insurance capabilities include:

- E-signature
- Illustrations
- Application Status
- Customer Information
- Calculators
- Application Submission
- Policy Issuance
- Training

The question to ask here is what information will your user need on the field? Simply rolling out everything on your portal to the mobile is not the answer. Provide information that is really relevant.

2. Partner in success

How do you partner with your producers to be successful? What should be your engagement strategy? Remember, it is not about you working with the producer, it is the other way around. It is about getting the producer to work with you. Co-branding is one crucial strategy. It enables external producers to sell better and positions the carrier as a better partner. Co-branded assets could include websites, brochure ware etc.

• Many carriers offer websites for producers with a wide variety of functions including contact information, pending business status, marketing materials, and product information on producer sites
• 56% of carriers offer customizable marketing materials to producers
• 21% of carriers allow the producers to submit claims via website for producers
• 83% carriers offer production reports to producers

(Source: LIMRA)

Training enables producers to be effective

Ongoing training delivered through portals is a key asset to enable the sales force to sell. Our interactions with our clients tell us how highly they are valued. Yes, training is important but more importantly, training has to be when the producers need it and of the type they need.

Any training should include:

- Ready to go videos
- Web casts
- Personalized online training

Marketing material

How do you convey your value proposition to your audience? Through an engaging and dynamic website that offers content including information about products and success stories. The producer should be able to download engaging marketing collateral such as brochures to further position it effectively to his prospects. The result? Improved partner acquisition and increased market share.

Lead generation

We find a lot of carriers struggling with this. How do you make it fair? Should you as carriers be giving leads? Well, we are starting to see that carriers are experimenting with this idea and have capabilities to ensure that lead allocation is monitored and done in a fair manner.

Providing leads to partners enables them to sell. Here are some ways in you can help the producer:

- CRM capability to get, track and act on leads
- Provide leads to producers from pre-login website
- Lead tracking and nurturing tools
- Systemic capability to manage allocation and monitor pre-sale leads/targets
- Tools to be productive and efficient

Carriers can offer many functions online such as:

- Pending business status
- e-applications
- e-signatures
- Sales and marketing tools
- Marketing campaigns
- Customer level tools for agent (e.g., target customer profiles, customized leads)
- Reporting and analytics on sales rep activities and process effectiveness (Where is the dropout from lead to closure)

We at eDynamic track several hundreds of these functions. Reach out to us for a list of tools that portals should offer.

Recognition and awards to drive engagement and motivate producers

It is critical to socialize with producers and periodically honour then with top producer badges on the portal or placing them on the leader board of top producers. We are all social beings after all who thrive in appreciation.

3. Drive Engagement

Wondering how to engage your producers? Roughly, one in four producers would like to see their carriers add discussion forums, social networking, instant messaging, texts, and blogs. Traditionally, carriers have been resistant and there are a lot of restrictions within the industry; but there are ways of getting around. Here are a few ways to engage with your producers:

Better collaboration

Carriers today are applying collaborative technologies to both internal (employees and agents) and external (customers and prospects) networks. They are using tools such as real time chat, discussion forums, institution /cross partner based community, quick search and remote easy-to-access reference materials/illustrations, training and other content for marketing and sales.
Here, a few more tools that enable better collaboration and lead to more business.

- Access to application and status outside work environment for agents
- Access to customer information, policy updates, product updates and rate updates in the field
- Customized marketing materials
- Complete view of all customer interactions through CRM integration
- Document management services
- Ability to make/submit policy changes/to submit claims

Information sharing

Carriers should consider driving deeper engagement with producers to seek greater collaboration. They could create a platform for producers to connect with carriers in real time, share effective practice and discuss strategies to overcome business challenges. Social collaboration, content and communication tools can help balance openness with acceptable risk.

Social media

In my opinion, there is no better tool than an ongoing dialogue with the producers. And social media provides that mechanism. Social is not just about facebook or twitter. It is about managed communities and there is a variety of things within the sphere. Ultimately, it is about a two-way communication carried out in a consistent and easy manner. This is a huge area of opportunity that most carriers are struggling with.

• Facebook is used and configured to allow agents to publish preapproved content that can be localized to their specific areas
• Twitter to connect with clients, use as marketing tools and build client product awareness
• Social data to be filtered, tagged, integrated, archived, and aggregated

Pull them

Don’t wait for producers to come to your portal. Bring them to you as it is all about pro-active engagement. Here are a few tools you might want to consider:

- Email alerts
- Newsletters
- Offering visitors the chance to sign up for Twitter updates while on the site, and linking them to blogs or discussion forums
- Webcasts
- Podcasts
- Chats and instant messaging
- RSS feeds
- Microblogs

Mobile access for producers

Mobile is changing the landscape of the industry and you need to tap into its potential. Here are a few mobile applications that you can offer to your producers:

- Calendar
- Email
- Pending business status
- Client account information
- Ability to submit applications
- Ability to submit service requests
- Ability to submit claims
- Commissions
- Agent can submit claims using an application designed for customers

Information sharing

In our industry, it is all about turning the management of information into a business advantage. It is important to extract information from silos and make it more widely available. You have to have tools for enabling people to share information widely, yet in a secure and controlled fashion. Let your producer search entire repositories quickly and efficiently. And be careful to achieve all this in a way that remains relevant to each producer and carrier.

4. Manage the product lifecycle

We see a variety of portals being created but what happens to them there after? They become stale very quickly. This is when product management comes in to the picture. The portal should be considered as a product and should be consistently improved. You need to have a product road map before you go ahead and create a portal. The big bang approach doesn’t necessarily work. So, lay it out; have different phases offering capabilities that are frequently rolled out. Consider marketing and product management to manage the portal’s marketing assets, rather than IT. Enable marketing to manage the experience in real time. When content starts to roll out, carry out tests and surveys to see what works and what doesn’t.

5. Best of breed technology

The right technology is the key to success. Technology has to be an enabler and not a constraint. Use technology that is flexible and offers ease of integration. Your portal must have capabilities that can be personalized and targeted more specifically. The technology should allow marketing and product management to easily manage the experience. This should be a key requirement. Quite often, the marketing team is sidelined while IT builds the portal. But ultimately, it is the marketing guys who have to manage the user experience.

A few considerations:

Consider portal and CMS technology
Focus on an eco-system rather than one tool.

Approach to an engaging distribution portal experience

How and where do you get started?

Understand your audience

To create an effective experience, understanding the audience and creating a flexible user experience is the key. Often, we see carriers defining producer requirements in silos. They think they know the producer. But do they? It is important to conduct primary and secondary research to understand the needs of your users. Don’t simply rely on statistics and second hand information about what other carriers are doing. Do research and speak to producers who have worked with different carriers.
After understanding the audience, segment the producer base. As I mentioned earlier, consider tenure, channel and a few other factors so that you can offer a differentiated experience to each segment. Most importantly, engage them in the process.

Analyze

I recommend benchmarking insurance and non-insurance portals. Look at other spaces like the credit card industry that are very advanced. As you identify, prioritize your capabilities.

Road map

Define a digital road map and don’t forget, big bang rarely works. Link your portal with strategic priorities.

Design

In terms of design, focus on an engaging design, user experience and information architecture.

This flexibility comes in handy when trying to meet client requirements. Different organizations have different ways of working, so being able to customize an out-of-the-box process is fantastic. To quote Sitecore CTO John West from his previous post around Sitecore Differentiating Factors Blog Series: Extensibility

Because no CMS can provide every feature that every organization requires, it is important that each customer can enhance the CMS with the custom functionality they need.

Sitecore provides a great deal of flexibility in the configuration and topology of the production environment. It is quite common to have multiple servers delivering content in the production environment and separate the content delivery servers from the content authoring servers. This kind of topology provides additional content workflow features to authors, allowing them to publish content within the content authoring environment so it can be viewed and approved by non-cms users (such as a manager or other senior member of staff) before publishing the content to the public. In this kind of topology the authoring server is also acting as a “staging” environment.

To facilitate this kind of setup Sitecore includes a feature called “Publishing Targets”. Publishing Targets are listed in the publishing wizard dialog so an author can select which environment the content will be published to.

The issue with the default publishing model in Sitecore is that there is no enforcement to ensure content flows through the appropriate environments before being published. In the scenario given above where we have separated the content authoring server from the content delivery servers, within the publishing wizard dialog there are no checks to ensure content must be published to the content authoring server (staging environment) and checked before it can be published to the public.

But luckily, thanks to Sitecore’s extensibility and flexibility we have many options for implementing such a requirement.

Let’s start by defining what it is we want to achieve:

As a content publisher, I want to ensure content that is published to production has already been published to staging and been approved to allow review by non-CMS users within the organization.

Below is a list of several options to assist in meeting this requirement. All options below assume you’ve already followed the guidance in Sitecore’s Scaling Guide document available on the Sitecore Developer Network to setup your publishing targets.

Set default publishing targets

Sitecore contains a setting in configuration for defining which publishing targets should be selected by default. The publishing targets will be selected in the publishing wizard dialog every time it opens. Even if the user unchecked the publishing target to deselect it, when next the dialog opens the publishing target will be selected again.

The following configuration patch file can be dropped into the App_Config\Include folder of the authoring Sitecore instance to have the publishing target named staging selected by default every time the dialog opens.

<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
    <sitecore>
        <settings>
            <setting name="DefaultPublishingTargets" value="Staging" />
        </settings>
    </sitecore>
</configuration>

The biggest issue with this option is that users can easily uncheck the default publishing targets. This option acts as a reminder rather than a verification of publication.

Use an event handler to verify items being published

Sitecore defines many events which are fired in response to various system actions taking place. One such event is the publish:itemProcessing event which is fired for each item during a publishing operation. We can write an event handler, which is custom code, to respond to this event and abort the publication of the current item if that same item doesn’t exist in the staging database (used by the staging environment). The following prototype code shows how this event handler might be created.

using System;
using Sitecore.Diagnostics;
using Sitecore.Jobs;
using Sitecore.Publishing;
using Sitecore.Publishing.Pipelines.PublishItem;
using Sitecore.StringExtensions;

namespace PublishFlow
{
    public class PreventNonStagedRevisions
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Gets or sets the database name the item is being published to
        /// </summary>
        public string TargetDB
        {
            get;
            set;
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Gets or sets the database name the item revision must already exist in
        /// </summary>
        public string VerifyDB
        {
            get;
            set;
        }

        public void Process(object sender, EventArgs args)
        {
            var publishArgs = args as ItemProcessingEventArgs;

            // ensure item is publishing to target DB
            if (publishArgs.Context.PublishOptions.TargetDatabase.Name != TargetDB)
                return;

            // find item in verify DB
            var db = Sitecore.Configuration.Factory.GetDatabase(VerifyDB);
            Assert.IsNotNull(db, "Verify DB cannot be found by name '{0}'"
                .FormatWith(VerifyDB));
            var verifyItem = db.GetItem(publishArgs.Context.ItemId);

            // verify item exists in verify DB
            if (verifyItem == null)
            {
                var message = @"Failed to find verify item {0} in database {1}.
                Publish to {2} cancelled"
                    .FormatWith(publishArgs.Context.ItemId,
                        VerifyDB,
                        publishArgs.Context.PublishOptions.TargetDatabase);
                FailPublish(message, publishArgs);
                return;
            }

            // verify revisions are the same
            var sourceDb = publishArgs.Context.PublishOptions.SourceDatabase;
            var sourceItem = sourceDb.GetItem(publishArgs.Context.ItemId);
            Assert.IsNotNull(sourceItem, "Source item not found {0} in database {1}"
                .FormatWith(publishArgs.Context.ItemId, sourceDb.Name));

            if (verifyItem.Statistics.Revision != sourceItem.Statistics.Revision)
            {
                var message = @"Revision of item {0} '{1}' in verify database is different.
                    Make sure you publish the item to the verify DB first.
                    Publish to {2} cancelled"
                    .FormatWith(publishArgs.Context.ItemId,
                    sourceItem.Name,
                    publishArgs.Context.PublishOptions.TargetDatabase);

                FailPublish(message, publishArgs);
                return;
            }
        }

        private void FailPublish(string message, ItemProcessingEventArgs publishArgs)
        {
            Sitecore.Context.Job.Status.Messages.Add(message);
            Sitecore.Context.Job.Status.Failed = true;
            publishArgs.Cancel = true;
        }
    }
}

The above code first performs some checks to ensure the handler should operate on the item being published as this may be a publish from master to staging for which this handler has no interest. If the handler should run and all prerequisite data can be found then a comparison is done between the item from the source database and the item in the staging database, comparing the revision fields of the items. Sitecore automatically assigns a new GUID to the revision field of an item every time it is saved, so you can be sure if separate instances of an item have different revision values the items cannot be the same.

To subscribe the above event handler to the publish:itemProcessing event use the following configuration patch file which should be deployed to the App_Config\Include folder.

<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
    <sitecore>
        <events>
            <event name="publish:itemProcessing">
                <handler type="PublishFlow.PreventNonStagedRevisions, PublishFlow" method="Process">
                    <TargetDB>web</TargetDB>
                    <VerifyDB>staging</VerifyDB>
                </handler>
            </event>
        </events>
    </sitecore>
</configuration>

One point to note about the above prototype is the order in which the publishing targets are defined. The publishing process will process the publishing targets in the order that they appear in this dialog, which follows the content order of the publishing target definition items under /sitecore/system/Publishing targets. Make sure your staging publishing target is sorted before the internet publishing target otherwise you’ll end up in a situation where within a single publishing operation Sitecore is trying to publish items to internet before staging and the custom event handler above is failing publication of items to internet because they haven’t yet been published to staging, even though they’re about to be.

Customize the publish dialog to select and disable the staging publishing target

This option entails overriding the Sitecore publish wizard dialog UI with our own implementation to select the desired publishing targets in code, then disable the publishing target checkbox so users cannot uncheck the publishing target.

The publishing wizard dialog in Sitecore is implemented using Sitecores SheerUI, so the dialog itself is defined in an XML file which can be easily overridden.

The following prototype code shows how to extend the default Sitecore publish dialog box implementation class and programmatically select the publishing target then disable the control.

using System;
using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;
using Sitecore.Data;

namespace PublishFlow
{
    public class PublishForm :
        Sitecore.Shell.Applications.Dialogs.Publish.PublishForm
    {
        protected override void OnPreRender(EventArgs e)
        {
            base.OnPreRender(e);

            // Ensure stageweb target is selected and disabled
            var stagingPublishingTargetItem =
                Sitecore.Client.GetItemNotNull("/sitecore/system/publishing targets/staging");
            var id = "pb_" + ShortID.Encode(stagingPublishingTargetItem.ID);

            var control = PublishingTargets.FindControl(id);
            if(control != null)
            {
                var hc = control as HtmlGenericControl;
                hc.Attributes["checked"] = "checked";
                hc.Attributes["disabled"] = "disabled";
            }
        }
    }
}

The default dialog implementation contains a method for populating the publishing targets called GetPublishingTargets(). This would have been an ideal method to override but unfortunately the method is private, static and non-virtual.

Rather than trying to identify a method further up in the call chain that makes use of the GetPublishingTargets() method and rewriting all the logic contained within these methods it’s much easier to intercept before the response is returned to the user and make the required updated to the UI components, as is being done above. The sample code overrides the OnPreRender() method which is called just before the response is returned.

By inspecting the generated markup of the default publishing dialog we can ascertain the format of the control ID for the checkbox we want to alter. This requires the ID of the publishing target definition item. Once we’ve found the checkbox control in the dialog we can select it and disable it.

Now we have to update the Publish dialog XML to reference the above custom form class instead of the default implementation.

Sitecore provides a facility to override any of the SheerUI controls it uses without editing the original file. This makes future updates much easier. If we updated the original file then a future update to that file would remove our customizations. By using the override facility our customization will remain even if the original file is updated.

To override the publish dialog we simply copy the existing XML file which describes the dialog UI from sitecore\shell\Applications\Dialogs\Publish\Publish.xml to sitecore\shell\override\Publish.xml. Any XML file which appears in this location will replace any default XML file that defines the same control ID (first child element name of the control element inside the XML file). We need to update the dialog to use our implementation class instead of the default class.

Locate the following line in the XML file:

<WizardForm CodeBeside="Sitecore.Shell.Applications.Dialogs.Publish.PublishForm,Sitecore.Client">

And change it to reference our custom implementation class:

<WizardForm CodeBeside="PublishFlow.PublishForm, PublishFlow">

Now when we open the publishing wizard and proceed to the publishing target selection tab the staging publishing target will be selected and disabled.

As with the previous option, take note of the publishing target order. You will need to ensure your publishing target definition items are sorted correctly to ensure the staging target is first on the list.

Conclusion

Several options were explored above to ensure content is published to the content staging server before it’s published to the world. The appropriate option for you would depend on your situation. Do you want a gentle reminder (option 1) or do you need to ensure content simply cannot be published to production without first passing through staging no matter what (option 2)?

Of the options presented I think option 2 is the best as it ensures the requirement at the data level and doesn’t rely on UI tweaks.

What is Personalization?

Personalization typically means meeting website visitor expectations more effectively and efficiently, making transactions faster and easier and, consequently, increasing acquisition and retention. It is all about interacting with website visitors on a personal level and delivering content that speaks directly to their needs. So, when prospects come to your site, you should be able to identify what they are looking for and route them to a path based on their implicit behavior.

Personalization – What it needs to be

Personalization is much more than a custom banner image, a personalized headline or even a personalized recommendation. It is richer and deeper than that. Personalization should essentially be a conversation or a two way dialogue between a prospect and the organization. To turn visitors into customers, you need to engage them at every step of their buying journey. Buyers evolve as they go through the buying cycle; they get more sophisticated in their knowledge of the industry, market, product features. Thus, true personalization should engage prospects in context with an understanding of their behavior and disposition.

To create an ideal personalized experience you need to understand what they’re looking for, where they are in the buying cycle and then deliver the content that matters to them.

Why is Personalization important?

According to SirusDecisions – “The average b2b buyer is 70% of the way through their buying process before ever speaking to a sales rep.”

Prospects are more informed than ever and hence it has become critical to anticipate their needs and deliver a strong, compelling user experience. Else there is a great possibility that you will end up losing them to your competitor.

According to the Marketing Sherpa B2B benchmarking report, a large portion of your database contains long term opportunities i.e. lead that are worth nurturing. So unless you are able to engage this big bucket of people and walk with them, nurturing them throughout their buying process, it is almost impossible to turn them into customer.

When is the Best Time to Engage? The answer is “ALL THE TIME”.

Essentially in a b2b buying environment where prospects engage with website and other digital platforms/channels, you need to interact with them at all the levels. Engaging with prospects at every point in their buying cycle with relevant content that promotes action is the key. We need to make sure that we provide the right content at each stage which would enable them to move forward to the next step until they reach a point where they are ready-to-buy.

The Role of Technology

With content management systems such as Sitecore, content driven web experiences have become a lot more sophisticated.

According to Gartner, “Although the rudiments of context-aware computing have been around for some time now, it is a disruptive technology that has the potential to be a real ‘game changer’ in terms of competitive advantage”

However, technology is only one aspect in the enabling process. You need to better understand the journey your prospects take and travel with them, learn what they need at each stage of the buying cycle, deliver relevant content to keep them engaged and nurture them to the finish line. Thus it is a combination of technology, process and methodology that comes together to deliver this rich experience.

How to identify visitor context?

Context can be identified through implicit, explicit or external means—all of which are integrated or interface the CMS

Visitor generated: Implicit information captured from the website journey—the “digital footprints” left by the visitor.

Visitor supplied: Explicit information supplied by the visitor as they complete questionnaires, quiz or any other form.

Externally supplied: Information captured by external service providers, emerging context-enriched services like location, presence, social attributes, and cross-vendor buying habits.

The Five Essential Steps to enabling true Personalization

Five steps to achieve contextual engagement that aligns with customer expectations and drives acquisition are:

Step – 1 Understand your Buying Cycle – There are typically 5-6 stages prospects pass through from the point of need recognition to a purchase decision. It basically helps you understand your buyer’s perspective and mindset through each stage in the buying journey.

Step – 2 Understand Disposition –When a person visits your website, based on their actions, you need to understand their disposition and the triggers and tripwires that can turn them into a buyer.

To understand their disposition, you can establish triggers that can help you track their action on the website. For example, the pages they spend most amount of time on, the material they download, etc.

Once you understand a prospect’s disposition, it’s important to identify and prioritize their pain points and motivators. Then, whether their motive is to increase revenue, save cost or increase operational efficiency, you would be able to serve specific content that matches their disposition.

For example, if a lead is still in the information gathering phase, you would serve a white paper that delivers more details about product benefits and if a lead is in the vendor evaluation phase, you would rather deliver a webinar or video that talks about your key differentiators.

Step – 3 Profile and Segment your Audience –It is critical to know who is buying from you – the distinct buying groups within the prospect population.

By understanding relevant segmentation attributes, you need to define exclusive and homogeneous groups that are of substantial size based on demographics, needs, behaviors, etc.

Step – 4 Align Content to the Segmentation – This step is about identifying and delivering the content that addresses your customer expectations after considering the stage of buying cycle they are in, the segment of audience they belong to and their pain points/motivators. We need to put ourselves in their shoes and determine:

• What questions would they have at this stage?
• What information would they need to move forward in the buying cycle?
• What fear, uncertainty and doubt must be overcome?

Here is an example of how a buying cycle is defined and how the audience is segmented and delivered relevant content based on their pain points, motivators and the stage of buying cycle they are in:

Step – 5 Leverage the Platform -Once you understand the buying cycle, the buyer and their motives, you can act on the disposition and deliver content that meets prospect expectations.

• All you need to do is “Build the Rules”. Understand and align the messages with the segment and their objections.
• Create rules to deliver content:
  • Per segment: Job title, industry vertical, etc.
  • Per stage in the buying cycle: Info gathering, vendor evaluation, etc.

Leveraging Powerful CMS like Sitecore for Personalization

Leveraging a powerful and contemporary content management system, like Sitecore, is all about organizing the content.

It means how and when do you want to present the content to your website visitors. With such powerful CMSs in place, the journey visitors take during their multiple visits on your site eventually becomes an engagement cycle, where over a period of time they get involved in a digital conversation in the form of a two way dialogue.

With Sitecore automation module – Digital Marketing System (DMS), it has become a lot easier to define triggers that can tell us the stage people are in. It collects the visitor’s implicit and explicit information, implement your trigger rules and automate delivery of content.

Personalization can occur in multiple ways – either it can dynamically present different content throughout the site, or it can be based on the implicit structure of the site. You need to look at what you want to personalize and how you want to structure the content.

You can either make your entire site dynamic or create targeted sections based on the vertical, department, pain points, motivators, of your audience and do personalization within these sections.

Here are the examples of B2B and B2C companies leveraging personalization on their website.

Example 1: A B2C Company

A Bike Manufacturing Company

A visitor comes to a website looking for a new bike. At first, he visits the home page and then searches for the type of bike he wants – let’s say a road bike.

After researching, he finally comes to the “Mountain Lion X7” page, and checks out the “compact carbon frame” model from technical specifications. Since the CMS has been capturing the entire visitor journey and his interests, the next time he visits the website, more information on carbon frame road bikes will be presented to him. This means experience will be personalized for him based on his website journey during his last visit.

As he will continue to spend more time on website, system will track his behavior and ask questions along the journey in order to validate his interest and ultimately indicate the dealers where he can buy the product.

Even if he leaves the site and doesn’t buy the product, Sitecore DMS will continue sending automated emails with offers, reminders, coupons, specific to his interest till the visitor is ready to buy.

Example 2: A B2B Company

A Financial Services Firm

This is an example of personalization based on implicit structure of the site.

This company preferred to create different sections for their audience based on their pain points/need – reduce cost, grow your business and improve processes.

Let’s say a visitor comes to their site and selects “reduce costs” – the site will now offer him a calculator wherein he can put his information and find out the cost he can save.

Since he is searching for a solution, his behavioral pattern suggests that he has gone past the initial information search stage and has already reached the advanced buying stage.

Thus personalization here will be based upon the implicit action as well as the data from CRM system that maps to the individual profile.

As more information is gathered about the visitor, targeted content will be served. This will finally lead to purchase decision.

Again if he leaves in the mid-way, the website will recognize the individual on his next visit and resume the conversation.

So, the crux is that personalization is much more than just a custom banner image, or a greeting. It is richer and deeper than that. More importantly, personalized content needs to be dynamic – it needs to change as the buyer changes and evolve as the buyer undergoes the buying journey. It’s important to understand your customers, take the journey with them through the buying cycle and deliver relevant content at the right time.

State of Demand Generation in Law Firms

While business development through relationship marketing will continue to be very important in driving new business, digital marketing can play a key role in the sales process to acquire new customers. According to Incisive Media Corporate research on Law Firms, marketing/business development professionals at larger firms are more likely to use web to support cross selling and repeat business

Another interesting survey proves that marketing professionals are more likely to report using e-newsletters/alerts to drive traffic, followed by email campaigns, search engine optimization and social media to target new clients.

But it isn’t working! Quality lead gen is a big challenge for law firms

The concern for “Quality Lead Gen” remains as the biggest challenge for law firms. This essentially means the entire demand generation process is not synchronized to convert leads to sales. And this issue is not only limited to the legal industry but spread across B2B marketing.

According to e-marketer, 39% of marketers are not happy with the conversion rates. While spend is $23 billion, conversion is as low as 3%. According to Omniture, the cost to traffic and conversion ratio is 92:1. So, the focus needs to be on conversion, not traffic.

Challenges Faced by Law Firms

Websites are not driving conversion like they should – Most of the legal websites are static information repositories. It’s very hard to find relevant information in the pool of content. The website tends to provide everything for everyone instead of personalized engagement. Moreover there is very little use of intelligence in understanding what a prospect really wants.

Channels don’t work together to engage prospects – The communication that is sent through emails, newsletters/alerts are not aligned with what is provided on the website. Hence, it results in inconsistent messaging across the channels and further confuses the prospect.

Quality of lead is poor – Converting lead to customer is becoming increasingly difficult as there is no process involved in qualifying the leads before they are shared with the sales team.  Lack of lead scoring and nurturing model in law firms result in friction between marketing and sales.

Marketing and business development gap – Marketing and business development are not playing the same game, which results in a strong negative impact to lead generation. In a survey conducted by Bloom group, 57% of law firms reported in the survey were not working off the same timeline of demand creation activities for most or all of the time. Moreover there is a notion in many law firms that marketers don’t really contribute to revenue.

Strategic Roadmap for Successful Demand Generation

In order to address the above mentioned issues and challenges, you essentially need a strategic roadmap which would pave the path for successful demand generation. To be able to drive quality and quantity of leads and laying the foundation for this strategic roadmap, you need to:

Understand how clients buy and organize – First and foremost, you need to understand how buyers buy. By looking at the buying lifecycle and coming up with a strategy that wraps around it, will fundamentally change how you market your capabilities.

Be multi-channel – The messaging should be consistent across all the channels and aligned with what you say on your website.

Get your strategies right –You need to get all your strategies — content, website, demand generation, SEM/SEO and social — flowing and working cohesively.

Get the insight – This would allow you to optimize and understand the experience your buyers are looking for and it would further enable your partners and attorneys to be able to close the business effectively.

Test and optimize – Continuous testing and optimization is most important to improve lead acquisition and ensure effective utilization of several marketing capabilities.

Join the dots with technology – Ultimately it’s the technology that has to make everything happen. Several platforms engage to drive conversion, thus successful integration and automated workflows ensure the desired outcome.

The Buying Lifecycle to Improve Acquisition

This concept of buying lifecycle is of utmost importance in the present scenario, as the clients are more informed and driving the buying process. Publishing and social media has fostered an ongoing dialogue among peers, and Web 2.0 tools have enabled B2B buyers to be well-versed on service offerings even before they have their first conversation with the firm. Thus the firms must direct and guide prospects through the buying phases of their decisions (as shown in the image below).

According to DGR Report, almost 95% of the recent b2b buyers said that the provider they chose “helped them navigate through each stage of the buying process with ample content.” Consistent with other industry research, case studies, best practices data, white papers, ROI tools and vendor comparison analysis, were cited as the most helpful content sources.

Thus, capturing the prospect’s online footprint becomes important as it allows the sales team to understand where in the buying cycle prospect lies, and plan interactions accordingly. Similarly leads deemed not to be “sales worthy” should be passed back to marketing. These are usually qualified prospects who simply aren’t ready to purchase yet and requires proper nurturing.

Digital marketing can have a strong influence on the buying lifecycle, so marketing and business development must align and wrap their processes and tactics around it.

• Understand your buying cycle – Understand your customer’s mindset through the buying cycle journey
• Segment your audience – Determine the target groups within your audience
• Map the messages – Understand and align your messages with the segment and their objectives
• Implement the platforms – Deliver consistent messaging across various platforms

The buying lifecycle eventually provides direction to your digital marketing initiatives.

Content Strategy to Target the Buying Lifecycle

The number one challenge is producing truly engaging and compelling content that grabs your audiences’ attention and makes them want to reach out to you. Your content strategy should focus on the needs of the buyer/client, while ensuring your other set of audience, such as talent, gets the information they need. Here’s what you need to do:

• Focus on Buyers’ need
• Consider mapping the buying lifecycle
• Keep minimal copy
• Focus on thought leadership content
• Ensure your content is searchable
• Leverage interactive content like videos
• Structure and implement content relationships effectively

Engaging Website – A Key Asset of your Digital Strategy

The next generation websites should:

• provide experience which is engaging
• be multi-device
• be multi-lingual
• provide intelligent content that targets the buying lifecycle phase
• provide personalized and relevant content
• make the content and information searchable
• be SEO friendly

Law firms have rich content and complex taxonomy which makes search essential:

• Type-ahead – Enable people to find content while entering keywords
• Guided Navigation – Suggest recommendations by integrating personalization capabilities with the user’s search history
• Faceted Search – Help quickly filter search results with common parameters

Attorney Bios are among the most visited section of websites, they should be:

• Easy to find through faceted search (by name, practice area, location)
• Linked to thought leadership material — blogs, webinars, whitepapers — created by the attorney
• Personalized
• Easy to navigate

Call to action is the key to driving conversion. It’s important for you to:

• Merchandise — make whitepaper seem like a significant item
• Make the content simple and persuasive
• Use simple forms
• Give engaging and obvious call to action

Email Marketing – Nurturing Strategy that Drives Prospect Engagement

The days of batch email marketing campaigns with low response rates are over. It’s time to execute mail dialogue campaigns:

• Deepen prospect relationship with multi-step email campaigns based on thought leadership marketing
• Engage in 1:1 dialogue and deliver personalized content
• Track who opens and click on emails or who visits a specific webpage
• Focus on continuous testing and optimization coupled with targeted email marketing
• Employ lead scoring to score opportunities and identify leads that are sales ready

Lead Nurturing Model to Drive Conversion

Approach to successful engagement through lead scoring:

• Use a scoring system to identify your segments
• Build a nurturing model
• Develop a content map
• Use interactive channels
• Measure and refine

SEO to Drive Traffic and Demand

Law firm can grow traffic exponentially by SEO strategy. You can generate link-back traffic and long-tail searches through internal and external article distribution, public relations, social media and blogs.

It is very important to regularly publish new content containing “long tail” key words (e.g. “Clean Energy Litigation Law”).

Social Media for Demand Generation

Social media requires strong strategy and planning. The key recommendations are:

• Target social media across the buying lifecycle
• Build your attorney’s linkedin profiles
• Manage your Twitter account
• Make your website social by linking it to Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook
• Create a Facebook page for recruiting purposes
• Prepare a content distribution/publishing plan
• Create a governance strategy

Data Analysis, Technology Integration and Optimization

• Single view of the client and closed loop marketing
• Cross channel analytics across web, mobile and email
• Integration with CRM
• Insight and behavior for decision making

CMS, analytics, onsite search and email marketing are critical for law firms to enable the conversion process.

In a recent Webinar we have discussed this subject. Click here to watch the on-demand webinar now.

According to Bain & Company, Inc. “Executives overwhelmingly cite revenue growth, as their organization’s most important priority over the next three years – three times more often than any other priority, and six times more often than cost containment”

DemandGen, Marketing Analytics and Revenue Management Survey Report indicate:

• 64.5% of the Management push for better pipeline visibility
• 68.4%  of Marketers feel pressure to justify spending
• 42% of CEOs actively track impact on revenue

But “How do we generate business”? The answer is “Generate most positive business outcomes”.

Business outcome is a measurable activity that has a quantifiable impact on revenue. Increasing number of customers and conversions are some of the obvious business outcomes.

A new approach to generate positive business outcomes which would lead to revenue growth is to make a connection between content and revenue. Delivering more business outcomes enable you to further grow your organization’s revenue.  This is accomplished with technology that is built upon four steps: Content, Context, Experience and Optimization.

Content: A great piece of news, which lays the foundation to this approach, is that most organizations are already creating content. They are creating marketing collateral, thought leadership material, blogs, websites, landing pages, microsites, etc. These are already out there and organizations are investing their resources in it.

Context : Now if we can add context by knowing the website visitor, what is driving them, what’s going to entice them, their device, social graphs, environment, location, we would be able to create an experience which would help deliver the right information at the right point of time in their web journey.

Experience: The right experience is delivered through channels like website, mobile devices, communities, and email.

Optimize: Once we generate these experiences, we can analyze them through the analytics tools and optimize to provide a highly personalized experience.

Business Outcome: And finally once we do this in the form of a virtual cycle, we can increase the business outcomes. Increase in the page views, brand awareness, lead acquisition are some of the positive business outcomes.

Making Sense of Engagement

Engagement cannot be measured with analytics anymore; mere clicks cannot define the level of engagement. Engagement can be defined as turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by a surrounding context.

Some of the other definitions of engagement are given below:

“Engagement is an estimate of the degree and depth of visitor interaction against a clearly defined set of goals” – Eric Peterson

“Engagement is defined as the strong connection a company, or brand, creates with a customer that drives purchase decisions and satisfaction over time” – Adobe

Forrester has developed a model to redefine the engagement process. It’s a thought framework suggesting how an organization should think. It’s also about a visitor’s participation with a brand, where they call the shots.

The model is primarily broken down to four different areas namely, Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy and Influence.

Involvement is about how people get involved with your site and interact with your brand, Interaction is about the various touch points where visitors take some action. For example, filling up a form or downloading a whitepaper.  Once we get these interactions going, we need to look at Intimacy, which is about how close people feel to the brand. This essentially leads to Influence where people begin to recommend your brand to others.

How Engagement Drives Revenue

Digital engagement drives customer acquisition and retention that translates into revenue generation for organizations.

Involvement can be measured through the number of click-through, time spent on the website and unique visits. By wrapping analytics around these, we can calculate the level of involvement a visitor has with the brand.

Interaction is where the customer takes a step further and interacts in a two way dialogue. Examples include filling up a form, leaving a comment, requesting a sales call or a demo, etc. These activities can be measured and analyzed to provide valuable customer insight.

Intimacy shows the preference of your brand over another. Here the customer makes the choice and comes back to purchase your products or services.

Finally Influence is where you convert the customer and persuade them to influence others as well. This involves activities like word of mouth promotion, forward to a friend, social network contribution, recommendations etc.

Capabilities that Drive Engagement

Capability models drive engagement and support the organization’s overall digital strategy. The six essential elements of such capability models are:

These six elements form the DNA of the digital ecosystem. Hence, delivering deep engagement requires a core set of capabilities that are supported by an ecosystem of technology platforms.

Integrated Channels: This involves the ability of people to engage with you across web, email, mobile, communities and various other channels. Integrated channels ensure there is no disconnect and a unified message is delivered across all channels.

Demand Generation: There’s lot that fits into this bucket, including inbound marketing, outbound marketing and lead nurturing.

User Experience: It involves good design, great information architecture and it applies to all the steps, as it supports the brand and the way people engage with the brand.

Relevance: This means delivering right message to the right person at the right time on the right device.

Analytics and Optimization: We are all aware of web analytic tools like Google analytics, Adobe Omniture and many more.  Now we need to take these to another level where we would gage and measure things like intimacy and influence.

Customer View: It ties a variety of things together, like relevance, analytics, user experience and the integrated channels. This essentially means getting a single view of the customer and delivering a unified message across all channels for better engagement.

Digital Marketing Capabilities Model

Organizations may start with stand alone platforms, disparate views of customer with singular experience for CMS and email automation. However as they move on, they begin to bring all these together to create a personalized experience across all the channels and provide cross channel integration with a single view of the customer.

The Digital Marketing Capabilities Model shows how organizations start by incorporating basic user experience, basic demand generation programs, disparate platforms and no optimization and then move towards a more sophisticated user experience with information architecture targeted to specific segment of audience.

Thus we need to figure out where our organization fits into this Digital Marketing Capabilities Model:

Maturity Models:

In the context of where organizations currently are and where they want to go, we need to take a closer look and map their present state, identify the gaps, find a reference point and keep improving as per the digital strategy.

In the Basic Digital Stage, they start by having a website and leveraging a content management solution. They focus on spray and pray emails which are typically not targeted or personalized. They focus on web design but not equipped with a fully solid information architecture based on the best practices. Then of course comes analytics, here organizations know how many people have visited their website and how many have opened their emails. However they do not know about the level of engagement people have with their brand.

As organizations move further down the maturity curve, they invest more and start improvising quickly. They reach the stage of Advanced Experience. At this stage, they improve the user experience and become more sophisticated about analysis. They broaden their scope of analysis and focus on demand generation. They think about SEO and SEM, and how they can leverage the targeted keywords. Capabilities like marketing automation, channel specific analysis and targeted user experience are initiated during this stage.

The next step in the maturity curve where organizations move to the next level of sophistication is Driving Relevance. Here organizations try and understand the relevance of content in context. Now they are not only thinking of improving the user experience but are also beginning to drive relevance through personalization. They do not have personalization across all the channels; some are still independent. But now they are reaching a point where they are segmenting at a much finer level. They are not only segmenting the content based on industries but also based on the role or function of the audience. They are beginning to create whitepapers, blogs, and images so that they are direct and personalized in their approach.

The final step is Continuous Optimization. It is more of the nirvana step, where organizations get to the point where they have expanded analytics across all the channels and have a broader view on how all of this will ultimately resolve into the maturity of the prospect into a lead. At this stage, the capabilities of the organization reach the epitome of sophistication and they position themselves as best in class with best practices like deep analytics and multivariate testing of the user experience,  logical view of the ‘digital footprint’ of customer, lead nurturing & scoring and unified cross-channel engagement.

Delivering Capabilities through Technology

It is important to understand how to deliver these capabilities through technology and how to organize these technologies with strategy. Typically we need to consider technologies like:

• Content Management – This delivers the relevant experience on the web.
• Marketing Automation – This is a level beyond simple email marketing, it nurtures the prospects throughout the digital buying lifecycle using email, content marketing, and web.
• Analytics: It tells us what people are doing and what they want.
• Social and Community: It enables group interactions. It is the mechanism where people influence your brand.
• CRM: It manages the sales cycle in the context of profile information.

Technology is only one part of the puzzle. It has to be aligned with strategy and context; else digital marketers will face challenges like:

• Multiple lead profiles
• Disrupted digital journey
• Irrelevant communication

Uncoordinated platforms deliver dissonant messaging to leads. Thus without strategy, even a complete digital ecosystem will not effectively drive the results.

Strategy—Making the Most of Technology

• Develop an engagement strategy: Understand the buying cycle of the customer, segment, engage and analyze the motivation/pain point and overlay them into a model.
• Create contextual content: After you have analyzed the pain points and requirements of your audience, segment them and develop content relevant to these segments.
• Define a lead disposition and scoring approach: Define metrics that inform the mindset and maturity of prospects.
• Automate a cross-channel, closed loop engagement cycle: Employ a rules-driven approach to engage prospects.

Driving Value for Organizations

To drive value for the organization, deliver capabilities through CMS, CRM and Marketing Automation technology platforms, integrate them with automated work flows, define matrices, create a closed loop engagement cycle and align engagement strategy to accelerate the buying cycle and increase conversion.

In a recent webinar we have discussed the subject in more details, click here for the on demand video.