Leading Web content management software (WCMS) provider Sitecore last month held its first London one-day conference highlighting the latest trends in digital marketing while showcasing the online strategies of some of Europe’s best known brands. Paul Shlackman reports…
Digital Trend Spot 2010 featured key note speeches by five of the world’s most respected authorities in digital marketing interlaced with a series of customer success stories arranged into three parallel streams: Digital Strategy, Online Marketing and Web Platforms & Development.
Opening the conference, Michael Seifert, CEO, Sitecore, presented a personal vision of a near-future world based on Digital Intimacy. As technological advances give business more and more digital touch points with customers around the world so business needs to be able to respond to customers with same amount of sensitivity online as it would in the physical world. “Online business-to-consumer websites will become places to go for truly one-to-one marketing experiences,” he predicted.
What’s in it for me?
Next Mick MacComascaigh, research director for Gartner Research, asked the audience of marketing professionals and online brand strategists to consider tuning their online channel to WII FM (what’s in it for me). This year online marketing budgets have for the first time ever exceeded print.
To measure the impact of these campaigns, company websites are being developed with ever more built-in “usability” – a term that has evolved beyond the confines of IT users to encompass non-technical users such as marketers.
Such sites can provide live feedback from activities like multi-variate testing so that marketing managers can continually tweak their site to make it deliver better results. The best way to tune into WII FM, he said, is to identify potential synergies and value through integration of your WCM with adjacent technologies.
Embracing social media in work
Margaret Manning, CEO of Reading Room, urged people to be bold and above all authentic with their online marketing efforts. For example, there is no point banning social media tools in the workplace if you really want to make the Internet work for you. To back up her point, her company is among the first to encourage all employees to use the corporate Twitter account to tweet on activities in the company.
Show, don’t tell
Following up was Neville Kuyt of AKQA, a digital consultancy. Opening on a controversial note Nobody cares about your website he emphasised the three most important lessons for successful website marketing:
1. Show, don’t tell
2. Go to customers, wherever they are
3. Websites are just part of digital marketing not all of it
While Web CMS should be at the heart of your digital strategy you should always adopt a multi-channel approach and let popular websites such as Facebook and YouTube help you to leverage local market content from global campaigns wherever possible.
Digital strategy- staying on message across multiple mediums
Much of the afternoon session was devoted to customer success stories. These comprised three parallel tracks – Digital Strategy, Online Marketing and Web Platforms & Development – representing the key components of any successful online campaign.
Digital strategy was the first theme explored in the customer sessions. The Digital Strategy session included Scottish Enterprise presenting on managing organisational change in times of austerity; Bristol Airport on how to convert your website from cost centre to profit centre; The Conservative Party on social media and the election and G4S on how to launch a website in many languages and across many cultures across the world while retaining a single, unified corporate message.
Meanwhile in the Online Marketing section Manchester City FC spoke about how to transform a Premiership Football Club site so that it engages with fans around the world online; National Autistic Society on how the charity’s re-launched website became a more personal user experience; how online activity has been placed at heart of the Spots v Stripes campaign in the build-up to Cadbury’s sponsorship at Olympics 2012 and Kia Motors about managing a uniform brand experience across large number of local dealership websites.
Addressing Web platforms & development were NHS Direct who had successfully integrated state-of-the-art CMS with legacy systems and develop smooth workflows for online patient self-assessment tools; Oticon and how they incorporated Digital Asset Management for new global corporate website; Department of Business Innovation and Skills who had gained efficiency and cost savings from their CMS platform and Toshiba’s successful B2B e-business strategy.
Content is getting personal
Eric Reiss of FatDux wound up proceedings with a talk entitled From marketing to social media (and back again). He argued that marketing and social media are two very different beasts and that although social media exists today social media marketing does not. To function effectively, he said, websites must allow companies to identify and personalise the customer by responding in real-term to their click journey so that the content becomes increasingly personal to them.
Know your customer’s world
In summary,the recurrent message from the conference was that WCM is no longer a stand alone concept but a whole solution landscape. In order to engage with online customers marketers must live in the online world, be familiar with the online places where their customers go and understand the importance of econometrics and expert web analytics. Choosing the right underlying WCMS platform is an important foundation for turning your online marketing strategy from a project into a living, constantly evolving process.
www.sitecore.net
