Sitecore Experience Platform on a Budget

You just got your freshly new Sitecore site or about to start a new development and don’t have the approved budget to implement Marketing features. Trying to implement marketing features on a budget can be tough but with the right planning, education, and prepping you can put yourself in the right position for when budget becomes available. Below are some tips and thoughts if you are on a tight budget

Plan Ahead
Typically, planning is always done for design, development and content for any project, but often planning for Sitecore Marketing features is an afterthought or handled in a later phase. This can potentially lead to challenges as the site might not be developed to handle the features easily.

Identify Your Goals
Identifying your marketing goals early so you can determine which are the immediate goals and long term goals you want to implement. Even though you may not implement due to budget, development team will have a clear picture and hopefully this will help them develop the solution to be scalable enough to accommodate the goals without major development.

Create Strategy Roadmap
You’ve identified your goals and by creating a strategy roadmap you are putting together a short term and long term goals for the development team to align with. This will help you prioritize the features you want to implement and see what can be quick wins that will bring high value with the minimum effort.

Set the Foundation
Make sure Sitecore Analytics is configured and capturing data so you can have historical data. This will be key information when you are ready to begin applying the features to re-enforce your strategies or change them. Communicate with development team of your goals to help them understand what you want to achieve as they may change their development strategy.

Start small, Start Simple
Often we have clients that want to implement all the features or create complex personalization rules straight out of the gates, which some clients are positioned to do, but most usually aren’t. We usually will recommend to them start simple and small, especially if they are just getting familiar or haven’t identified their goals. By starting small, you will become more familiar with how things work, more time to digest and analyze the data that is being captured and be more strategic on what you want to implement and hopefully save time and money.

Hopefully with these tips you can plan and be successful even with a limited budget.