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Why Sitecore Business Optimization Strategies Should Steer Your Digital Marketing Strategy

If your organization’s website(s) are on Sitecore, your team may be wrestling with how to implement Sitecore personalization and optimization. If you are not sure where to start or simply want to validate a potential plan against best practices, then SBOS is a great fit for your needs. A SBOS (Sitecore Business Optimization Strategies) planning and implementation project will inject energy and confidence into your digital strategy to get it off the ground.

Why SBOS?

With the promise of personalized customer experiences, organizations are enthusiastic about the potential of Sitecore but this may wane when the daunting task of the strategic implementation comes up. It’s not uncommon for me to work with marketing teams who have developed personas and have some great ideas but when it is time to implement in Sitecore, they get stuck. My response to this hesitation is simple: just get started. Dive in.

SBOS is designed for this exact scenario; the process starts with a trained SBOS strategist guiding conversations among stakeholders. The strategist facilitates the conversation as an objective 3rd party to help gain consensus on key business objectives, therefore it is critical to find a technology partner who gels well with the culture of your company.

The SBOS kickoff and initial conversations result in the following:

  • Consensus around key business objectives
    • Focuses and unifies team
  • Level-set with identification of current CX Maturity and desired future state
  • Prioritize most important Strategic Objective
  • Identify key Digital Goals
  • Identify Quick Wins
    • Develop implementation plan around the Quick Wins

Typical additional benefits of SBOS workshop:

  • Many Quick Wins identified
  • Discovery of optimization opportunities
  • In depth conversations align business, marketing, and IT

Think Big, Start Small

Think long term and set your goals high. Then, when considering goals and identifying Quick Wins, identify actions that can be taken as soon as possible and don’t require custom rules or development. Ideally, Quick Wins will require minimal technical effort to implement.

By keeping the Objective and key goals in mind, the Quick Wins will be the best of both worlds—they will move you down the path toward reaching your objective while also being achievable in the short term.

I encourage you to think long term and set your goals high (but also realistically). Get started somewhere. Even small steps prove valuable.

Don’t Forget about A/B Testing

Of course, personalization and optimization need to align closely with the key Strategic Objective to prove valuable.

Too often we see the focus on personalization alone which is a missed opportunity to optimize in other ways. During your SBOS discussion, look for ways to improve overall customer experience on your site. It’s possible that some of the ripest opportunities lie in A/B testing certain elements of the site.

A/B tests can be the least time and resource consuming to implement. They also have the benefit of getting data in hand to learn from and inform future decisions.

Getting some optimization done helps solidify direction and confirms assumptions.

It’s not just about personalization—people can entirely focus on personalized experience but it’s also about optimizing for a better user experience across the board. Don’t underestimate the value of some good, targeted, purposeful A/B tests.

Our Experience

Having a highly skilled technical partner is a major advantage in an SBOS project as the real key to success here is the ability to implement the strategy digitally through Sitecore. XCentium can both guide your conversation about your Digital Strategy and implement the plan in Sitecore, including integrations with additional technologies. Our implementation projects, as a rule, launch with personalization in place and Sitecore Analytics turned on. There is no need to “wait for later” to get started on capturing data and setting up processes to review and optimize website content.

Why XCentium?

  • Platinum Partner
  • 10 Sitecore MVPs
  • Broad and deep experience with integrations
  • CRM expertise, including Salesforce
  • Brings experience and best practices from multiple projects across a variety of industries and implementations