The true long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on consumer shopping habits won’t truly be understood for years, but its effect on digital transformation is immediately evident. What we know for certain is that consumers and business buyers expect lightning-fast digital experiences, available on any content device, and the experience has to mirror the ease of doing business that leading brands, like Netflix and Target, delivered during the lockdown. Crucially, this remains true whether you serve consumers or businesses.
For marketers and brands, this level of digital adoption and savviness is a double-edged sword. Digital engagement with consumers and businesses allows marketers to understand their base in a much more fundamental way than traditional marketing methods. However, the speed of this level of adoption has created a whole new issue for digital experience professionals from experience scalability and long-term management point of view.
For IT leaders, I know that long-term management has long been a source of frustration. From infrastructure costs to finding the right talent, it seems that digital experiences are always requiring more attention and more budget. So, the question becomes how can you get out of the digital experience delivery process and pivot to providing more value-added guidance to your marketing and experience colleagues?
To ensure that brands and marketers are empowered with modern, scalable, and agile solutions to meet consumer and business demand for engagement, Sitecore, a global leader in end-to-end digital experience software, has released Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) Cloud. With the unveiling of XM Cloud, Sitecore is the first company to completely transition its core CMS solution, including personalization and the content authoring experience, to a modern cloud architecture.
According to a consumer survey conducted by the company in May, online interactions play an outsized role in driving engagement between brands and customers. Sitecore XM Cloud helps solve the globally recognized problem of powering instantaneous, global digital experiences in the cloud without sacrificing the customer experience.
Through XM Cloud, brands are provided with unrivaled speed to market in the implementation of customer experiences, simplifying design and deployment, and eliminating upgrades, which dramatically decreases the cost of ownership. With XM Cloud, marketers can instantly create, manage, and deliver engaging omnichannel experiences with an industry-leading enterprise-ready CMS.
In short, marketers can create smarter, faster customer experiences that lead to a much more informed and agile brand overall.
“Consumer behavior has changed rapidly over the past two years. Audiences have become very digitally savvy and have an expectation that brands deliver highly personalized customer experiences. This puts marketers in the unenviable position of trying to meet this expectation, but with tools and solutions that don’t deliver, and in some cases hamstring, the needed agility to meet demand,” said Dave O’Flanagan, chief product officer, Sitecore. “Sitecore XM Cloud provides marketers with a truly end-to-end, SaaS-based solution that not only helps brands meet consumer expectations but also delivers a best-of-class omnichannel customer experience.”
XM Cloud can serve multiple internal audiences within an organization. Business users can build pixel-perfect digital experiences via a WYSIWIG authoring experience that can access content anywhere as well as embedded testing & personalization, and integrated visitor analytics. Developers can use XM Cloud with headless development techniques and it will work with modern frontend frameworks and support all deployment scenarios.
“There is growing opportunity in the digital experience market for vendors providing scalable, data-driven personalization within the core of their service,” said Marci Maddox, research vice president for Digital Experience Strategies, IDC. “Sitecore continues to strategically invest in this critical area. Their current direction and move toward a composable SaaS offering for creating and delivering digital experiences is in line with what marketing teams are looking for today.”
To find out more about Sitecore’s Digital Experience Platform and latest product updates visit: Sitecore.com.
