Sitecore is not just a powerful, scalable and flexible CMS platform, it’s also a Swiss army knife of digital marketing tools (DMS: Digital Marketing System). It empowers you to market within the context of current and past customer interaction with your brand, across any channel and in real time. The result is a personalized and relevant customer experience, improved web traffic and a better user experience. Sitecore also provides a great way to track marketing, sales and any kind of campaigns.
Sitecore is among the leading .NET-based content management systems. Launched in 2001 in Denmark, it’s been growing in popularity, becoming the choice of many global top brands like Toshiba, Canon, Suzuki, Heineken, Panasonic, Zurich as well as some government agencies.
Main Features and benefits
Sitecore offers an open architecture that makes it flexible and fully customizable, so we can say that it’s also a powerful framework that helps in delivering sophisticated, attractive and full-featured dynamic next generation websites. Here are some of the main features and benefits…
Intuitive and User-Friendly Interface
Sitecore offers a powerful desktop interface very similar in look and feel to a Windows desktop. There is also a content editor interface that is similar to the file browser in an OS like Microsoft Windows, which makes things easy for users new to Sitecore as well as for non-technical content editors to pick up and understand the system.
Open API
A powerful framework and an open API architecture provide developers the flexibility and scalability they need to customize, extend and override any functionality. These custom functionalities and features can be easily exported from Sitecore into a package which can then be installed into another Sitecore instance and/or shared through the community.
Repurpose Content for Different Devices
The fact that Sitecore decouples presentation from content allows us to focus on creating nice web experiences instead of worrying about how the content will be displayed. Sitecore automatically serves content in the format best sized and suited for a user’s device. With the Sitecore device detection module you automatically detect and optimize content for different devices, allowing you to preview, for example, how your content will look on a mobile phone vs. a tablet.
Targeted Content Based on User Behavior
With Sitecore you won’t be treating every site visitor the same. The CMS will give you the capability to optimize your content for each visitor, personalizing what they see on their mobile device, tablet or laptop. WIth the goal of improving conversions, the CMS helps in classifying site visitors according to their behavior, their interaction with the site, their location, their preferred type of content, and more.
Optimize Web Experience with A/B and Multivariate Testing
This feature gives you the possibility to test alternative combinations of your website’s content to find out which components or combinations of components are the most effective with visitors. You can quickly evaluate the test results, giving you insight into the content that functions best with your audience. This can help you create more successful campaigns with higher goal-conversion rates.
Easy Integration with Third Party Tools
Sitecore provides a full data integration feature that allows you to connect to any database, web service or any external system and access that content as if it were Sitecore content. There are many modules developed by Sitecore itself to integrate third-party tools such as Active Directory, Brightcove, Dynamics CRM, Sharepoint, LDAP, etc.
Multilingual Content
In Sitecore, any item can have any number of versions and each version can have any number of languages into which it gets translated. Sitecore even supports external translation software and provides connectors to work directly with these translation services.
Multiple Sites Support
Enterprise customers don’t have to recreate content for every website they manage, Sitecore lets you share content across thousands of sites for a consistent experience on all of them.
Improved Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Sitecore helps you to create optimized URLs to ensure they are clear, concise and reflect the information structure for your site. Sitecore’s sitemap module ensures sitemap content is dynamically updated for search engines.
Flexible Workflows
Sitecore provides an easy, flexible and powerful workflow feature that enables you to handle content updates, approvals, notifications, publishing, etc.
If you are looking for more than just a CMS, with powerful digital marketing features that can help you with your branding, engagement, visibility, etc to grow your business and more, Sitecore must be your choice.
Stay tuned for future articles about Sitecore!