AI-Powered Digital Modernization and Limitless Data Connectivity with Sitefinity 15

Sitefinity 15 perfectly blends intuitive AI-assisted content creation and personalization capabilities, powerful technologies for omnichannel delivery, rich integrations and connectivity and flexible deployment options.

Navigating the Digital Shift

The rapid advance of digital technology has enabled customers to research products, access services and interact with brands with unprecedented ease. This shift has fostered a demand for personalized experiences, convenience and instant gratification, forcing companies to provide seamless experiences, tailored recommendations and one-of-a-kind customer service.

The pressure to adapt and drive business through data insights while keeping the human touch is growing by the day, leaving businesses with no choice but to adopt new technologies that will help them meet and exceed their customers’ growing expectations. More than ever, organizations must focus on connecting with customers through relevant content, delivered on their preferred channels.

Improving the efficiency of content marketing as well as developing a scalable content production machine that enables multichannel content delivery and personalized outbound communication will give businesses the competitive edge they have been looking for. This is the landscape that allowed generative AI to emerge and disrupt the way marketers create and distribute content.

Sitefinity 15 is the perfect fit for organizations with CMS modernization needs looking to equip marketing and IT practitioners with modern tools, enabling them to:

• Leverage emerging technologies such as generative AI to scale content production and improve efficiency.
• Easily connect their content platform to 1,000+ business-critical systems and martech tools, bridge data silos and automate workflows.
• Build a unified customer view, reduce content waste and improve campaign effectiveness.

Modern Challenges Need Modern Solutions

Let’s look at some challenges that create immense roadblocks for organizations in their journeys towards modern digital experiences. For the purpose of illustrating how real these are, I am using some wording that I have picked up in customer conversations.

1. (1) Our web presence is very fragmented across several websites, domains and apps.
   It is hard to centrally manage different web properties, brands, (sometimes products), channels and marketing tools at the same time. It’s inefficient, content creation takes a lot of time and is prone to duplication or low quality. Resources are never enough to serve all aspects of our digital journey and cover all touchpoints.
   
   Solution: Centralized content management, from a single platform enables single and multi-brand organizations, regardless of their vertical or business model, to manage multiple sites and domains, streamline content orchestration, ensure brand consistency, improve efficiency and increase marketing program effectiveness. Generative AI augmentation increases efficiency by accelerating content creation, improving quality, enabling personalization and reuse of content.
2. (2) Our CMS lives in a silo.
   It is disconnected from other sources of customer data that we have – Google Analytics, CRM, marketing automation and campaign management tools. We don’t drive efficient go-to-market efforts based on data and cannot make informed decisions about what our audience responds to, which content performs best and what channels contribute to our business goals.
   
   Solution: Integrating your CMS with business-critical systems and third party martech in a no-code manner eliminates data silos to harness data sitting in disparate systems, unify customer information and activate communication channels with tailored personalized messaging. This approach helps drive automation of complex workflows, which does not require any coding and prevents the steep and cumbersome technical configuration and learning curve associated with integration between systems.
3. (3) We are unable to leverage any of our customer data.
   It’s hard driving efficient go-to-market efforts based on data and make informed decisions about what our audience responds to, which triggers have an impact on our conversion rates and what content performs best and contributes to business goals.
   
   Solution: Tapping into use case (2) above, bridging data silos through powerful and easy to establish integrations with third-party systems, serves as a gateway to data-driven marketing, audience segmentation, content personalization and campaign optimization.
   
4. (4) We are unable to execute content changes fast.
   Our systems make it hard to update content, create layouts and leverage new widgets on our own. Every single change, even the smallest ones, needs to go through a ticket request to IT and eats up days, if not weeks, taking away any potential competitive edge that we would explore.
   
   Solution: The right-fit content editing tools should offer marketer self-service and WYSIWYG capabilities for editing, such as, out-of-the-box widgets, drag & drop page building, codeless page layouts and reliable content governance and publication workflows.
   

Without revealing too much, I delved a bit into the solutions that have worked for customers in their efforts to overcome some of the most widely spread challenges in modern digital experiences. Do you recognize yourself in any of these? If the answer is yes, then you’ve come to the right place as we will explore some of the features and capabilities Sitefinity 15 is introducing and what they will solve for you.

Sitefinity 15: What’s New

AI-assisted authoring tools for content creators and marketers

Sitefinity 15 introduces out-of-the-box generative AI features, available from the most loved Sitefinity platform component—the rich text editor. With these new features, content editors and marketers will be able to generate, improve, optimize and personalize text at the click of a button without learning prompt engineering.

These AI tools are based on Azure OpenAI and enable four out-of-the box actions that content editors can take to generate text with AI. The features are available for any page, widget or module that utilizes the rich text editor in Sitefinity:

• Compose text generates text from scratch based on predefined criteria such as key points, audience, tone and max length.
• Summarize text summarizes longer texts based on desired key words and length. The summarized text can then be inserted in different text fields and on pages.
• Improve writing checks grammar and language targeting a specific audience and desired tone of voice (friendly, formal, vertical-specific, e.g., use 'finance language').
• Personalize text is available when personalization is turned on for content blocks. The user can specify on the fly the audience or persona they want to personalize particular text for.
  

What’s more, if these four actions reach their limit in terms of what they can do for content editors, your website administrators can add new actions (e.g. ‘create headline’) or modify existing prompt templates to tweak the output to match specific use cases (e.g. ‘use technical/simple language’).

New Business-User-Friendly Data Connectivity Architecture for Critical System Integration

The new Sitefinity Integration Hub allows Sitefinity and Sitefinity Insight Customer Data Platform to integrate with any third-party system available on the market—CRM, ERP, marketing automation, campaign management, social media, chatbots and more! The Integration Hub leverages Workato (an industry-leading iPaaS) to streamline data integration, allowing customers to connect and exchange data with 1,000+ third-party martech systems, by means of no-code event-driven workflows, that are extremely easy to implement and automate.

The data, collected and collated in these third-party systems, integrated with Sitefinity, can be utilized in multiple practical ways allowing marketers to consolidate different data points and create a unified customer view—by means of real-time, interaction-based data. By unifying content, customer and business data, marketers can lay the foundations of a powerful customer data platform, create segments and personas, drive lead scoring, optimize the journey based on what they know about their customers and activate various communication channels for a true omnichannel digital experience.

What’s more, the new integrated AI Chatbot onboarding assistant in Sitefinity Insight makes all the above even easier by accelerating onboarding, cutting down the learning curve and bringing the customer insights that you have always wished for and your marketing ROI closer than ever.

Brand New Sitefinity Dashboard

Content creators, website administrators and even analysts love Sitefinity for its ease of use. In Sitefinity 15 content editors and Sitefinity administrators enjoy a new control hub built entirely on Angular to match the superior functionality with increased visibility, sleek design, versatility and ease of use. The redesigned Sitefinity Dashboard comes with a set of predefined widgets and can be customized from the Backend Pages screen to your liking.

The dashboard offers an easy and powerful editing experience that our users know well from the page editor that we introduced along with .NET Core. From the dashboard by default, you get easy access to getting started resources, recent content, most visited pages, pages that need your attention due to missing SEO parameters, media resource management and more!

The latest release delivers so much more, have a look at the release notes.

Sitefinity 15: Feature-packed. Future Present. 

Many organizations have already embraced generative AI and are seeing promising results. We have added generative AI to the growing list of AI-assisted capabilities in Sitefinity to help you harness its potential and make the jobs of content editors, digital marketers and website administrators easier. With generative AI, we haven’t even reached the peak in terms of technology adoption so there is no better time than now to explore what efficiencies and competitive advantages it can bring for you—now, when it is just a few clicks away.

The future of tech is not only about AI though. If you are already riding the .NET Core wave, then you are certainly looking to reduce complexity and simplify content end experience management to free up resources for more strategic initiatives. Improving your stack’s integration capability is certainly one of your priorities, especially if your goal is to raise digital maturity across your organization—yet another reason to consider the benefits you will be getting with the latest Sitefinity 15 feature enhancements.

Want to see Sitefinity 15 in action? Register for our release webinar or get the VIP treatment by requesting a personalized demo.