Sitefinity 13.3: How To Take Care of the Numbers You Care About Most

While composing and orchestrating a digitals experience is meant to keep visitors engaged and entertained, solid foundations are a must if your goal is to stay on top of your KPIs and the numbers you care about most.

Have you ever thought about what is it that makes music bands a hit? Or breaks box office records. How about launching a satellite or going into open space for a “walk”?

There is much going on behind the scenes, and while we often only see the result, we know that behind every successful enterprise there are people—standing on the shoulders of titans—working together to deliver on their promises.

We developed Sitefinity 13.3 with people like you in mind. Our goal was to enable multiple teams across the organization to take care of the number they care about most.

In this blog I will try to share some of the top challenges anyone from sales and finance to IT, marketing and support will often face.

One common theme that emerged in a recent survey we did was related to the growing complexity of projects and the growing number of internal and external systems that tend to coexist in siloes within the organization. And that’s just one aspect of improving the digital experience for your customers, or achieving operational efficiency.

Truth is, that hoping to solve all challenges at once, organizations often end up overinvesting in technology. Contrary to what they would expect, adding yet another app or platform on top of the tech stack may result in slow time to market and high total cost of ownership among other outcomes. And, instead of enabling teams to operate independently, anyone who relies on IT for help will continue to struggle to get their request to the list of top priorities.

Aiming to achieve a certain level of independence or improve agility, marketing teams (mostly) tend to fragment their tech stack to the point that it often becomes hard to integrate, and nearly impossible to manage and secure.

Looking top-down or across your organizations, there are clear patterns as well as specific challenges to be found. Unsurprisingly, just like new year's resolutions, many organizations put “alignment” to the top of their list of priorities.

We asked a number of business leaders about their priorities, and shared their goals and aspirations for 2021 and some common themes emerged:

• Providing a differentiated customer experience
• Delivering more innovative products and services
• Reducing costs and improving employee efficiency

But how do you achieve your goals when the road ahead is often riddled with major technical barriers? How do you cope with limited IT resources, lack of in-house strategic expertise, and growing project complexity?

Whether organizations like yours strive to introduce new products or services, improve customer experiences, optimize cost, or explore new channels, using the right-size digital experience platform can certainly help you get where you want to go. Alignment continues to be a big “must-do” in 2021.

For me, understanding what other teams tend to focus on, as well as what their key KPI’s are, is the easiest way to get truly aligned.

We will get the KPIs and aspiring goals in a minute, but before we head there, here are a several common denominators for you to consider such as:

• Access to stable and reliable technology that is built to support long-term platform requirements and business strategy that minimizes potential bugs and ensures performance and security
• Superior ease of use for marketers, platform agility to improve efficiency and time to market, or ability to connect data silos while delivering differentiated customer experiences
• Streamlined developer tools to eliminate maintenance-related tasks, reduce backlog and simplify custom development requests
• Tools to help analyze performance, optimize the experience, or collect insights whether the focus is security, improving marketing programs, and address specific customer or business needs
• Unmatched support to scale one’s online presence to meet growing business requirements and strategy

If there was such thing as recipe for success, some key teams within the org would make it to the ingredients list. In other words, the people who would often play a key role in helping organizations raise above the noise.

Today, the biggest issue with metrics is not how to measure them. A bigger challenge is which metrics to choose—and once in agreement with other stakeholders—keep an eye on them, spend less time tracking, and more time acting upon the found data.

Project managers are big on metrics and KPIs, milestones and the sorts.

Skillfully navigating between growing business requirements, sparse resources, and constantly in need to shift priorities on-the-fly while keeping their commitment. What project managers care about is predictability. But there are other KPIs, too. Things like:

Planned value, actual cost, earned value, return on Investment, planned hours of work, overdue project tasks, missed milestones, percentage of tasks completed, resource utilization, percentage of projects completed on time ... are we missing anything?

What can help project managers stick to the plan is access to stable, reliable technology that enables them to deliver projects on time and minimizes the impact of changing the scope. Ask any project manager about the KPIs they care about most and you will find bug reports or change requests on their shortlist.

UX and Web Designers—Adding Emotions to the Data

Can a website be both useable and pretty? Things can get heated in the web department whenever UX and web designers tend to get in disagreement.

While both teams have their own tools of the trade, the way to get into agreement is to use data. Yes, Google Analytics is a good starting point whether you are running an opensource CMS, or a full-blown enterprise-grade DXP platform. But it is only when you add insights, audience segmentation and consider your target personas, that things will start to make sense. Just add personalization and do some A/B testing prior to making those permanent changes to the homepage.

Data is king. Even in the world of web design. It can really show you the way to prototype and design engaging, visually appealing layouts that remove friction points, reduce bounce rates, increase conversions, and build brand affinity in the process.

Do Web Developers Need a CMS, or Should They Build Their Own?

These are the people who do not get praised high enough. And, no matter how complex the scope of work is, chances are that they will deliver on their promises if you equip them with the tools they need.

This is where a platform like Sitefinity can help developers meet their effectiveness, quality and productivity KPI’s.

Certainly, things like actual delivery time, number of bugs reported during the test or the number of issues solved are critical to the success of the project. But what can cultivate the “can-do” attitude within the team is the access to technology that can ensure predictably and stability, among other things.

What Are Some Digital Marketer KPIs and How To Achieve Them

Sitefinity is a content management system, a digital experience platform, a single, unified control center that can help you orchestrate epic digital experiences. And you do not have to be a large enterprise customer to benefit from enterprise-grade capabilities. Progress customers across industries and company sizes successfully leverage Sitefinity as the perfect vehicle to drive marketing success.  

And it is only after other teams, such as designers or developers have shipped their deliverables, when content creators and digital marketers get in the spotlight.

Counting shares, downloads, staying on top of inbound links, Improving SEO ranking, measuring share of voice, brand awareness, time spend on page, bounce rate, unique page visits, cost per click and cost per lead, open rates, CTR, unsubscribe rates ... the list goes on.

And while many digital marketers will want more arrows in the quiver, what they really need is a scalable, customizable, and connected platform that can help them achieve their most important KPI—deliver growth.

Building a Solid Foundation for Your DX

As a product marketing manager, I have a long list of responsibilities. Often do I find myself at the intersect between multiple teams. And while they may have different aspirations, goals or priorities, they will wholeheartedly agree—teams across the organization need access to technology that sets them up for success.

If your mission is to orchestrate an elevated digital experience for your customers and partners, consider leveraging Sitefinity for your projects.

With its unmatched ease of use, built-in analytics, user journey mapping, as well as cool extras such as A/B testing and personalization it can easily become digital marketer’s BFF.

Sitefinity is CEO, CIO, CTO, and CMO-friendly. Engineered to be an enterprise-grade development platform, it also enables administrators to centrally manage multisite, multichannel, and multilingual content and commerce and improve operational efficiency. Extensible, customizable, agile—there is no project too small or too big for Sitefinity.

Here is how to get started. Upgrade to the latest version or migrate to Sitefinity. Simple.

If you have an existing Sitefinity deployment, it is worth considering upgrading to the latest version. Our Professional Services team can help you evaluate your current project and provide a blueprint for upgrade.

If you are on the mission to optimize your cost, but keep feature parity, many of our Sitefinity partners offer CMS migration services designed to get you up and running with Sitefinity regardless of your current CMS.

And if you consider cloud to be the new frontier, Sitefinity Cloud can offer you everything you need to deploy, manage, and scale your experience with ease.

But do not take my word for it, give Sitefinity a try, or request a personal 1:1 demo today.

Try Sitefinity for free