Context Marketing and Sitecore Symposium 2017 Marketing Track

Introduction

Today's websites must engage with customers in the context of their previous interactions with your brand, at scale and in real time. Using the information you have gathered about your contacts, you must provide relevant and personalized content. In other words, deliver the right content at the right time just when and where the customer needs it.  Context Marketing is the only way to own the experience and win loyal customers. Customers demanding more won’t be satisfied with anything less.

Context Marketing begins with knowing what’s relevant to the customer based on information like:

• What pages did they visit on your website last week?
• What did they buy from you on their mobile phone when they were traveling to New York yesterday?
• Are they posting on social channels now about their New York trip?

The content you deliver today can only be relevant if it takes into account the context of how your customers interacted with your brand last week, yesterday, or right now on any channel.

Tools needed for Context Marketing

To deliver on the promise of Context Marketing, your marketing technology platform needs to deliver three key capabilities:

1. Content Management built from the ground up as an integrated, well-connected platform. When they’re part of a single, connected experience, every interaction becomes part of a joined-up conversation that carries across devices and channels and over time. So your prospects have a seamless experience with your brand regardless of what device they’re on.
2. Contextual Intelligence down to the individual level, with essential detail and intelligence about each visitor, who they are, what they care about, and what they need. (After all, personalized conversations require the ability to get personal.)
3. Omnichannel Automation that enables on-the-spot decision making so you can deliver the right content on the right channel at precisely the right moment for that particular prospect, at scale. No more, no less.

Sitecore provides marketers with the needed tools, so they can offer customers relevant content in the appropriate context at the right time using a user profile, behavior history, preferences, paths used, content consumed, purchases made, geographic location, device type etc.., the Sitecore Experience Platform continuously learns from each customer interaction, so you can create and deliver meaningful, relevant content to your customers.

Additionally, Sitecore Commerce add-on integrates content and commerce, so your customer's online shopping journey is seamless, and because it uses all the data in the Experience Platform you can personalize offers throughout that journey.

I am pretty excited about the Marketing Track sessions Sitecore has on the 2017 Symposium Agenda. There are a lot of good ones to choose from. I have added the below to my must-attend list.

• Checking in with the Context Marketing Stars from Symposium 2016 – What great Context Marketing programs look like one year later
• Chick-fil-a: Omni-channel engagement and commerce – The marriage of engagement and commerce
• Connecting the next big thing – How to prime your strategy for the next generation customer experience
• Content Strategy – How to plan and create content from context
• Atlantis Palm – How to create five-star omnichannel experiences
• Context marketing case – StorySLAM!

Attending the sessions, I hope to gather deeper insight into delivering optimized experiences for customers across any channel and in real time. With Sitecore Commerce added to this mix, shopping cart information, interested products, purchase patterns etc. will now be available. For Marketers equipped with Sitecore Experience Platform along with Sitecore Commerce, truly…….the sky is the limit!