Although the pandemic is far from over in some parts of the world, many companies are starting to implement recovery plans following the initial widespread outbreak. But what does this mean for marketing?
After ten years of continuous ad market growth, the Advertising Association/WARC Expenditure Report (April 2020) forecast a £4.23-bn drop in advertising expenditure in the UK alone as a result of the global pandemic. That’s a fall of 16.7% from 2019’s record £25.36bn.
It's no surprise that global ad spend, which was initially expected to grow by 4.8% in 2020 (excluding US political advertising), is now predicted to fall by 11.8% (around $70m), returning the industry to slightly higher than 2017 levels in constant currency terms.
Coca-Cola has paused its entire marketing budget (an average of $4bn annually over the last six years) in response to a global volume decline of 25%. And Google has slashed its marketing budget by about 50% and introduced a hiring freeze across its marketing departments.
On top of this, marketing priorities are shifting. Brands are flowing resources, away from third-party and toward in-house (19%) and shifting people between teams to meet new demands (47%). Around 30% of brands are reallocating budgets from acquisition to retention, and 45% are adjusting their content for relevancy to the new situation. (See more stats in the free Future CMO report).
As businesses that have been hit by the pandemic start to navigate through the repercussions, marketing teams have to quickly ramp up their efforts in a bid to recover sales despite the slashed budgets and reduced manpower. They’re going to need to act fast, embrace digital transformation, and utilize all the technological support they can get.
And nothing helps businesses with their digital transformation and boost marketing productivity like Kentico Xperience. Why? Because it’s built to empower the marketer. To manage everything from one place. To achieve more in less time. And to engage with customers in ways they never could before.
Sophisticated digital marketing that takes care of itself
Create an excellent customer experience with ease
Help your customer find you by optimizing important on-page search engine optimization (SEO) factors, URLs, and HTML code while ensuring compliance with web standards.
Automatically create logical (robot-readable) URLs that reflects your content’s position in the content tree, and customize extensions and aliases to your specific needs and keywords. You can even create short alternative URLs (for use on Twitter, for instance) without moving any pages.
And then, once they’ve found their way to you, make it easy for customers to find the information they need by providing flexible search capabilities that offer relevant results.
Enable filtering according to facets like categories, authors, dates, and availability. Offer predictive search and synonym flexibility, be typo-tolerant, and use stemming analyzers.
Speed up results for very large volumes of data by enabling searches on index files rather than the database and allow queries to target multiple indexes that automatically update along with website content changes.
Have full control over which pages should be included and which ignored and assign search results permissions according to user authorization.
Publish faster with full control of content
The Page Builder feature enables marketers to design beautiful personalized pages without any technical knowledge using drag and drop widgets. Content (articles, posts, catalogs, etc.) is structured and independent of its presentation, so it only needs to be created once, then can be used and reused anywhere (across multiple sites, apps, and email campaigns).
Kentico Xperience automatically resizes your images for different screen sizes and stores all your digital assets in one built-in asset library. It means the whole team is working off the same page, with the latest versions, and at pace.
Using Workflows and Versioning, you can ensure the consistency and compliance of your content via custom workflows based on your internal processes so you can manage the flow and approval of content between authorized users.
And it’s easy to create content in multiple languages (including Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Hebrew, and Arabic), and display appropriate languages using Smart Language Selection. You can easily manage translated content via localized user interfaces and collaboration workflows. Or you can connect third-party translation services to automate the process!
Additionally, Kentico Xperience is designed with multi-site support, so you can manage multiple websites from a single platform, sharing content, data, code, and credentials across them.
Sophisticated personalization executed simply
Using the flexible and scalable plug-and-play interface of Kentico Xperience, you can quickly build exceptional personalized customer experiences across all channels based on customer demographics, behavior, and context (age, job title, location, browser, device, content engaged with, products purchased, and more).
Create multiple personalization variants in order to present tailored content to your different customer segment and persona groups, or select to show content that changes dynamically according to actions they have performed.
Define guidelines and rules for a variety of real-life scenarios and use across your websites, email campaigns, and automated workflows. And analyze results in the built-in web analytics module to identify most frequent users and to ensure highly relevant content based on their interests.
Use the integrated AI-powered recommendation system Recombee to display real-time recommended products, services, and articles. Just drag and drop Recombee widgets onto your homepage, product categories, emails, and shopping cart to show recommendations based on insightful cross-channel customer data. You can even use APIs to add data from other sources.
Create and optimize targeted emails faster
Create beautiful emails faster and with ease using the Kentico Xperience built-in Email Builder’s drag-and-drop interface and use widgets to personalize content based on website activity, customer data, or lead score for outstanding results.
Identify best performing content using integrated A/B or multivariate testing by sending variables of your email to segmented target audiences and then tracking performance.
Send timely newsletters with dynamic content and monitor performance (open rates, click-through rate, unsubscribes) to improve your newsletter strategy. And, achieve high deliverability with third-party integrations to ensure spam filters don’t block emails.
Create successful campaigns with minimal effort
One central hub packed with out-of-the-box functionality for launching and managing cross-channel digital marketing campaigns, means you get a clear overview of all your campaigns and associated assets, as well as real-time data of their performance (number of visitors interacted with your campaign, number of conversions, and current conversion rate).
Simply choose your audience, assign content assets, tweak your tracking, and your campaign is ready to launch. Things like creating campaign emails, adding landing pages, tracking clicks, and measuring conversions are ready to use. Plus, multiple team members can be working on different campaigns simultaneously!
Count conversions instead of sheep with automated marketing
With Kentico Xperience, marketing automation is a simple drag-and-drop interface with customizable templates to get you quickly optimizing your campaigns on every channel.
With marketing and commerce automation, you can deliver engaging and relevant content to your customers at the right point in the customer lifecycle, and you can do it at scale. You can set triggers for personalized drip campaigns that gradually warm your leads up at their pace (abandoned cart reminders, favorite products, etc.) while gathering further intelligence that you can use to help guide them toward conversion.
And you can forget updating social media manually, too. The out-of-the-box tools for managing sophisticated social marketing mean you can post about new website content on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook automatically in a share-friendly way for maximum reach and exposure.
The Visual Workflow Designer presents an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface that puts you in full control of when publishing happens, and you can easily modify and update the workflow to ensure your content is seen, followed, liked, commented on, and shared.
Boosting conversions with ‘no-skills-required’ A/B testing
Within the same interface as you create content, you can set up A/B tests to help you work out which content is working best.
Simply create multiple variations of your page or email, define your test metrics (visitor segments, conversion goals, traffic sources), and test. Kentico Xperience will automatically pick your best-performing variant, calculate the chance of the new test beating the original, and improve conversion count. It then automatically replaces the original variant with the winner and archives previous insights for future reference.
Built-in cross-platform analysis and reporting
Boost your digital experience strategy with real-time, multi-metric customer, visitor, and email recipient insights (traffic sources, referrals, page views, downloads, banner clicks, campaign engagement, conversions, and more) and discover which content and campaigns are bringing the best results. Easily set up campaign journey steps to see how your funnel behaves and identify your best-performing channels.
Deep dive into your data by creating your own reports (or leveraging the customizable templates) on anything you want (content, workflows, commerce, customer journeys) from across the entire platform, adding visual components like graphs, charts, tables, and values.
Analyze your content inventory and performance, identify new trends and potential threats, and keep on top of orders and revenue. You can even export your data for analysis in external tools.
Performing marketing miracles under pressure
The world has changed over the past few months.
Marketing budgets may have been slashed and teams cut, but customer expectations remain high and competition for their custom fierce. And things are set to remain difficult as COVID-19 recovery spills into next year.
There is no better time to be investing in a platform that empowers your marketing team to lead the way in customer experience despite time and resource constraints. A DXP that brings all the tools they need, wrapped in an efficient and easy-to-use platform that integrates with their existing MarTech stack with affordable and scalable licensing.
If there was the perfect time for Kentico Xperience, it’s now.
Interested in a free 1-on-1 demo? If so, meet one of our DXP experts at a time that suits you.