Site of the Year 2022 has its finalists and winners! The recognized websites are true digital experiences - engaging users with attractive content and interactive features while providing marketers with data needed for successful campaigns. How did Kentico help them achieve their ambitious goals? Learn their secrets!
The Site of the Year 2022 jury members evaluated all the projects and noticed many common themes, especially in relation to the needs of each category. Let's dive into the submissions and see what they found most beneficial in each industry sector for creating successful digital experiences.
Our customers discovered the key to smooth content management
The main reason why the Site of the Year 2022 winners turned to Kentico was the need for scalability, flexibility, and user-friendly content management and digital marketing tools. From their responses, we see two essential needs for the efficient work of a marketer:
- Creating content without the help of developers
- Reusing content across their websites
B2B
More than in other categories, the B2B category contestants mention how much they benefit from content reusability and their large editing teams really appreciate the whole content management in Kentico. Many of them have previous experience with other systems, so they can compare.
Marketing automation was mentioned as the most useful marketing tool. Clients use either the out-of-the-box Kentico feature in combination with the Email Builder, or they integrate other solutions, namely Hubspot or Marketo.
Commerce
Customers who submitted their project for this category use Kentico as a commerce solution, sometimes completely replacing third-party or even proprietary software. According to them, contact tracking, email marketing and a combination of emails and marketing automation, all inbuilt Kentico features, are essential for successful lead nurturing.
Businesses in the commerce sector need a large variety of integrations. They leverage Kentico’s API to connect the DXP with ERP systems, customer data platforms, SAP solutions, region-specific applications for shipping services, vouchers, payment services, etc. The winner of this category also uses an out-of-the-box integration with Recombee AI recommendation engine.
See the Commerce category winner
Consumer Goods
Most customers in the Consumer Goods category use our out-of-the-box integrations with Algolia search engine or Azure Cognitive Search. They also heavily use widget-based content personalization driven by data collected either through Kentico activity tracking or via synchronization with a CRM, ERP or third-party lead management software.
Personalization is used to modify call-to-action buttons and tailor commerce-related communication such as bill payments and order information to every customer.
See the Consumer Goods category winner
Education & Careers
When evaluating the Education & Careers category, we noticed many organizations leverage Kentico’s inbuilt email marketing for sending regular newsletters. Some customers mentioned that marketing automation plays a key role in personalizing the content on the website. Often large editing teams benefit from workflows and user roles to control access to different parts of the system.
See the Education & Careers category winner
Entertainment & Hospitality
One of the reasons for migrating to Kentico in this sector is outgrowing the current solution. The biggest gains customers mention were improved security, ease of managing content, and improved website performance. As Kentico grows together with its customers, it’s the right choice for companies that want to avoid a complicated migration in the future.
Most projects in the Entertainment & Hospitality category use online marketing features, namely content personalization based on the contact's behavior and demographics. Some customers also mentioned that Kentico helped them automate tasks, like sending emails via automation flows or using automation for housekeeping of their contact management database.
See the Entertainment & Hospitality category winner
Financial Services
Financial organizations emphasize SEO as one of the game changers in their digital success. Easy website updates in Page Builder help them stay efficient. They also have a strong need for custom-built features, such as product-finder tools, map-based location finders, and centralized rates management databases. And they found Kentico’s flexibility enables all that.
As we are in the YMYL, or “Your Money or Your Life” category, almost all customers mentioned that they use Kentico’s advanced workflows and versioning for content approvals. The most often mentioned online marketing tools include inbuilt Contacts, Contact Management, and Activity Tracking. Azure cognitive search dominates the search solutions.
See the Financial Services category winner
Government & Municipal
By nature of their sector, government organizations have high security expectations. And Kentico security features help them manage user roles and access permissions. Our in-house support with a 7-day bug-fix policy is another thing that helps us to build the trust of these organizations.
Some clients in this category implemented Kentico to support a longer conversion journey with content personalization and many use integrations with YouTube, Google Analytics, Hubspot, or Salesforce.
See the Government & Municipal category winner
Healthcare
Besides Page Builder and Kentico localization capabilities, healthcare customers leverage Kentico’s Workflows for content approval processes where more than one editor participated in content creation. Not surprising since we are again in the “Your Money or Your Life” category.
Healthcare marketers often use Kentico Form Builder to generate leads. What’s worth mentioning is the flows tied to form submissions – several customers mentioned that they built an integration with Salesforce and Hubspot to handle lead nurturing.
See the Healthcare category winner
Industrial Manufacturing
Kentico customers in manufacturing heavily use digital marketing features for sending email sequences. They collect data through Kentico forms, track users’ activities and A/B test content. They use the Campaign app and analyze impact through web analytics. All with Kentico’s inbuilt features.
We heard that Kentico features help these companies save time and costs on third-party software, or even replace custom-built systems with a better solution.
See the Industrial Manufacturing category winner
NGO & Associations
With Kentico, it’s OK to start small with a basic CMS and add more marketing functions as needs grow. Many customers in the NGO sector leverage this flexibility and split their implementation into phases.
Associations use Kentico’s email marketing to send newsletters and campaign emails and some use marketing automation to synchronize contacts from their CRM into Kentico and vice versa. They also use it to bring in relevant membership information, so they could drive website personalization using the data.
See the NGO's and Associations category winner
Key takeaways
As you probably noticed, in each category, Kentico supports a wide range of customers with various needs. Some customers benefit from a customizable CMS, some leverage all the digital marketing features we offer, and others integrate Kentico with several third-party technologies.
How does Kentico contribute to their success?
- Easy and intuitive interface
- Value for money and TCO
- Scalability and extensibility
- Wide range of out-of-the-box marketing features
- Regular refreshes instead of complicated upgrades
Our vision is to help customers become digitally native - supporting them where they are now, and getting them to where they want to be, as easily and affordably as possible. We know that each industry has different requirements, and each company is at a different stage in its digital journey.
That’s why Kentico has the products and services for maximum flexibility. You can customize, scale, and extend Kentico’s DXP as your business and your digital maturity grows. Furthermore, our new product Xperience by Kentico can be deployed as SaaS (software as a service), which provides customers with the best hybrid headless marketer experience for now and the future.
Do you want to know more about the Site of the Year winners? Download the Site of the Year 2022 ebook. Or, are you interested in meeting one of our experts? Schedule a quick chat today.