Sitecore’s Mid-Year Product Update: Doubling Down on Content

As customers’ interests, needs, and demands continue to change, brands are under increasing pressure to achieve greater marketing engagement and return on investment (ROI). At the same time, the scale of operating in an omnichannel environment has many marketers struggling with a content crisis, which is exacerbated by the sprawl of marketing technologies intended to address their fast-growing content requirements.

It all adds up to a need for marketers to shift gears with their martech investments if they’re going to achieve their customer experience and business goals. That is why we’re excited to release Sitecore’s mid-year product updates, including version 9.2 of Sitecore^® Experience Platform^™, version 3.2 of Sitecore Content Hub^™, and an entirely new product: Sitecore Content Marketing Platform (CMP).

End-to-end content management

Collectively, these mid-year releases move Sitecore a big leap forward in our vision to provide a single unified platform to own the entire content lifecycle. The advanced capabilities in Sitecore’s latest versions don’t just improve marketers’ ability to deliver rich, personalized experiences to any digital touchpoint, they also provide agile solutions that empower our customers to achieve faster time-to-market and greater cost efficiency.

You can read the press release regarding Sitecore XP 9.2 and Content Hub 3.2 here, and the announcement of Sitecore CMP here, where you can read details on the new features and functionality of the products. But for this blog post, I’d like to dig a bit deeper on why these latest products — and the vision they support — provide such a unique value to our customers.

Defining an enjoyable experience

Think for a second about every experience you’ve ever enjoyed. Not just experiences you’ve had online or buying a product, but every experience. The common thread? Our best experiences offer value in our daily lives, whether by rewarding us, reassuring us, making something easier, or teaching us something new.

This is precisely why marketers are focused on personalization and the three elements that make personalized digital experiences possible: customer intelligence (to know who somebody is and what they care about); content (to speak to their wants, cares, and challenges); and omnichannel delivery (to get that content everywhere they choose to engage with you, no matter the time, place, or channel).

All of these are important, but when it comes to delivering value to a customer, customer data and omnichannel delivery will only get you so far without content. If you can identify five different individuals in a crowd but you can’t provide each of them with content that speaks to their specific context, well … you aren’t able to personalize the experience.

Making content the priority

So, while other martech vendors are preaching the value of acquiring customer data at scale, Sitecore is focused on the production and delivery of content as the underpinning of personalized digital experiences. And today, Sitecore is the only vendor that can manage the entire content lifecycle — from planning, creation, collaboration, and management to omnichannel delivery — with the opportunity to measure the effectiveness of an individual piece of content on consumer behavior.