Is your team ready for the Sitecore Experience Platform?

Many companies acquire the Sitecore Experience Platform looking forward to benefiting from its promising experience marketing features. They often start with the false belief that once the implementation project is completed and their newly redesigned website is launched, their job is done. But that's not the case. The ability to offer a relevant, contextualized journey for customers is supported by Sitecore, but digital transformation is not a finite project. Achieving a high level of maturity in an organization is not a project—but a business transformation. To ensure positive ROI on the technology, they must get strategically and operationally ready beforehand. Operational readiness is carried out with:

• a properly trained team
• a content strategy that will fuel your experience marketing activities
• a strong understanding of how to transform analytics into actionable insights

In this post I'll focus on the team and the skill set necessary to get started on the path to digital transformation. The key roles needed for success are:

Digital Strategist

The digital strategist is in charge of translating the organizational strategy into an experience strategy. In other words, make sure to align the company's strategic objectives, marketing objectives, and digital goals. This role studies customer behaviors and segments to produce cross-channel campaigns and experience strategies. Strategy must address key business and marketing objectives such as customer acquisition, engagement, lead nurturing, loyalty, and advocacy. Strategists are often also the ones who develop user personas, as well as the business cases associated with the initiatives.

Content Marketer

The content marketer oversees all aspects of content creation. This role requires a combination of skills in editorial and content strategy. The content marketer must have a thorough understanding of customer segments’ journeys as well as appropriate context marketing tactics and content. They are responsible for incorporating personalization tactics and experience automation flows across channels (e.g., web, social, mobile, email, app, commerce). As the content team grows, the content marketer is responsible for establishing publishing workflows.

UX Designer

The user experience (UX) designer is in charge of designing the information architecture. This role is responsible for creating the user-interaction design (e.g., use-case definition, storyboarding, wireframing) behind personalized experiences. The UX designer identifies opportunities to optimize customer journeys and works closely with visual designers to bring interaction designs to life. Usually small organizations use creative guidelines and playbooks provided as output of the design phase of the project instead of keeping a visual designer around.

Marketing Technologist

This role executes and optimizes marketing tactics within Sitecore and any other technology used by the organization. The person in this role configures campaigns, personalization tactics, tests, experience-automation plans, email, and social-marketing tactics. They also work with the digital analyst to make optimization recommendations based on their deep knowledge of the platform capabilities.

Digital Analyst

The digital analyst evaluates conversions and engagement values associated with digital goals to provide insights into customer journeys and intent. They also assess channels, campaigns, and segments performance. The analyst offers actionable recommendations for optimizing business results through improved content, design, and personalization. They also design tests to measure the impact of these optimization efforts.

Final Thoughts

You may not have individuals to fill all the roles, so one person has to do more than one job. It's ok to multitask as long as the workload allows for it.

Every organization is unique, and you must adapt to work with the resources at your disposal. As your organization grows, you can look at expanding the team. Larger organizations usually have multiple teams and more specialized roles in their structure.

As you start to build your experience marketing capabilities, begin with a small, focused team that can get the ball rolling quickly.