Reasons Why Ektron Should Be On Your 11WCM Shortlist

Transcription

1 Reasons Why Ektron Should Be On Your 11WCM Shortlist

2 Executive Summary A web content management system (CMS) enables business users to easily create, manage and publish content on websites, rather than having to rely on IT, and allows the organization to engage with their consumers online. But, choosing the right Web Content Management solution requires more than an understanding of the content management capabilities needed to meet an organization s requirements. Content management has evolved to encompass online customer engagement, from initial reach to the prospect to customer retention. This paper is designed to help decision makers think beyond WCM to help them keep in mind their overall business goals and how WCM plays a strategic role in achieving those goals. The web has evolved. Customer expectations have changed. New channels like mobile and social media have emerged. Video is becoming the most important content type for visitor engagement. And today, your WCM platform can meet your current business needs of implementing a multichannel customer engagement strategy. That is, if you have the right WCM platform. 01 Ektron s web content management simplifies the creation, management, and delivery of multi-channel customer experiences. Ektron s software speeds time-to-web, drives business outcomes, and builds customer loyalty. Ektron empowers Marketing teams to manage the entire customer lifecycle from acquisition through conversion through retention. Developers benefit from Ektron s extensibility and commitment to the Microsoft.NET framework. There are 11 main reasons why organizations such as Chapters Indigo, Dolby, Fairmont Hotels, Kodak, Microsoft, Travelex and Valasssis have chosen Ektron as their WCM solution. This paper will help demonstrate why Ektron should be on your WCM shortlist percent native Microsoft ASP.NET 2. Ease of Use Resulting in Increased Productivity 3. Integration With Existing Mission-Critical Applications 4. Deliver Multichannel Experiences 5. Embrace Social Business Through Communities and Collaboration 6. Empower Employee Productivity Through an Intranet Portal 7. Commerce to Build Online Customer Shopping Experiences 8. Marketing Teams Can Connect Content to Business Outcomes on a Website 9. Turn Your Website Into a Lead Generation Tool 10. Enterprise Search 11. Speed Time-to-Web with Synchronization

3 Introduction If you re currently searching for a WCM solution, you re likely in the process of reviewing a long list of candidates, comparing features, reading analyst reports, and hearing from different stakeholders in your organization telling you that your next WCM system needs to have a certain set of requirements. What differentiates Ektron is that it is more than just a CMS. It is the core technology that serves as the vehicle to deliver an online experience for a company s customers. Ektron provides other essential software that businesses expect today; namely social software to build customer loyalty and marketing optimization tools to drive revenue growth. By connecting seamlessly with third-party integration points such as Customer Relationship Management, web analytics, globalization and translation services, adaptive content targeting and recommendations and video delivery, Ektron provides companies with a total solution aligned with their business needs. 02

4 Reason 1: 100 Percent Native Microsoft ASP.NET Ektron s flagship Web Content Management platform provides the scalability, extensibility, and power needed to deliver complex, dynamic websites. Ektron was the first web content management vendor to deliver a pure.net application and continues to aggressively invest in the latest Microsoft technologies. From a.net developer s perspective, Ektron is easy to understand. It s built on the Microsoft.NET Framework, using Server Control, Users Controls, Master Pages, and.net caching for scalability. Developers use standard languages and development patterns such as HTML, CSS, C#, and JQuery. Ektron provides a library of over 90 pre-built.net Server controls allowing developers to quickly add functionality to websites. When developers need more flexibility and power, Ektron provides a complete SDK and API for custom developers. Designers have full control over markup, allowing them to incorporate HTML5, Flash, AJAX, and more into their website. 03 Server Controls Ektron provides more than 90 pre-built implementations of the.net APIs in the form of server controls ranging from simple controls such as dynamic content lists to compound controls and applications. All Ektron server controls encapsulate complex functionality, making it a straightforward process for developers to quickly assemble web pages by dragging and dropping controls from Visual Studio s Toolbox onto an ASPX Template, then defining the control s behavior by setting properties either in code or by using Visual Studio. Ektron s Server controls follow a Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern permitting independent development, testing and maintenance of each. Open API and Extensibility Framework When developers need more flexibility and power, Ektron provides a complete SDK and API for custom development. The.NET API provides easy access to data stored in the database without the need for a developer to ever write a line of SQL code or to understand the database schema, providing for seamless future upgrades. Consistency, discoverability and simplicity make building applications with the Ektron API quick, easy and efficient. Ektron Exchange Community The Exchange a one-stop shop for developers offers a variety of community benefits and features, including the latest news, Best Practice advice from Ektron experts, pre-built code, server controls, widgets and more. The Exchange is the largest library of freeware code for the Ektron Platform.

5 Reason 2: Ease of Use Resulting in Increased Productivity Ektron makes it easy for users to create, manage, and publish content. Non-technical subject matter experts can participate in the content lifecycle without having to know HTML or involving an IT team. Users make edits in-place without having to leave the page. 04 Webpage Creation and Assembly Ektron PageBuilder revolutionizes page and site creation. It allows users, developers, and designers to work in parallel, empowering content authors to manage the entire page creation process. Content authors simply enter text, imagery, social media, and any other site functionality (termed Widgets ) to create fully functional pages and microsites. Pages are managed by marketing teams the same way they manage content: applying metadata, following approval chains, tracking histories and more. PageBuilder provides marketing teams with the ability to create agile marketing campaigns including landing pages and campaigns without requiring assistance from developers and designers. In fact, PageBuilder allows any content author to easily create, edit and manage web content without needing technical assistance.

6 Reason 3: Integration With Existing Mission-Critical Applications Ektron doesn t require you to replace your existing business applications. We actively work with the world s leading technology companies to ensure the Ektron platform will provide you with a total solution aligned with your business needs. From CRM to analytics to localization, Ektron s technology partners have the experience and expertise to leverage web content management for new business opportunities. Video Delivery Video has become an important customer engagement tool across every industry vertical. For example, retailers use video to increase conversion rates. Using video demos of items on product pages increased sales for Zappos by between six and 30 percent. Publishers use video to increase viewer engagement by creating video interviews with authors or trailers publicizing new releases. Non-profits use video to create emotional experiences to drive donations, creating emotional experiences that help connect supporters. 05 Video isn t just another content type; it s perhaps the most important content type, especially for engagement. Brightcove, the leading online video platform, and Ektron together streamline the online video publishing and content management process. Our joint customers easily incorporate highquality, branded video experiences into their online properties and marketing campaigns through a Brightcove widget. Marketers can execute state-ofthe-art video campaigns with the same efficiency as any other aspect of building and maintaining their websites and marketing campaigns. Customers leverage Brightcove s best-of-breed media transcoding, management and publishing tools without leaving the Ektron user interface. Users can drag-and-drop a Brightcove widget into a site, page, or marketing campaign, creating a rich platform that can fuse text, audio, images and video into a transformative Web experience. Ektron also supports inserting Brightcove s player embed codes manually for more customized video experiences. Translation When a company s audience is global and multilingual in nature, they need the ability to reach that audience in the language of their choice. Lionbridge is a leading provider of translation services that enables clients to create, release, manage and maintain their web content globally. Companies can ensure that their corporate content is localized for every audience, get maximum value from community-generated content regardless of its language of origin, and use their website to build customer satisfaction and increase revenue opportunities globally. Organizations will increase international market share and speed adoption of global products and content. When companies choose to integrate Lionbridge as part of their Ektron solution, they will see an accelerated time to market and an increase in their global competitive advantage.

7 Adaptive Web Deliver uniquely personalized website experiences for visitors. With Ektron and Baynote (a provider of personalization and digital marketing optimization solutions that power the adaptive web) combined, marketers can have the best of both worlds in content targeting both associative and adaptive personalization. Ektron associative content targeting lets marketers establish a set of business rules to establish what content should be displayed based upon information gleaned from the visitor s search criteria, geographic location, source traffic and other factors. For example, different content would be displayed dependent on whether the visitor arrived through a search link or came from another site. Baynote adaptive personalization extends targeting even further where the site itself adapts content based on visitor behavior. The two technologies of Ektron and Baynote combined provide an unequalled complementary marketing optimization solution. Analytics Analytics 06 Connect web analytics to your marketing team, turning web analytics insight into action. Leverage your existing web analytics investment by integrating with the three most widely deployed analytics packages Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst and WebTrends providing the context you need to make informed business decisions. Easily access all your common analytics reports including Goals, Visitors, Traffic Sources, and Content. Web analytics data is always just a single click away. Compare page performance over time. Access customized reports, including most viewed pages, highest rated, most commented and most ed. Build custom analytics dashboards, highlighting important business metrics and KPIs. Customer Relationship Management According to Marketing Sherpa, the top two challenges faced by B2B marketers are generating more leads, and producing higher quality leads. The corporate website should play an important role in your marketing automation strategies. Today, marketing automation tools primary engage with customers via . But in an inbound marketing world, we know that customers often find products and services via search engines or social media, with the primary engagement point being the website. The opportunity is to take lead nurturing and marketing automation principals that work well with campaigns and apply them to the corporate website. Your Web CMS should be able to score visitor behavior based on the implicit and explicit actions they take while on the site. Once the visitor shows the right interest level, they should be automatically added as a lead to your CRM. Let Ektron show how it s possible to connect your website to a CRM such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics.

8 Reason 4: Deliver Multichannel Experiences According to Gartner Inc., by the end of 2011 there will be 468 million Smartphones in use. By 2013, mobile phones will overtake desktops as the most common Web access device. People are accessing companies websites via a Smartphone or tablet every day. What kind of mobile experience are you presenting your audience? While you can open any website on almost any mobile device that s equipped with a web browser, that doesn t mean your visitors are going to have a good experience, or that they re not going to immediately abandon your site when they find it s not mobile-optimized. Ektron s emobile Tools provide businesses with a complete set of functionality to deliver personalized web experiences for mobile devices. With the number of web enabled Smartphones increasing daily, the demand for mobile versions of websites and web based applications is also growing exponentially. This creates a unique opportunity for you to build a specialized experience for visitors with an interface optimized for those users who browse via their phone or other mobile device. As a general rule-of-thumb, if you ve created a mobile-optimized site, you ll want to present mobile visitors with your mobile version, and desktop users with the desktop version of your site. This ensures that each user receives the intended experience without compromising performance. Similarly, you may want your site to take advantage of the sophisticated capabilities offered by many Smartphones, such as geo-location, to target specific offers and promotions to mobile devices in real time. Ektron emobile Tools will automatically detect specific mobile devices and their capabilities using the largest, most complete device detection library on the market letting you render the right experience to the right device. 07

9 Reason 5: Embrace Social Business Through Communities and Collaboration Websites are evolving to become a seamless blend of corporate-generated and user-generated content. Social is no longer just a disconnected feature of a website, it s a fundamental shift in how companies embrace customer relationships, transparency, and authenticity. Social Business changes everything. It changes how employees collaborate, enabling better communication, innovation, and productivity. It changes customer support, allowing customers to support each other in vibrant online communities. It changes commerce, providing authentic customerdriven ratings and reviews that build trust. 08 A pioneer of integrating WCM with social software, Ektron understands the value and importance of Social Business and has developed innovative technology unlike no other market offering. Whether an enterprise is looking to improve employee collaboration or to improve customer experience, Ektron s commitment to social gives customers the ability to manage both their corporate and social presence through a single platform. A significant differentiator is Ektron s complete integration of social features within its WCM platform rather than costly and poorly implemented integrations with third-party social tools as provided by other WCM vendors. Is your company ready for the social revolution? Ektron Social Business Software allows organizations to create vibrant social communities for employees and customers. Socialize key business processes including Sales, Support, Marketing, and Innovation. Ektron Social Software powers many of the most well-known customer communities, delivering enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty. With Ektron, social is not a feature, it becomes a business strategy. Reason 6: Empower Employee Productivity Through an Intranet Portal Current generation intranets are plagued by poor user adoption. Symptoms of a poorly adopted intranet include stale content, a poor information architecture, broken search, and poor collaboration. Frustrated employees look outside of the enterprise to solve their business challenges, often looking towards consumeroriented tools like Facebook. The Intranet must evolve to meet the needs of the modern employee. The Ektron eintranet is a complete information distribution, knowledge management, and social business intranet portal, bridging the worlds of your employees, customers and partners. More than a standalone intranet solution, the Ektron eintranet will integrate existing business applications such as SharePoint and Salesforce. com into a single application. Continued on next page

10 With eintranet, your support teams will be able to answer a question once and push it out to everyone in the organization, updating information as and when needed. Managers can be instantly informed on the status of a project, a slipping deadline or a finished task. Employees will have the most current version of project content schedules, documents, presentations always at hand. Organizations can now turn their intranet into an essential business application. Reason 7: Commerce to Build Online Customer Shopping Experiences Ektron s ecommerce solution brings all the tools merchants need to build and manage a complete web marketplace. Display, edit and change product information in minutes. Provide a powerful search engine to help visitors find exactly the right offering on your site. Hook into your ERP and accounting systems to process orders. And checkout is a breeze with Ektron s pre-built shopping basket, ready to be deployed for your business. 09 Ektron categorization and search helps visitors quickly find the items they re looking for. Enhance product SEO with Ektron metadata and URL aliasing features. Auto-generate image thumbnails. Utilize cross-selling and up-selling features. Leverage the power of the Ektron platform and import additional functionality using Ektron s flexible, scalable API. Payment and shipping options are flexible with ecommerce, which integrates with major purchase and shipping providers through Ektron s Provider Model, an abstraction layer to access data, making Ektron ecommerce fully extensible. You decide the payment you want to accept - credit cards, checks, and/or PayPal. Payment gateways such as Payflow and Authorize.Net are included as part of the software installation. Ektron s ecommerce and storefront module is fully compliant with the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS) program. Reason 8: Marketing Teams Can Connect Content to Business Outcomes on a Website You have seven seconds to engage a visitor before they leave your site. Or maybe it s ten seconds. Or three. Whatever the exact number is for your site, you ve got a finite amount of time to engage a visitor before they re gone. Content is the cornerstone of visitor engagement on the corporate website. It entertains, educates, and sometimes even inspires your customers. The challenge faced by marketers is to get the right content to the right visitor, in the right context, across every customer channel. Managing content was so much easier when you could create and publish content without putting much thought into how the content was going to produce business outcomes such as new customer acquisition, retention, lead generation, etc. Today, companies look to web content management systems such as Ektron to serve as the foundation for their web strategy. While content management remains a core challenge for marketing teams, the ultimate goal is engagement, not management. So how do companies use content to engage site visitors? Enter personalization.

11 The ability to engage, convert, and retain visitors is significantly improved by targeting messaging to customer segments in the context of both what you know about them and their actions on your site. Armed with that context, a marketer can build a personalized experience for each visitor based on their behavior, location, demographics, profile, social graph, and more. The more relevant the information is to the site visitor, the more likely they are to take the desired next step. Ektron addresses personalization through rules-based content targeting and dynamic content targeting. Rules-based content targeting allows marketers to define business rules to personalize content delivery. For example, a promotion on a landing page might be tied to a specific search engine keyword. Or a site might deliver a promotion to existing customers based on their prior purchase history. Content targeting is often combined with multivariate testing to uncover the best combination of copy, layout, imagery, and other factors to drive conversion. Content targeting works well when marketing teams have a fixed number of customer segments and are able to clearly define those segments based on behavioral, environmental, or user profile data. But often marketers want to evolve beyond a customer segmentation strategy to reach one-to-one, real time, intent-driven personalization. Through Ektron s partnership with Baynote, companies can deliver a personalized web experience to each visitor in real time based on context and intent. Baynote operates using the collective intelligence gained from the interaction patterns of site visitors. Each page on the website automatically adapts itself to provide the right recommendation, the best content, or the most helpful search result, all based on the collective intelligence learned across hundreds of thousands of visitor interactions. 10 But context goes beyond personalization. Companies can make the experience more meaningful when they know what that visitor came to accomplish and how they came (whether from a Smartphone, tablet, desktop or search engine). If the visitor came to your site using a search on Google and they used certain search phrases, you can optimize the experience by targeting content specifically in the context of what they searched. You can also take advantage of knowing what location they came from and target content accordingly. By understanding who your site visitors are, you can match the intent of why they came to your website and present them with content that s personalized and meaningful. It s then that you start to drive successful business outcomes. Reason 9: Turn Your Website Into a Lead Generation Tool The following conversation happens in every company that sells and markets products: Sales executives complain about the quantity and quality of leads, while Marketing executives complain about Sales inability to close the leads they are given. Because demand generation marketers are under constant pressure to generate more sales leads, they continue to run expensive lead generation campaigns while often ignoring the greatest opportunity for low-cost, high-quality leads. The website.

12 Customers often find products and services via search engines or social media, with the primary engagement point being the website. So, the opportunity is to take lead nurturing and marketing automation principals that work well with campaigns and apply them to the corporate website. Sales teams can now have real-time insight into website visitor behavior (pages viewed, search keywords, where they clicked, their click path, the individual s location and company from a GeoIP lookup, etc.) and be able to integrate those behavior models into their organization s existing customer relationship management applications like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics. Leads are automatically scored, measuring the level of engagement of each site visitor to support a lead nurturing strategy that utilizes customer segmentation and targeted content to ensure the right content, promotions, offers, and more are delivered to the right customer at the right time to advance them in the sales process and their buyer journey. Analytics can be used to see how leads are performing and it provides valuable insight into visitor behavior, as well as to understand prior trends and predict new ones. 11 Ektron has solved the epic struggle between sales and marketing. Now marketing can turn their website into a high-performance lead generation engine, helping sales get high-quality, actionable and real-time leads to generate more revenue. Reason 10: Enterprise Search Search can be the most powerful navigation tool you have on a website. Ektron is the only web content management vendor to embed Microsoft Search Server with an optional upgrade to Microsoft FAST Search, providing the highest scalability and performance search of enterprise content. Site visitors can narrow and filter results to find exactly what they re looking for. Search matching capabilities include phonetic matching, nickname expansion, common misspellings and name spelling variations. Search results from multiple websites can be displayed in a central location rather than visitors having to perform separate searches. Synonym search and suggested results lets you determine what you want your site visitors to see first based on the search phrase they entered. Marketers can measure and monitor the performance of their site search with analytics reports. Review common search phrases, top destination pages and click-through rates for search results. See what queries return no results. All in order to optimize the user s search experience. Developers can easily tune and configure all of Ektron Site Search, powered by Microsoft, including relevance ranking, document indexing and more. Reason 11: Speed Time-to-Web with Synchronization Ektron s esync synchronization technology automates the secure provisioning of web content, code, assets, and templates from development environments through production. Ektron esync automatically deploys only necessary changes, from single pieces of content to entire sites, speeding time-to-web and eliminating site downtime. With its intelligent synchronization technology, esync is able to securely move selected content bi-directionally. Many sites now have a wealth of user-generated content and membership information. That data can now be synchronized back to the development environment through esync, making your site fully synchronized, whether content was generated by your company or by site visitors.

13 Next Steps You ve now read our top 11 reasons of why Ektron should be on your WCM shortlist. But you don t have to just read our take on it. We would love for you to see our software in action and listen to our customers opinions of Ektron. Learn how Ektron can be the right fit for your organization. For a demonstration of Ektron, a sample RFP, or to get a list of Ektron customer references, please contact us today at or visit our website at About Ektron Ektron s web content management (WCM) platform simplifies the creation, management and delivery of multi-channel customer experiences for global organizations that are looking to engage with customers online. Ektron speeds time-to-web, drives business outcomes, and builds customer loyalty through software that powers corporate websites, intranet portals, and social communities. It goes beyond traditional WCM, putting the power of the entire customer lifecycle, from acquisition through conversion and retention, in the hands of your marketing and web teams so that customers continuously receive relevant, fresh content that matters to them. Headquartered in Nashua, New Hampshire, with offices in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, Ektron has more than 8,000 customers worldwide including: The Home Depot, Kodak, Microsoft, NASDAQ and National Health Services UK. For more information, please visit or 12 Corporate Headquarters 542 Amherst Street Nashua, NH USA 1 (603) United Kingdom Sienna Court, The Broadway, Maidenhead SL6 1NJ UK +44 (0) Australia Level 3, 175 Castlereagh Street Sydney NSW 2001 Australia Ektron s web content management (WCM) platform simplifies the creation, management and delivery of multi-channel customer experiences for global organizations that are looking to engage with customers online. Ektron speeds time-to-web, drives business outcomes, and builds customer loyalty through software that powers corporate websites, intranet portals, and social communities. It goes beyond traditional WCM, putting the power of the entire customer lifecycle, from acquisition through conversion and retention, in the hands of your marketing and web teams so that customers continuously receive relevant, fresh content that matters to them. Copyright 2011 Ektron, Inc. All rights reserved.