Today’s digital landscape and the unification of social, mobile, and the web into a cross-channel experience are fundamentally changing the ways our portfolio of brands engages with its customers.  This new paradigm has led to an evolution of user experience (UX) into Customer Experience (CX), influencing how we approach creating digital experiences that drive business impact for our clients.

One of the implications of CX is the increased role of content management systems (CMS) in delivering and managing customer experiences across channels. In the not-too-recent past, companies implemented CMS platforms to help them manage and maintain website content, generating operational efficiencies and gaining greater control over their web properties.  The new focus on CX requires that CMS must become an enabler in helping clients go to market differently and transform the way they deliver products and services.

Here are three examples of the new demands CX is placing on content management technologies:

Marketing Automation

The most effective demand generation processes are those where marketers respond individually to each prospect in the buying process. But given the volume of marketing campaigns, that’s not practical. Marketing automation gives companies the ability to manage their interactions with customers and deliver the right messages at the right times over the right channels.

Marketing automation software like Eloqua and Marketo are established solutions with proven performance. However, best-of-breed CMS need to go beyond simply enabling easy integration with current marketing automation applications and build automated targeting, testing, and analytics tools right into the content workflow.

Personalization

Digital personalization serves users content and even unique experiences based on their profile and behaviors.  Delivering a more relevant, or personalized, experience results in higher user engagement and enables a website to more effectively drive key business outcomes.

Personalization takes one of two forms, explicit and implicit. Explicit personalization is straightforward. Data is gathered when the user performs an action, such as filling out a form. Content can then be customized based on what the data tells us about the user.

Implicit personalization employs passive tools like cookies to gather data about users from behavior such as page views, searches, and location.

Retailers like Amazon employ complex and extremely granular personalization that requires a significant investment in resources. However, best-of-breed CMS technologies will need to enable a personalized experience to be created with very basic user information.  This means that organizations can implement a personalization strategy without the massive investment.

Multi-site

Many marketing organizations today face the need to deliver an increasing number of stand-alone and unique digital experiences for marketing campaigns, product launches, or new brands.  Whether it’s a landing page, microsite, or more complex website, they frequently have new content, a unique look-and-feel, and an accelerat ed time-to-market.

CMS platforms will need to make the process of delivering large numbers of unique web experiences repeatable and scalable, taking days instead of weeks and months.  Marketers are able to maintain high brand consistency while more effectively react to market opportunities.

When reviewing the current CMS landscape, products like Adobe CQ and Sitecore clearly stand out from the pack in terms of CX enablement. Another  entry worth noting is Drupal.

Beginning as a flexible open-source platform for on-line communities, Drupal has evolved into a truly enterprise CMS platform, capable of delivering content-driven brand engagement and sales enablement.  As a pure CMS, Drupal is powerful, yet user-friendly, with a streamlined development, admin, and publishing processes that helps accelerate a site’s time-to-market.

In the past, custom modules and expert code development could enable Drupal to deliver a degree of marketing automation, personalization, and multi-site capabilities.  Acquia, the commercial open source software company that provides products and technical support for Drupal, then introduced two products that brought Drupal to the next level.

Acquia Lift –an interoperable platform that delivers testing, targeting, and analytics capabilities to simplify the delivery of personalized digital experiences. By mining and interpreting data, it automates contextual relevance to create a one-on-one conversation with users.

Acquia Site Factory –a turnkey solution that reduces the complexity of and time necessary to deploy one site or hundreds of sites. Intended for non-technical users, Site Factory allows for customized design and content, without the need for back-end Drupal development.

For companies currently on Drupal or who prefer open-source technologies, Drupal is a powerful and viable solution for customer experience management.

Decisions around digital technologies come with an investment and companies have to weigh a number of factors such as existing infrastructure, total cost of ownership, and business requirements.  The emergence of CX means that ROI and revenue performance management are now starting to become part of the decision-making process.  Whether you’re considering replacing your current CMS or upgrading your current system, be sure to make customer experience enablement a “must have” and a high priority requirement.

 

Last week we launched a new digital experience for Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. The new website, msb.georgetown.edu, gives alumni, global executives, prospective students, master’s candidates, faculty and staff a world-class digital experience. It is specifically designed to show how the McDonough School of Business helps its students succeed in their goals and the institution move up in the highly competitive business school rankings.

Site launches are always an exciting time for the Bluetext team, and McDonough was no different. It’s opening night, the curtain is raised, and the target audience will determine if the strategy, creativity, discipline and hard work have paid off. Shortly after the site launch, we gathered the team to review the project, discuss lessons learned, and identify ways to apply those to current and future projects.

 

The session was also an opportunity to further refine our core approach to innovative digital experiences to Higher Education as a market. Here are some of the key take-ways:

• Build a strong and sophisticated brand connection. Clean, bold, and straightforward design lets the institution’s brand speak for itself. The design, imagery, headlines and copy should convey confidence. Videos, infographics and interactive functionality can showcase the value proposition and the work of faculty and students.
• Address Return-On-Investment up-front. Students are savvier than ever. They want to understand the value proposition and why the degree at any particular institution is worth the cost. Address the question up-front in a way that students understand, speaking to their concerns and goals.

• Show the “bigger picture.” How will the education experience help students make an impact or shape their world in a positive way? Talk about how their education correlates to what’s relevant today. Depending on the discipline, it could be entrepreneurism, clean energy research, transforming the public education system, or even global citizenship.
• Engagement is essential, just like in the real world. It’s about social engagement and community. Smart use of social tools will put a face on the educational product, faculty and institution.

• Simplify. Put phone numbers and contact information at their fingertips. Clearly describe the admissions process and what they need to know to get started.
• Deliver a coherent digital experience across all touchpoints. Digital audiences are more connected, more empowered, and more distracted than ever before. They are constantly interacting with one or more devices that place data from websites, apps, and social media at their fingertips. Responsive design can give a consistent brand experience across multiple devices. What’s also important, but often neglected, is making sure that content is structured in a way that makes it reusable across desktops, laptops, mobile devices, social media and digital campaigns.

These core principles provide a solid foundation for creating a successful digital experience that drives ROI for any institution. Today, the user experience is about how a broad range of audiences interact with the brand and product across multiple contexts. That requires thinking of the .edu presence as a digital platform, not simply a “website,” to drive enlistment, revenue, and engagement goals.

Supporting CSC’s global digital brand team, Bluetext designed and built CSC’s Digital Briefing Center, a virtual experience where clients and CSC’s entire ecosystem can come to learn about CSC’s key technology conversations across its target verticals.

As the company expands with a global customer base and diverse set of solution offerings, it was important to ensure that prospective customers could get a similar experience as they would if they visited corporate HQ.

Bluetext designed a virtual office building where each floor represents a specific vertical industry, and visitors can learn about CSC’s key solutions and experience across cloud computing, big data, applications, cyber security, and mobility.

The highlight of the Digital Briefing Center is the elevator ride where users can see “CSC” in action across healthcare, banking, manufacturing, and insurance. The solution is designed to scale with more solutions and target industries, as well as partner ecosystem solutions from CSC’s top technology partners.

It was built for users across all browsers. For pre-HTML5 browsers we built a lightweight code base, and for today’s modern browsers we used HTML5, a custom video player, and a JSON XML Twitter integration. Bluetext handled all CMS integration into CSC’s environment.

CSC turned to Bluetext to design and launch an industry-specific landing page around its approach to targeting the requirements of the manufacturing industry. CSC’s vision is called Orchestrated Manufacturing, and it represents an age where manufacturing processes are orchestrated through digital interactions and cyber-physical production systems. CSC is working with clients to implement advanced solutions that leverage a new generation of systems is providing real-time awareness and autonomic interactions between machines, systems, assets and things.

 

Bluetext worked with CSC’s digital brand marketing team, as well as their Manufacturing industry marketing team, to design a landing page unlike anything CSC has ever launched inside of its corporate domain. It includes a modern design with one long, scrolling page to showcase the vision and its practical application to the market, and then lead visitors to download key content and interact with CSC.

 

At Bluetext, we find that many large companies with diverse industry focuses and solution offerings sometimes make it hard for target audiences to find exactly what they are looking for. The idea behind Orchestrated Manufacturing is for CSC to tell its story in a unique way with an online and offline strategy to drive a consistent visual message into the market. The landing page is complemented with two videos that can be used by sales teams to succinctly tell the story, as well as a highly produced poster for sharing at events.

 

Please check it out at www.csc.com/om. We would love to hear about how you are designing landing pages targeting unique audience groups and what strategies you are finding work best.

 

 

 

Across the federal government, agency IT leaders demand integrated approaches to technology to tackle their most pressing mission challenges. Govplace, a leading enterprise IT solutions provider exclusively to the public sector, turned to Bluetext to develop FedInnovation (www.fedinnovation.com), a destination designed to help government agency executives get the latest information on current technology challenges and solutions for big data, cloud, security, mobility and storage. Developed in conjunction with leading technology providers including Dell, Intel Security and VMWare, it includes exclusive content, videos, blogs, and real-time social feeds.

FedInnovation represents the concept of combining relevant, fresh content, complementary offerings, and financial resources to deliver an educational platform to drive awareness and leads for Govplace across its target market.

From this platform, Govplace will drive blog posts, webinars, and other marketing programs to ensure its target audience understands the value that it, working with the leading IT providers to the Federal Government, can deliver.

The development of platform is a continued focus for Bluetext as we look to conceptualize, design and develop creative solutions that deliver measurable business impact for our clients. We are finding that the customers of our clients are demanding unique experiences with premium content delivered in an easy to consume manner. That is the goal behind FedInnovation. Explore FedInnovation today (www.fedinnovation.com).

 

 

The landowners of America’s working private forests had a large challenge: Few people outside the forest landowners community understood how private forests were different from Federal and state-owned forests, how their landowners were managing the lands in a way that was sustainable, and how as a result our private forests are healthy and growing. Instead, the image was often based on mis-impressions and confusion. The landowners asked Bluetext to develop a new organization, together with a name and logo and a website that could serve as the repository for information about our private forests, the landowners who serve as caretakers while harvesting wood sustain-ably, and the issues they were are facing.

Bluetext proposed that this new organization be called Forest America, and designed a logo that would convey the important connection between our forest landowners and the conservation that they bring to America’s forests.

Bluetext designed a comprehensive website that is responsive for all devices and that uses wide banners and paralax images to give a strong sense of the value and beauty of privately owned forests.  The site makes has calls-to-action to get involved throughout its pages as part of the strategy to recruit members and advocates for Forest America.

Bluetext also designed a multi-image infographic with key industry facts that is embedded in a sliding graphic that is accessed on the lower part of the homepage. Additional graphical elements include large banner images with text and compelling photography throughout.  Forest America includes social engagement links, and in its next phase will embed polling functions and advocacy tools that will not only make it an effective tool with policy makers but also generate its own content that can be pushed out through its various channels.

 

Forest America has all of the design features that deliver a site that can help the organization achieve its advocacy and recruitment mission with both state-of-the-art functionality and stunning creative assets.

The landowners of America?? working private forests had a large challenge: Few people outside the forest landowners community understood how private forests were different from Federal and state-owned forests, how their landowners were managing the lands in a way that was sustainable, and how as a result our private forests are healthy and growing. Instead, the image was often based on mis-impressions and confusion. The landowners asked Bluetext to develop a new organization, together with a name and logo and a website that could serve as the repository for information about our private forests, the landowners who serve as caretakers while harvesting wood sustain-ably, and the issues they were are facing.

Bluetext proposed that this new organization be called Forest America, and designed a logo that would convey the important connection between our forest landowners and the conservation that they bring to America?? forests.

Bluetext designed a comprehensive website that is responsive for all devices and that uses wide banners and paralax images to give a strong sense of the value and beauty of privately owned forests. ?The site makes has calls-to-action to get involved throughout its pages as part of the strategy to recruit members and advocates for Forest America.

Bluetext also designed a multi-image infographic with key industry facts that is embedded in a sliding graphic that is accessed on the lower part of the homepage. Additional graphical elements include large banner images with text and compelling photography throughout. ?Forest America includes social engagement links, and in its next phase will embed polling functions and advocacy tools that will not only make it an effective tool with policy makers but also generate its own content that can be pushed out through its various channels.

 

Forest America has all of the design features that deliver a site that can help the organization achieve its advocacy and recruitment mission with both state-of-the-art functionality and stunning creative assets.