Sitecore CMS Review: All You Need to Know

Sitecore CMS Review: All You Need to Know

What is Sitecore CMS?

Sitecore is a leading digital experience solution providing web content management and multichannel marketing automation. As a content management system, Sitecore enables web content editors and marketers to create seamless, personalized digital experiences for their target audience. In short, it offers a fully robust digital marketing system that makes customer engagement super easy for organisations.

We say Sitecore CMS, but Sitecore doesn't offer only Content Management. This is just a part of it. It also offers marketing automation and contextual intelligence to help you understand who your customers are and how best to personalize your marketing efforts to them.

How It Works

Sitecore, the company, calls its CMS the Sitecore Web Experience Manager. It is designed as an enterprise-grade solution to help organizations manage all of their website properties, facilitating a consistent and excellent web experience for their website visitors.

To make that possible, Sitecore CMS comes with features like:

• Tailoring content to specific types of visitors

• Multi-site integrations

• Writing content once and distributing it to several marketing channels

• Displaying websites in the user's home language (multi-lingual functionality)

• Creation of blogs, wikis, and polls

• Integrates websites with social media

• Tracking site visitor behavior for customer insights

• Storing customer data for profiling visitors

• Mobile-first responsiveness.

Sitecore's contextual intelligence keeps track of customers' locations, interactions, and behaviors, enabling you to personalize every customer interaction. This ability to customize every aspect of your marketing campaign makes Sitecore one of the best CMS platforms you could ever leverage.

Yes, like other CMS platforms, you can design a website on Sitecore. All you need to do is select the user Defined folder in the Content Tree, select New Template, and enter Home Page or Product, as the case may be, to create your web pages.

Plans & Pricing

Sitecore CMS it's a paid solution for businesses of all sizes, but there's no specific pricing. Instead, cost varies according to implementation and scale.

Sitecore can also be implemented as an Intranet, and the pricing will vary with the number of users that have access.

Notable Features

Sitecore comes with amazing, power-packed features that make it one of the best CMS platforms out there. If you're still wondering how, have a peek into the following features:

Content Management

Sitecore's content management is a fully-packed feature that gives you the following capabilities:

• Create and design web pages without any coding skills

• Edit content with a Microsoft Office-style ribbon interface

• Organize, manage, and secure digital assets efficiently

• Combine several marketing tools like blogs, social media, wikis, and polls all in one place

• Multi-lingual capabilities

Personalization Editor

Sitecore enables you to personalize content directly on the page. You select rules and content values to tailor each content to the appropriate site visitor, and you get this insight by previewing past user experiences.

Sitecore also helps page editors to understand each page's target audience by assigning profile cards to different parts of the user's site.

Personalized Customer Data

As has been mentioned, this is one of the most notable features of Sitecore that makes it remarkable among its competitors. It stores site visitors’ metrics and behavior so that you have insight into each customer, helping you personalize your marketing campaigns accurately.

Print Experience Manager (PXM)

The PXM feature lets you align all contents with your standard laid-out guidelines. Furthermore, it allows you to distribute content and convert it into print-ready designs.

Sitecore Experience Database (xDB)

The Sitecore experience database (xDB) collects customer experience data across all your marketing platforms and connects everything together. This gives you a wholesome knowledge of every customer so thar you can make well-informed marketing decisions.

Mobile Web

One notable feature of Sitecore CMS is its mobile friendliness. It dynamically formats content with a multi-device design and optimizes sites for mobile viewing.

Conversion Friendly Forms

Sitecore CRM allows you to create and personalize web forms that target specific audiences. Then, you can send data from these forms into your CRM and ERP systems.

You can as well incorporate business logic into the forms.

Integrated Omnichannel Campaigns

With Sitecore CMS cloud, you can track your marketing campaigns' performances across multiple channels to know what works best. This omnichannel feature makes it possible to access everything in one place without having to switch between several systems repeatedly.

Engagement Analytics

Sitecore CMS tracks the connection between your content and lead engagement, telling you how visitors work their way into your site. This makes your insight richer as you become able to determine and prioritize the appropriate follow-up.

Geolocation

Sitecore offers personalized GeoIP for customers to see the nearest store location without inputting zip codes.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

No website can succeed without Search engine optimization. To offer users optimal online presence, Sitecore delivers SEO best practices such as:

• Optimizing sites from the search engine's perspective

• Using Google-friendly URLs to improve site ranking

• Improving user experience while helping visitors find what they need quickly with an in-built search functionality on the website.

You can as well employ the SEO toolkit to optimize content before publishing.

Pros

• Being a .NET-based solution, Sitecore allows you to build your website from scratch with everything fully customized, including the templates.

• Create world-class, enterprise-grade websites with powerful development tools

• With its personalization capabilities, Sitecore allows you to interact with and engage each site visitor in the format that best suits them.

• Impressive customization

• Easy integration with API

Cons

• Difficult to learn as features can be quite complex to navigate

• Unlike other competitors like WordPress and Shopify, Sitecore may require tech-savvy users to implement fully. Most times, you'd need a .NET developer.

• Sitecore wouldn't be the right—or an affordable—option for a small business as it caters mainly to enterprises.

Conclusion

At the end of our Sitecore CMS review, it's fair to say Sitecore is one digital solution large-scale organizations can ideally leverage to reach their audiences efficiently. However, SMBs will find it too expensive, complex, and overly sophisticated for their needs.