The problem: Inconsistent, scattered digital messaging
In the current digital landscape, every company is challenged
with obtaining consistency in their messaging while understanding
the profile of their customers. This is not an easy problem to
solve. Your website, industry blogs and message boards, Twitter,
Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn are all places where your digital
messaging may reside.
Let me illustrate the challenge with an example. A client of our
technology consulting practice has an independent network of stores
/ dealers who are very attuned to their local communities. These
stores and dealers provide services that meet the needs of their
local areas and they have special pricing on products and services
their communities need.
The retailers / dealers used independent websites and social media
to highlight these specials to their community. The challenge was
that messages to the end customer were delivered in a one-off,
inconsistent manner. How would the customer know where to get the
next special that mattered to them? Would they visit the corporate
website? Follow the company on Twitter? Would they get the local
special but not the head office specials by visiting the local
store's website?
The other challenge with these varying messages was that the
marketing department couldn't keep track of how best to engage
customers. Single messages on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube were
delivered independently in a shotgun approach; marketing was unable
to learn what was effective nor whether they were reaching the
target audience.
The answer: An enterprise portal framework
There is an answer to control this digital content 'wild west'. While not a silver bullet, an enterprise-class portal framework will bring your organization a lot closer to controlling your messaging and learning about your customers. The challenge of executing your digital content strategy will remain, but a portal framework provides the foundation and flexibility to create a custom digital experience for your audience.
So what can an enterprise portal framework do?
An enterprise portal framework combines information from
multiple sources and delivers personalized, targeted messaging to
the viewer. All enterprise portal frameworks have the following
features. Leveraging these capabilities will solve the digital
problem outlined above.
Learn more about your end customers
Enterprise portals have sign-in capabilities, allowing customers /
stakeholders to register themselves. User registration allows your
marketing team to gain more insight into stakeholder segments,
including who views the site and when and if messages targeted to
certain groups are being looked at by those groups.
Some advanced portal features allow the use of LinkedIn, Google and
Facebook logins so that individual customers do not have to create
yet another account. Furthermore, your organization can leverage
those social media sites to learn about your customers'
demographic information and habits.
Leverage content from multiple
sources
Have you ever seen a video for a product or service and wondered if
it is available at the store location nearest you? A portal can
help your organization provide this service. A portal allows
integration of multiple streams of content personalized to an
audience. Enterprise portals have a concept called portlets. These
portlets are built to talk to each other through the portal
framework. This enables different content from different digital
media to talk to each other and provide an enhanced user
experience.
Portlets can, for example, direct a user who finds a video about
one of your products on YouTube to your webpage, where they will
see local pricing for that product / service and quantity remaining
at the store closest to them. The same technology can be used on
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or other social mediums.
What this means is that content from social media and your back-end
systems could communicate through the portlets to provide a
customer experience that concludes with a call to action and makes
the purchase easier.
Allow your local experts to author
content
A portal provides web-based content management, content authoring
and content review capabilities. This allows your local experts to
write messages on your corporate platform with peer / marketing
review and approval as necessary.
This also allows your local network to leverage social media and
drive customers to the portal. Local personnel input store specials
or articles on new products and services for local consumption,
special pricing is put in to your back-end systems and local
customers are then informed through a targeted social media
campaign.
Customers seeing the social media blast are driven to the portal to
view more information and some will sign up to receive more
information. This will help your marketing team learn more about
local areas and trends in different markets. The authoring
capabilities also help keep messaging consistent and leverage other
features of a portal to provide an enhanced customer
experience.
In other words, local authors drive demand while the corporate
level data-mines the results to develop future campaigns and
offerings to properly segmented markets.
Advanced content security
management
Another feature enterprise portals offer is the ability to restrict
information based on user profiles. Several of our clients have
taken advantage of this by providing special marketing content and
pricing to dealers based on region, customer category and role.
Securing content can involve very complex combinations and portal
frameworks are able to help with these challenges.
A portal is powerful, but you still need a digital content strategy
Enterprise portal frameworks are powerful tools that can help your business manage information and provide a clear message to your customers. Note, however, that these frameworks are only toolkits to enable your organization to better reach your clients. In the end, you need a strategy to best marry portal capabilities with customer and marketing needs in order to reach organizational objectives.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.