10 ways Kentico Xperience delivers lead generation for marketers
Posted by: Adam Weston
05 May 2021
Helping financial services marketing teams generate qualified leads from their website, fast.
As a Kentico Gold Partner, we explain why Kentico Xperience CMS is the answer.
At a glance
- Get in front of your target customers and improve conversion with an all-in-one Digital Experience Platform (DXP).
- Kentico Xperience comes with built-in marketing tools for easy personalization, e-commerce, marketing automation, and more.
- Kentico’s website CMS is straightforward and simple for all marketers to work with.
- Get a real-time understanding of campaign results from insight-driven analytics.
New role + ambitious marketing targets = refreshed website
You’re settling into your new role as Chief Marketing Officer for a multinational finance company. You’ve been introducing yourself, developing a feel for your team, and building your 90-day plan. Everyone’s enthusiastic, though in the wake of the pandemic, there's huge pressure to deliver business results fast.
For you and your team, the bottom line depends on improved customer acquisition and retention. Lead generation tools all point to the company website, which is currently unhelpful, unengaging, and pulling in very little relevant traffic. A new website has been highlighted by the Board as one of your first priorities.
The decisions you make next will impact the business and your reputation.
Ever had a “waterfall drenching”?
You run a pitch process and issue a brief to the winner. There’s great chemistry, the ideas are good and the timeline and costing seem reasonable. The website development agency is appointed and starts work on your new website.
Over the next few weeks, you’ve assured progress is good. There’s lots of talk about “open architecture”, “APIs” and “Facebook Pixel”, so it sounds like they know what they’re doing.
Then project milestones start slipping and an extra budget is requested. Yet you’re not actually seeing anything much until, suddenly, ta-dah. You're all looking at an attractive yet vexing website. Where are the calls to action? What, exactly, is the customer journey? Why is there a picture of swans? What’s with the unwieldy circular cursor? Why the slow load time?
Clearly, your brief had some creative interpretation and there are still significant technical glitches. A series of several exhausting rehashes and reviews follow.
This process - agency retires to its offices to build the whole website; presents the first version, gets feedback; presents the second version, gets feedback; presents the third version; gets feedback; makes last changes; tests, retests; go live - is called 'waterfall' project management. It’s how things have been done for a long time - but it’s not fit for today’s pace of change anymore.
Granted, eventually, you do have a somewhat acceptable new website. Unfortunately, the development agency has poorly implemented Kentico Xperience and you and the team aren't happy. You need the agency to stay hands-on in what becomes an increasingly fractious (and expensive) partnership. Together you make the best of it, convinced that the sunk cost will eventually come good. You manage Board expectations, but it’s not a comfortable experience. The website is viewed as a cautionary tale of trial and error.
Say hello to an agile Kentico development agency
GrowCreate is one of a handful of certified Kentico Gold Partners here's our listing which was earned by meeting certain standards. We have Kentico-trained developers in our team and proven experience in building Kentico websites. But that's not what makes us special.
What makes us special is always sticking to the budget and timeline commitments we make to our clients. We do this by developing websites in an iterative manner, sharing successive iterations with the client as we complete them. We start with a “minimum viable product” website, then add further levels of complexity in priority order, as determined by business needs.
This development process is called “agile”. The word agile is bandied around a lot and can even be intimidating to those new to it, but we think we've found the agile “sweet spot” that marketing teams love - predictability. Because no one likes nasty surprises when making a big investment.
We don’t hide behind dev-speak or build anything you’re not going to use. We foster trusting, transparent relationships with clients and talk in straightforward language.
Lastly, we bring maturity to the business relationship. Ours is a senior-level, experienced, “grown-up” digital development team. We don't build fancy (unpredictable, potentially buggy) code on your time for our CVs. We're all about your business results. Here’s a bit more about us
So what will Kentico Xperience do for you?
An industry-leading CMS and more
Kentico Xperience is more than a CMS; it’s a holistic Digital Experience Platform that incorporates an easy-to-use CMS ideal for building websites, online stores, intranets, and membership websites - but it comes with lots of other marketing tools, too.
Kentico Xperience powers over 30,000 websites across 120 countries, has won a number of awards including five stars in the Emerce100 list for CMS software and is relied upon by more than 15% of the Fortune 500 companies.
10 reasons why Kentico Xperience is a marketing director’s dream
1. Saves time, effort, and cost
There are loads of Mar-Tech tools available to help marketing teams introduce potential customers to their business. These tools may sit in a multi-faceted ecosystem around your website and its CMS. For many marketers, this can be a good thing, though efficiency-driven companies are increasingly moving towards all-in-one Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) to reduce development and maintenance costs. DXPs also reduce time spent moving between different, independent tools.
2. A comprehensive marketing tool kit
Kentico Xperience is a website CMS, content personalization, e-mail automation, e-commerce, and data analytics platform, integrated and ready to go out-of-the-box. It can connect easily with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and other CRM platforms too. Read why two companies found the all-in-one route so helpful.
3. Easy to use
With Kentico, once you're up and running, you won’t always need to call a developer to figure things out. The CMS reflects the structure of your website in the way it’s mapped out, so it’s more intuitive than other CMSs you may know and easy to navigate. You can edit your website on any standard browser using the page builder, which shows how a web page will look while you’re editing it. Drag and drop functionality also makes editing pages fast and easy. To ensure quality and avoid errors Kentico Xperience also incorporates workflow functionality, putting your whole team on the same page.
4. Makes lead conversion more likely
Kentico Xperience lets you create personalized websites and marketing content for different perspective segments. You can create multiple personalization variants so that relevant content is automatically targeted based on age, job title, visited pages, downloaded content, purchased products, campaign clicks, purchase stage, location, browser/device used, and more. Personalized content stimulates higher engagement, return visits, conversion, and ultimately revenue. Here are three examples of how companies grew online business enquiries significantly with Kentico Xperience.
5. Ability to test, test, and test
Kentico Xperience lets you easily A/B test multiple variations of web pages or marketing emails with the same interface you use for content creation. You can set up a test without even leaving the web page you’re editing. You can predefine test metrics including visitor segments, conversion goals, and traffic sources, and start testing the variants you want promptly. It’s all easily doable, without having Kentico development skills.
6. Real-time analytics
You can access web analytics based on page views, file downloads, banner clicks, traffic sources, referrals, campaigns, conversions, and browser types. You can also analyse the performance of your digital marketing campaigns with integrated campaign reports that track your assets and measure their conversions in real-time.
7. Aids remote collaboration in the post-Covid era
Kentico Xperience is an all-in-one marketing platform, accessible from anywhere. Because it’s cloud-based, there's no need for someone to be sitting physically in front of a specific piece of hardware to use a specific marketing tool. The platform and all its functionality can be accessed from anywhere, with a normal website browser.
8. Peace of mind
As a pay-as-you-use subscriber, you can rely on Kentico Xperience performing at its best, running on optimal servers, being maintained, and getting timely updates to keep its future fit. It's a SaaS (Software as a Service) offering that's looked after by Kentico. The latest version of the platform, Kentico Xperience 13, released in October 2020, undergoes serial updates - “Refreshes” - on a quarterly basis. These keep it high performing and secure.
9. Ongoing Kentico Support
Kentico prides itself on being available to customers in need of Kentico support; you can phone through a query 24/7 or submit a detailed query online, including attachments like screenshots. You should hear back within one business day. Of course, as your Kentico support agency, we'd always be happy to assist you.
10. Legal boxes ticked
If you’re an EU-based marketer wishing to avoid infringing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Kentico is fully engineered for GDPR compliance and incorporates encryption technologies, a consent management tool and a data protection app.
Optimise your website's performance and user experience
If your current website performance is sluggish and users can’t quickly find what they’re looking for, you're definitely using the wrong platform and/or development agency. Further confirmation that it’s time to migrate to a Digital Experience Platform (DXP).
What makes visiting a Kentico Xperience website compelling is personalisation. You can define different segments of your target market based on age, job title, visited pages, downloaded content, purchased products, campaign clicks, purchase stage, location, browser/device, etc. The platform then automates personalised website content to different website visitors, with the overt aim of being helpful - and the covert aim of increasing visitors’ basket size, or encouraging them to respond to cross-selling. These possibilities tend to increase when visitors feel understood and assisted by a website.
People are used to feel supported in this way when visiting a streaming service or online store - but not when they engage with a corporate company. This makes Kentico Xperience a worthwhile investment for marketing teams that want to give corporate website visitors a warmer experience of their sector. This video depicts the personalisation functionality, in the retail space as one example.
Why it’s good that your development agency specialises in Kentico
Kentico pays close attention to its platform when it comes to combining best practices with the latest security trends to counter common web-based vulnerabilities. This is a big reason why many Fortune 500 companies rely on it.
The CMS is highly scalable. Whether we’re making a simple website/online store or a multi-layered corporate website for a multinational bank, we know we can do a great job and meet the need for advanced features like e-commerce, member portals and CRM integration.
Kentico is compatible with widely-used Microsoft Azure, a Cloud solution for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services. This means we can add and test all sorts of independent features and micro-services that you might want to explore.
Recently Kentico became one of the first DXP vendors to switch from a portal engine base to ASP.NET Core MVC, a lightweight, open-source and highly testable development framework. This evolution has moved Kentico firmly away from any risk of becoming “legacy” software (software that is out of date). This means that your Kentico website likewise won’t date, because the underlying technology will upgrade with ease.
SEO is where the battle between competitors’ websites is often won or lost. With Kentico’s CMS, we can deliver robust SEO for your website by:
- Customising page URL extensions with any extensions we choose.
- Easily add TITLE or ALT attributes to all images and links.
- Eliminating duplicate URLs for the same content.
- Helping Google index the site and improve its ranking.
- Building a content tree that is easily understood by search engine robots (web crawlers).
Finally, when multi-territory clients need content translated into different languages, Kentico Xperience delivers one of the most reliable translation services on the market.
GrowCreate + Kentico Xperience
No business should be held back by their website right now. If you're struggling with static or falling engagement and conversions, and your sales team need more marketing-qualified leads - your website needs a review. If it feels hard to make changes, web development milestones are slipping and costs are mounting, then your agency might need changing too.
If your ambition outstrips your current website's capability, it's time to give us a call. GrowCreate has offices in the U.K. and Germany and uses Microsoft Teams for online meetings. If you’d like to have a chat, send us a quick message here.