Experience Marketing: The Crawl, Walk, Run of Sitecore - Part 2 - The Walk Phase

Welcome to part 2 of the three part series of  The Crawl, Walk, Run of Sitecore Experience Management. You can get a good context of what this series is about by reading Part 1. In this part we will add more digital engagement tasks to our 4 primary categories:

1. Content Profiling
2. Content Personalizatiton
3. Contact Profiling
4. Analytics

The Walk Phase

In this phase we will do more of what we did in crawl phase but by looking back at the analytics we have collected thus far. We will also add and expand on our list of to-dos.

1. Content Profiling - Walk Phase

After having collected sufficient web analytics data, you should be able to move on to the walk phase of content profiling.  

• Data Driven Personas: Evolve your existing personas from research driven to data driven personas. Have a data science team analyze your web analytics data in order to come up with personas and profiles.

• Create Profile Keys, Profile Cards, Pattern Cards: create these based on the data driven personas.

• Assign Profile Values to Top Level and Secondary Level Pages: assuming your website has a mega menu with least two levels of nesting, tagging them with appropriate profile values should start yielding relevant segmentation related analytics.

• Create and Assign Campaigns: create a couple of basic campaigns using Campaign Creator app in Sitecore for a Registration page and Edit Profile page. There is a lot of engagement value in tracking campaign conversion for registration and profile submission.

• Create and Assign a Custom Goal: create and implement at least one Custom Goal defined by marketing team.

2. Content Personalization - Walk Phase

Here are a few areas where you can expand your personalization efforts:

• Implement Conditional Renderings: Sitecore does a great job of defining conditional renderings as a subset of your overall personalization strategy. 

• Implement Visit and Visitor Personalization Rules: since we implemented visitor tracking in the crawl phase, looking at the web analytics data you should be able to provide effective personalized experience based on the Visit and Visitor.

3. Visitor Profiling - Walk Phase

In the walk phase of visitor profiling, we can do things like start tracking visitor's Search Keywords and custom goals and campaigns we created earlier. 

You can also implement additional marketing taxonomy like Goal Facets. I recommend creating at least 3 goal facets for each website.

4. Experience Analytics & Optimization - Walk Phase

Going back full cycle, start analyzing the experience data your are collecting with all the above tasks. Start to pay attention to Keywords under Acquisition section and Internal Search under Behavior section of the experience analytics as we are tracking these per visitor now. Additionally, start analyzing data by Outcomes under Conversions section as we have custom campaigns and goals implemented with custom facets under marketing taxonomy. 

That's it for the walk phase. If you are working with Sitecore XP v 8.x you will continue to use the old xDB APIs but if you are on shiny new Sitecore XP 9.x, start diving into xConnect for capturing the custom interactions mentioned above. 

xConnect is the service layer between the xDB and all client applications. Use xConnect to get, create, search, and update contacts and interactions.