5 Reasons to Look Forward to Sitecore Symposium - Marketing and Innovation

With its focus on celebrating success and creativity in our quickly growing industry, I am always inspired by Symposium. It is a wonderful opportunity to both learn from others and to share our XCentium team’s innovations with the Sitecore Community. This year, Sitecore Symposium promises to be full of talented, industry leading speakers – both in keynote speeches and throughout the breakout sessions. I’m specifically looking forward to these five sessions in the ‘Marketing Strategy, Innovation, and Best Practices’ track:

The Road to Amazon and Beyond

Tuesday, October 9th, 12:45 pm

Having had the opportunity to work with XCentium Sitecore Commerce MVPs, Vasiliy Fomichev and Srikanth Kondapally, I have experienced their passion for innovation when it comes to artificial intelligence and machine learning. This year, they have used these applications to create Voice Commerce, featuring Alexa and chatbots with social media integrations. With many industries investing in leveraging machine learning, I am looking for ways to talk with clients about practical uses for ML to leverage now. While this session is geared towards those using Sitecore Commerce, these integrations also apply to the Sitecore Experience Platform and can be leveraged for all of our clients. I am also looking forward to hearing how these features comply with GDPR.

Atlantis The Palm – From Personalization Project To Context Marketing Program

Tuesday, October 9th, 4:15 pm

As a leading entertainment resort destination, Atlantis The Palm is a magnificent haven for leisure-seeking families and couples for whom holidays are a precious escape from the everyday world. I am looking forward to learning from two Digital Marketing Directors from Atlantis as they discuss how optimization efforts within Sitecore allowed Atlantis to achieve organizational objectives by moving from a successful personalization project (presented at last year’s Symposium) to an ongoing context marketing program. They will also share how 2018 objectives were achieved by strategic planning through the lens of SBOS framework and methodology. I’m excited to see how organizations are continuing along their roadmap with personalization to be able to apply that to our clients who are currently at the start of their personalization work.

Catching up with Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon: Leveraging The Right Data Sets To Drive Personalized Experiences

Wednesday, October 10th, 11:45 am

Clients and their customers expect personalized experiences as their expectations are greatly affected by what they experience on social media. I’d love to learn how to use data to more quickly and effectively design strategic solutions for our clients. In this session, Fulton Financial Corporation and SilverTech share how they utilized customer data and Sitecore to drive targeted product offerings to qualified customer segments and next-best product cross-sell opportunities to their existing customer base. Other session features include how to leverage your existing data, third-party data, and the power of Sitecore Experience Database to deliver a personalized experience to the majority of your site visitors.

Retooling The B2B Customer Experience

Wednesday, October 10th, 2:00 pm

With so many complex products and long purchase cycles, how can we change the customer experience in the B2B space? As our B2B opportunities grow, I would love to hear about how customer experience (CX) strategy works well in large enterprise settings. This session features Stanley Engineered Fastening and how they teamed up with Arke to redesign their digital program, which drives awareness and sales to the largest B2B division under the Stanley Black & Decker umbrella. As their global enterprise continues to grow by mergers and acquisitions, the strategy not only had to work to keep the customer needs at the forefront of the solution design, it also had to scale and support for future company growth. The resulting digital strategy is the ultimate foundation for enabling marketing optimization capabilities across the SBD enterprise.

Personalizing the customer experience for anonymous visitors

Thursday, October 11th, 10:30 am

There is a misconception that clients need to wait until visitors are known before you can meaningfully personalize. I’m interested in learning more about the opportunities we have to personalize for anonymous visitors from Gavin Little, Senior Sales Engineer at Sitecore. As marketers, we can use the power of customer-journey mapping and customer- experience management to better understand how to personalize the experience for a known visitor. But these same strategic initiatives can also help organizations personalize the experience for an anonymous visitor. Gavin’s session will help marketers and digital strategists best understand the power of personalizing the anonymous visitor’s experience.

In conclusion, there is a myriad of great breakout sessions to choose from! It is truly hard to pick only five sessions to review with all the great content offered at SitecoreSymposium. Over the next couple of weeks, our XCentium team will be reviewing each breakout session track, as well as the Will Smith keynote in our XBlog series, “5 Reasons To Look Forward To Sitecore Symposium.” I recommend checking out our articles as they are a great way to start to prepare for the biggest conference of the year! When you are at Sitecore Symposium, please come say hello to our team at XCentium’s Booth, #705. We look forward to connecting with you in Orlando!