In showing Sitecore to prospect partner and clients, one of the things that inevitably starts some exciting discussions is Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Platform’s capabilities around customizing the Web experience based on marketing-defined Personas. By the time we’re on the phone or sitting across the table, this is generally an exercise that has already been discussed. Depending on the situation, you might be already incredibly deep into this process, with finely-tuned and clearly defined Personas, describing your target audiences in terms of all kinds of detailed attributes, demographics, buying patterns, etc. In other situations, this might be exceptionally informal or barely defined at all. You might have a general idea who hits your site, where they’re coming from, but you haven’t created these buckets of generalization to group those visitors into categories—categories that can drive experiential differences for them.
Sometimes this conversation can lead to, “why would I do that, and, more importantly, what happens if I do this WRONG?”. Very fair question, and very smart to be cautious. I think, generally, when this feature of the Customer Engagement Platform is first considered, creativity can get the best of us. I hear this in meetings all the time, where the room starts to buzz with possibility—“what if we did that, or this, or moved this here because of that, or hid this because of that?”. This is all good excitement and is the exact full-cycle brainstorming session that you should go through once the dust of initial giddiness has settled. Even in a 1-2 hour first meeting around the Customer Engagement Platform, someone in the room with the right combination of fear, power and cynicism says, “STOP!”.
The air that left the room took with it a bit of excitement, but it also left room for a bit of rigor that any good human-based project needs. We all tend to want to see and play with the IPhone 7 instead of enjoying the continual, measured improvement along the way.
So, with the giddiness out of the room, think. Not about stage Z, but about stage B (you’re at A). What are the simple, nuanced things that might change based on your having a general idea of who this visitor is?…not the logged in user who gave you his profile, but the visitor that came from a certain referrer, used a certain keyword, landed on a certain landing page, and is exhibiting a certain behavior?
The guy that said “STOP"!” is concerned that if you do this wrong, you’ll make sweeping generalizations and sweeping changes to the site based on incorrect assumptions. Step back….too much for this stage. Instead, based on an agreed upon confidence interval and threshold, you’ll change his experience through targeted marketing spots now shown, a multivariate test initiated (didn’t want to start the test for everyone), a navigation system that is just a little bit friendlier in its ordering, an image rotator that favors a particular image. Or maybe NOTHING at all changes—you’re just gathering data for the good, old-fashioned analysis that will help you make better decisions in the future.
For Launch Sitecore, we decided on 4 buckets to put our potential visitors into:
- Marketers (probably really interested in the Customer Engagement Platform)
- Content Managers (usability and feature set of the CMS)
- Developers (how do I get this installed and start playing with it?)
- IT Professionals (what are the infrastructure and environment specs?)
Don’t go crazy with this yet. I’ve seen troublesome attempts at creating 30 different buckets on Day 1. Think to yourself—am I going to really be able to, as an author of content, discern between 30 different audiences when I write my content? And, as a Web Experience Strategist, are you going to do anything different based on 30 possibilities? Do you have targeted content written to support this?
In our case, 4 is our good starting point and it is clear in our heads when we’re writing a new article. If I’m putting together an article with infrastructure diagrams, I know which bucket of visitors I’m targeting. If I’m diving into CEP Analytics--while it could be less black-and-white—I can picture my visitor type that will be interested.
This won’t be an exhaustive discussion of Sitecore’s Profiles, Profile Cards and Pattern Cards, but let’s take a look at the Launch Sitecore content tree in this area:
Going down the tree:
- The overall Profiles section in the Sitecore content tree (part of the CEP installation by default).
- Our Launch Sitecore Profile, called Job Function (the main driver behind our 4 buckets)
- Individual, specific job functions (Analytics, Copywriting…). These are called Profile Keys in Sitecore .
- The Profile Cards folder. These are in the Sitecore content tree by default, under any specific Profiles you create. The individual Profile Cards described below are then a possible mixture of any Profile Keys you defined in this Profile.
- Individual Profile Cards (Connie the Content Manager, Devon the Developer…). Now we risk tripping over terminology a bit. Don’t these seem like Personas? Well, in fact they really are. The Data Template these Cards are built from is called Profile Card – Persona. The fields that make up these items will ring true to anyone that has gone through a persona definition marketing exercise to date:
In addition to the persona definition fields, description, a handy image to help communicate and visualize what this persona is all about, there is a field in these items that allows you to specify the right mix of specific job function attributes Connie is concerned with / interested in:
Connie is most concerned with Copywriting, but don’t necessarily leave her out of Personalization and Testing conversations.
So, with our Profile Cards / Personas defined, we have a concrete, visual representation of the 4 buckets we started with. Now our Launch Sitecore article writers can consistently “tag” their work with an appropriate audience.
On a fundamental concept article called the Launch Sitecore Site, we are able to choose Connie’s Profile Card (and see the specific job function attribute mix that will apply to our content item).
If you actually go to this page on Launch Sitecore and hover over the “peelback” on the top left corner, you can see that you’re already trending towards Connie. Click around to different articles and see if you hit a threshold where you’re trending like one of the other Personas.
Sky’s the limit now! When someone visits Launch Sitecore and they start to exhibit behaviors like Connie (by reading some targeted content authoring articles), we sound mp3 file horns, we put up huge banners screaming “Hey Content Author!” and we remove all navigation to any articles not targeted towards content authors. OK, no, we don’t do that.
What we can do is limitless, but let’s just cover 2 quick options.
- Do absolutely nothing. Maybe we’re just starting out with this Launch Sitecore thing (we are) and we’re not quite sure our Personas are just right for us. We’re not sure the campaigns we set up and the MV tests we run will reconcile with the content tagging we have in place with these Profile Cards. Maybe we just want to look at Sitecore Analytics for a while and see how our traffic is being distributed between these 4 buckets. More importantly, let’s start to see how much Engagement Value visitors that trend towards these personas are providing for us on our site. Much more on this later.
- Apply a Rule to a control that changes content if someone starts to exhibit the traits of one of our Personas. I won’t go into too many details on this as I and many others have written plenty of articles covering this topic--but to finish our specific Launch Sitecore example, I might want to show a marketing spot on the home page that specifically talks about CMS as opposed to DMS/CEP if a visitor looks like Connie:
And here’s the specific default (out of the box) rule condition that will do this:
We have a targeted marketing spot focused on the CMS (as you can see, this has been selected in the Personalize Content field. Sitecore will continue to watch for a change…if the threshold is hit where this visitor looks more like Devon the Developer, we might choose to personalize the content with something more developer-centric.
Lots more to come as we enjoy watching the Engagement Plan and Analytics on our Launch Sitecore site: www.launchsitecore.net.
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