Digital Solutions Blog

Marketing Automation 

Marketing Automation comprises a group of email marketing tools that go above and beyond the basic list management and email production & send functions found in standard email marketing tools.

The extra capabilities of these tools lie in the areas of automated one-to-one emails, and the ability to workflow a series of emails from triggers such as email activity and website interactions, or data triggers such as birthdays and renewal dates.

The ability to score leads based on similar email and website activity means that prospects that interact can be differentiated and flagged for the sales teams’ attention.

All of this automation is really leading towards greater involvement by marketing in the sales cycle, and in B2B helping to manage “the long sale”.

Social Networking Tools 

Social Networking has experienced a meteoric rise in the past two to three years, with more and more businesses harnessing the potential of social for their brand. Whilst these tools have great potential, they have created a range of challenges for marketers.

The first of these challenges is the overall social strategy to be implemented – what networks should be used? Which ones will generate the best return for our business? Who should be posting on these networks? What content should be uploaded? These are all worthwhile questions to ask, and all of these can be answered with an effective and well thought out social strategy.

Other challenges surrounding the measurement and reporting of the use of social tools exist. Knowing what to look for, what to measure and how to be sure that what you’re doing is working are important factors, and will help shape the tools that you use to measure your social efforts.

Mobile Responsive Designs  

Responsive Design is a new development in web design which breaks down a website into a grid – adapting the layout to the viewing environment. This means it is now possible to design one website that automatically adapts to suit the device on which you are viewing the site, be that PC, tablet or mobile.

A simple example would be to detect the size of the screen being used and either a three column, two column or single column layout. A really good example is www.smashingmagazine.com; visit the site and slowly shrink the size of your browser window and watch it change layout.

Content Marketing  

Contnt Marketing reflects the growing trend of customers wishing to do their own research, and to be contacted later to support the buying process.

If you are reading this article and finding it valuable, then hopefully you are also easily convinced of the value of content marketing. Generally this is the easy bit. The har part is understanding your target audience well enough to write engaging content, creating a plan to do this across a year and then how to target and reuse content.

Investing enough regular, quality time into the activity will leave a lasting impression on people in the long term. This is of course impacted on by the frequency and significance of your content to the individuals.

Personalisation through conditional content 

If you have the right content management solution, like SiteFinity or Ektron, it should be a platform for delivering a personalised digital experience not just a tool for editing web pages.

The combination of applying a good taxonomy to all your content, and then encouraging your users to either implicitly or explicitly tell you what they are interested in knowing about it is a very powerful asset. Add to this tools like Ektron’s marketing optimisation suite, that allow you to display conditional content according to the data you have collected on your users, or the search terms they use in Google, you can deliver a much more targeted message.

For example, if you were referred to this website from the SiteFinity or Ektron website you will see a very different homepage targeted at the CMS Solution you are interested in.

For many organisations and projects, SharePoint is the right solution. 

There are, however, a lot of myths being thrown around stating “You can’t do X in SharePoint” and “SharePoint is no good for Y”. 

So we thought we would take a moment to do some myth busting! 

Here are the top 5 criticisms we hear directed at SharePoint & our myth-busters…  

1 - “SharePoint is really just a document management and collaboration system” 

This might have been true for the 2003 version but with 2007, Microsoft integrated their content management system into the solution. 

SharePoint 2010 is much more than a document management solution and is a flexible development platform. 

Easier to style and more powerful for search, the platform includes genuine and usable content management capabilities with all the benefits of powerful document management and Office integration. 

2 - “You can’t make an accessible website in SharePoint” 

In the past, SharePoint faced challenges for accessibility particularly in a European context. Agencies and partners had to work around this with bespoke code and web parts. 

SharePoint 2010 is much more suited to delivering front end content which is WCAG2 compliant. 

Although SharePoint still doesn’t have a built in accessibility checker, there are now a number of third party applications that can be added to do this job. 

3 - “SharePoint licensing for public websites is too expensive” 

As an Enterprise content management system, licensing can be expensive. 

Commercial organisations have to invest specifically in an Internet Connector license for public website projects at about £5k per server. If you want to use Business Forms for multiple domains, costs can triple. 

Look into options to pass this on to an official Microsoft hosting provider who has made the investment already and is willing to break this down into a monthly fee for you. 

Academic, not for profit and charitable organisations are also likely to be eligible for big discounts. 

4 - “SharePoint websites are ugly and you can’t apply a good level of visual branding and customisation” 

For public websites this is simply untrue as there are no constraints. 

You will need the time and skills to build the presentation layer as you would for websites using other content management systems, so if you wanted to deploy a highly branded site with the touch of a button – think again!  

SharePoint templates and web parts can seamlessly overlap with Office for your users but there will definitely be overhead involved in design.  

Anything is possible with enough time. True value of the platform comes with heavy investment for a highly bespoke Intranet, Collaboration or Extranet build. 

5 - “SharePoint sites have poor performance and load times” 

This is also not correct. That said, you can’t just use the intranet themes for public websites, you have to use the publishing master pages. 

Initially, time will need to be invested in stripping out unnecessary JavaScript and tagging which is true for the majority of out-of-the-box content management templates. 

SharePoint is a powerful platform that leverages IIS and Windows Server capabilities, so you need to be very aware of how to cache elegantly and get the right infrastructure in place. 

With the right attention, experience and capacity modelling in these areas, your website performance will be just fine.

Here at Appius we have been designing and implementing SharePoint websites for 9 years. 

We also provide strategic advice, user-centred design, search engine marketing, systems integration and more. Appius Microsoft SharePoint Services