Sitecore Experience Manager is an enterprise-grade CMS competing with Oracle WebCenter, IBM Web Content Manager and Adobe. It presents a fairly wide and comprehensive swath of inbuilt features. In Sitecore WCM editing takes place from within the page with its inline editor, allowing editors and authors to create display rules and content within the context of the page in an integrated process. It allows the creation of blogs, wikis, polls, integrates with social media, and is mobile…
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Uberflip
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Uberflip is a content marketing platform from the Toronto company of the same name. Central to Uberflip is its content hub for aggregating, centralizing, organizing, and finally curating content for delivery to targeted audiences in streams, culminating in the call-to-action (CTA). Uberflip also contains analytics that show how effective these CTAs are (and in what context they are effective or not) so poor content can be confidently dropped in favor of what works.
For $200 monthly the user…
Great for companies that are looking to create customized, tailored content solutions and be willing to put in the hard work and effort to maximize the value out of the tool. If your company is just looking for very basic content management without all the bells and whistles, I'd recommend looking elsewhere for less [money].
Uberflip is well suited to bring your larger organization into sharing content. Instead of relying only on marketing to be driving content, Uberflip has made it easy to integrate content into the sales process or client services process, with the ability to make the experience unique to sales or CS. Where Uberflip may not be as suited is if you are looking for landing pages to capture leads, most of the time for landing pages designed to sell a product you want to add specific feature copy and be able to place a gate over content without having a user jumping from page to page, while also having the gate capturing information and allowing you to trigger activities from your marketing automation system. Uberflip doesn't allow you to add copy or manipulate a landing page and only allows you to add information from a gate to a static list, which does not allow you to automate the process.
Personalisation of advertising banners based upon knowledge of the customer, like location or previous searches enables us to target customers with products and offers that they are more likely to engage with, which has been done to good effect.
The use of Sitecore for content management enables the business and design team to perform changes to things, like images, content and page structure, which would otherwise have required a code release, which is costly in terms of man power.
The A/B testing in Sitecore is good because it allows us to statistically verify minor changes to the site - like advert changes or component ordering on the page - as to whether or not they positively impact conversion.
Sitecore is Customer Engagement Platform. It comes with lots of features (e.g. Authoring, Analytics, personalization, A/B Test, Webforms for marketers etc), But, most of them are not being used by many clients. If you are really looking for just CMS (only authoring and publishing), then I don't think Sitecore is a way to go.
You need to have a strong Sitecore certified developer base to manage the Sitecore platform (if you are using all features). It's the same case with others. But, finding a Sitecore certified (costs $$) developer is tough in the market. Now the market is growing (thanks to Sitecore promotional events) and Sitecore is gaining popularity, It may be easy to find such developers in the future. If you want to leverage most out of the Sitecore community you need to be a Sitecore certified developer.
Sitecore comes with lots of built-in features and marketplace components. I feel this puts in a little tricky situation. It gives an opportunity for a normal developer to use some of the free marketplace module, which may or may not be supported in a future version of Sitecore. which may put the entire platform in risk to upgrade to latest Sitecore version. You need to have a proper process to control and validate the marketplace components before using them.
Sitecore has proven that it can deliver on its promise of a robust, reliable enterprise CMS solution with plenty of features. Also, they keep updating it with more and better features. Now that we are highly trained on it we have started on getting the most out of it and we plan to keep doing more of that in the future.
This serves all of our content marketing needs, but our sales team does need a more robust sales enablement solution. It's hard to have the engagement/usage data for different kinds of content in disparate systems. But I've looked for years and been unable to find a one-size-fits-all solution to solve all marketing and sales enablement use cases.
With any platform that offers so much capability, usability will naturally be more challenging. Sitecore does an admirable job and made massive strides in version 8, but at some times offers too many ways to achieve the same task allows users to sometimes take a path less efficient than the preferred path.
For me this has been very easy to use. Once we got the basics down it was easily repeatable and if we did end up having questions our point of contact was very helpful and fast in getting our questions answered. If it was above their capabilities they brought in a support professional who really made it easy for us to learn and replicate their steps.
Sitecore Support is very knowledgeable and helpful. We have raised a number of issues with them and they rarely fail to come up with an acceptable solution.
The support and the team at Uberflip is THE BEST!!! They are seriously so great. They got to know me on a personal level and really cared about getting my Hub set up the way I wanted and they want my Hub to be successful. They even took a few of us out to dinner when they were in my area for a marketing event. They are always there to help me and only a quick email or phone call away
Sitecore captures and remembers every single interaction your customers and prospects have in any part of the system, allowing you to build comprehensive, ever-learning profiles of each individual. From email marketing, to social media, to online shopping, Sitecore remembers where each interaction left off so you can automatically continue the conversation. Sitecore helps you manage your content for each and every experience your customers enjoy. Customize what content you want and the system will take care of how it's displayed.
It wasn't exactly training but there was a step by step check list of things in a project the Uberflip team shared with me. There were links to helpful articles on it that walked me through how to set things up
Make sure you work with a partner that can help you take advantage of the entire platform. Specifically we see a lot of customers not taking advantage of Sitecore DMS and thus missing a huge opportunity. Sitecore is a platform that is meant to be constantly optimized and improved upon.
The implementation team was with us every step of the way, helping us map what needed to be done, providing examples of other customers and being as hands-on as we needed
The decision to select Sitecore was not ultimately mine, but the fact that we were able to leverage in-house Microsoft .Net (C#) experience on a platform that had a library of extensions, but also allowed us to customize and keep private our confidential IP has been a big help. When you see a SharePoint site or a Drupal site you can usually tell "oh this is a MS SharePoint site", but with Sitecore the ability to customize and have different views even different components based on device type makes Sitecore a clear winner.
When it comes to asset management, Uberflip has a HubSpot beat. That doesn't mean HubSpot isn't necessary for other functions, but when it comes to the content itself, the backend organization, reporting (item and stream level), and delivery of the content is much more useful in Uberflip. Otherwise, they have the same learning curve.
ROI depends so much on implementation. Its would be difficult to comment in a positive or negative regarding CMS product to direct ROI. A non-technical user would be surprised at what a basic installation of Sitecore looks like. "Hello World" comes to mind. With that in mind we can look at two things, Sitecore Support and Sitecore Partners.
Certified Internal Developers and Sitecore Support: This depends on the qualifications of your existing departments regarding implementing a enterprise CMS. No experience to some experience, this is a no brainer, rigorously vet top and middle partners and hire one to lead this effort. If your experienced still hire a partner and vet them but hire a middle to small partner and have them help, not lead.
"Sitecore Window": You could equate Sitecore in some implementation as throwing expensive parts at a car problem. If your business requirements and data consumption needs are not within this cost window then in the end on paper it will be difficult to see ROI or that there just wasn't a return. Then it will be time to look at other lower cost alternatives The initial cost is just the start. Over engineering and expensive horizontal integration partners can cost someone a promotion or job.
If your content workflows are complex, sites rendering data requirements are large and performance and scalability are paramount. Sitecore should be in your top 3.
