Marketers are especially attuned to the changing technology landscape. Customers expect more and more from brands, and it's our job to keep up with them. The good news is that there are tools to help you do just that, tools like digital experience platforms (DXPs).
DXPs are modular, cloud-based solutions for marketers that offer strategy, design, content management, delivery, and analytics capabilities. They're designed to make enterprises' lives easier and help marketers deliver their brand promise in an increasingly complex world.
Enlisting a DXP is a great way for CMOs to modernize their digital marketing efforts and drive better business results. With the right tools, you can turn your entire customer experience into one cohesive flow that delivers targeted content across all channels, from mobile apps to websites to IoT devices.
However, many enterprise companies still don't know how to wield their DXP. With that in mind, we created a playbook to help marketers leverage the true strengths of their DXPs.
According to Gartner , a digital experience platform is, “an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery, and optimization of contextualized digital experiences."
A DXP is, then, the evolution of a traditional, coupled CMS. A DXP breaks the monolithic structure of traditional CMSs. DXP is made of a network of interconnected microservices. This network extends the core functionality of the CMS, which acts as an orchestra director.
It goes beyond web content management by delivering a unified digital experience to IoT devices, mobile apps, websites, and even smartwatches. Digital experience management is at the center of an extensively interconnected digital ecosystem, allowing marketers and developers to work in sync to deliver the best digital experience possible.
The core capabilities of a DXP revolve around flexibility. The platform benefits from composability as it divides architecture and functionalities into packaged business capabilities or PBCs. Each PBC represents a related set of functionalities built for a specific purpose or task such as:
Analytics
A commerce platform
Personalization engines
Customer data platforms
Content delivery networks
Search engine connectivity
Frontend libraries to build UI
A content management system
Content fuels your brand experience. A DXP helps you deliver flexible digital content and provides you with the tools to build, manage, and deliver connected customer experiences.
Take a look at some of the marketer-friendly DXP needs to have to support marketing operations.
A hybrid CMS is at the crossroads of pure headless and traditional. It offers a traditional platform's functionality and ease of use while also supporting pure headless deployment for greater control over your frontend. A hybrid headless CMS like dotCMS, as well, allows marketers to use a combination of both headless and non headless functionality for greater flexibility, granting you the best of both worlds.
The WYSWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor enables marketers to create content with a word processor-like formatting. With a WYSIWYG editor, you can type in text and apply styles to it (make it bold, italic, or change the text color for example), insert links and images, and add other content and formatting. All these changes are visible in the editor, similar to how they will be shown on the frontend.
Enterprise marketers in charge of global brands and companies must deploy content in different languages across channels to ensure a consistent customer experience. An enterprise-grade CMS like dotCMS enables marketers to publish multilingual content out-of-the-box. It also enables you to configure different content options based on the visitor's location.
The omnichannel nature of today's content marketing requires coordination between multiple touchpoints along the customer's lifecycle. With a marketer-friendly platform like dotCMS, you can improve your content creation system by building multi-step workflows with features like Four Eye approval, AI translations, and third-party integrations.
Content as a Service is a layer of APIs, GraphQL, and REST, enabling marketers to access content and functionality separately from the backend. dotCMS has a drag and drop UI that allows marketers to build rich content using all content types, including text, location, dates, and media.
Enterprise marketers have to handle more than one site. A CMS with a multisite architecture enables marketers to build the foundation for a DXP that supports the creation and management of multiple sites. dotCMS' multi-tenant capabilities make it a solid alternative for users to rely on a single software instance and support multiple websites.
LowCode development refers to a software development method in which non-technical marketers can build application or website functionality through graphical user interfaces rather than writing code in complex programming languages. dotCMS is a LowCode platform that aids marketers in building digital experiences without requiring the help of IT teams.
Digital asset management (DAM) enables marketing teams to store, locate, and retrieve content, images, and assets quickly and without the need for an external database, reducing software bloating and unnecessary integrations.
Images say more than words, and marketers' work would fall short without a platform that supports image processing and editing. With dotCMS' Image API, marketers can optimize images to build fast websites and apps. With robust URL parameters, dotCMS gives you the power to deliver the right image at the right size.
CDNs are made up of servers distributed that cache data from the origin server globally. If a website or app uses a CDN, users will then access the data from a server near them, sharply improving performance and reducing latency. By leveraging a CDN, marketers ensure that they always deliver blazing-fast content without sacrificing performance or quality. To help marketers deliver the best content at all times, dotCMS has teamed up with BunnyWay to provide a globally scalable secure Content Delivery Network (CDN) that is lightning fast.
With all that we've said about DXPs, it should be clear how DXPs represent a new way of creating and delivering content that's more agile and better suited for today's marketers, but that's not everything a DXP can do for marketers.
Let's take a closer look at how a DXP simplifies and enhances a marketer's job.
DXPs make it easier for marketers to create and analyze omnichannel marketing campaigns. A composable DXP allows a 360º view of your customers at every step of the customer journey. As the number of touchpoints increases, DXPs enable marketers to capture audiences across web, mobile, voice, kiosks, and IoT devices from a single platform.
DXPs are designed to integrate with an enterprise's marketing, commerce, and customer support platforms. By leveraging the flexibility of the modular, API-based architecture, DXPs help marketers orchestrate the collection of incoming data and deliver relevant results to customers across different touchpoints. The result of this approach for DXPs is that they gain greater control over how they interact with customers.
What makes DXPs extremely effective for marketers is the flexibility and agility of the microservices architecture. The microservices architecture structures an application as a collection of maintainable and testable services, loosely coupled, and independently deployable. This means developers on the back end, and marketers on the front end can independently make necessary changes and improvements to different parts of the platform without affecting any other part of the store.
DXPs enable personalization either natively or by leveraging third-party integrations. Personalization drives customer loyalty and creates a tailored experience for customers that they won't likely forget. By delivering 1:1 granular digital experiences, contextual personalization brands are able to consistently and automatically improve customer experience regardless of the touchpoint. Also, by enabling smart use of customer data, a DXP aids marketers in targeting the right shoppers at the right time throughout the customer lifecycle.
Implementing an effective DXP makes your company stand out from its competitors by enabling marketing teams to render an elevated customer experience that drives engagement and revenue.
However, modular DXPs are like lego blocks. When disassembled, they won't work. Yet, when assembled they enable you to create beautiful designs. The only thing that separates a good DXP from a disjointed bundle of different platforms is how you and your team put it together.
This raises the question of how integrating everything together actually solves real-world problems? Simply put, integrating everything together can enhance every level of your business. It improves collaboration, workflows, and empowers you to deliver contextual content at scale.
Let's take a closer look at how marketers can put the best DXP together:
Collect Insights: A DXP helps marketers connect both internal and external operations and systems. This goes beyond web, mobile, and social media; it also helps you connect IoT devices, digital signage, and eCommerce engines, giving your marketing team a 360° view of the customer. By integrating an analytics engine or marketing automation capabilities to your DXP you'll get greater insights about your visitor's history and then be able to pass those insights automatically to the sales team for further qualification.
Become Customer Oriented: DXPs enable marketing teams and enterprises to become customer-conscious. By mapping customer journeys you can identify crucial bottlenecks and reengineer your business practices. A DXP without tools to deliver customer support and tools for customer success won't enable marketers to retain their audience.
Invest in a CMS That Allows Orchestration: A CMS can aid marketing teams in building the DXP of their dreams by enabling them to coordinate the of drive content and allowing reusability across multiple environments to create truly omnichannel content delivery and fulfill the promise of "create once, publish everywhere."
For enterprises, the journey from traditional, coupled CMS to a modular, cloud-based DXP won't happen overnight, but you can get started quickly if you enlist the right CMS for the job. Enterprises should start by breaking their monolithic solutions into multiple PBCs working within the same DXP and then extend their capabilities slowly to the changing needs of their customers and clients.
dotCMS and its Content as a Service model can work as the foundation for your composable DXP strategy. CaaS removes the barriers to managing your content and assets and enables you to extend your capabilities with APIs and microservices.
CaaS simplifies operations and reduces time to market, even in omnichannel settings. By allowing marketers to personalize customer experiences and provide relevant content to users on their platform of choice, dotCMS' CaaS platform makes it easier for companies to build a composable DXP and scale it as they grow.
To learn more about dotCMS' CaaS model and how marketers can leverage it to build their DXP, learn more: DXP and CaaS: What is CaaS and Why is it the Foundation of a DXP.
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