How Sitecore supports global expansion, at pace

Scale-up companies who are in their next stage of growth and looking to expand globally, find themselves in a complex transitional period.

They're starting to shed the agility they once had as a start-up but have some way to go before they have the stability of a mature and established business.

From a commercial perspective, they must navigate their way through a significant amount of change. They need to manage the rate of growth, remain profitable, maximise sustainability, retain culture and attract fresh talent, all without growing their head count too aggressively.

Alongside this, there are many technical and operational challenges that are equally as complex. In this article, we look at some of the ways Sitecore can support this change at what can be a vulnerable time for a business.

Keeping pace with user expectations

As the business develops into new markets there will be the need to consider how to communicate to a global audience and drive conversion across a more diverse demographic of users with cultural, linguistic and regulatory differences.

Firstly, internationalisation needs to be considered and Sitecore provides comprehensive support for this across its entire product suite, from localisation of content through to distribution.

Our Head of Engineering, James Hobbs, digs into this topic in more detail in this recent blog article.

But beyond this, users expect to receive relevant and meaningful content and communications, tailored to their individual needs. In turn, managing and optimising these experiences and expectations at scale grows exponentially, as the consumer base becomes larger and more diverse.

This is an area that Sitecore excels at.

Its market leading suite of AI personalisation and marketing automation capabilities span the full end-to-end customer journey and enables personalisation at every touchpoint that customers interact with the business.

Some examples from their product suite, include:

• Sitecore Send – provides personalised email engagements that can include tailored content recommendations, predictive analytics and smart audience tagging to segment customers based on their behaviour and preferences.
• Sitecore Search – utilises natural language processing (NLP) and behavioural analytics to deliver contextual search results.
• Sitecore Personalise – provides real-time predictive personalisation to decide the best content, offer(s) or product(s) that are the most relevant to each individual user across any channel.

Not only does Sitecore come with a comprehensive suite of powerful functionality, but its intelligent machine learning algorithms do the heavy lifting, providing the ability to scale rapidly without needing to hire an army of content editors to maintain it.

Keeping pace with technology

As the business scales it is important to think carefully about the new technologies that are put in place. They need to meet the immediate requirements but more crucially need to provide a solid foundation from which to build upon. That said, evolving the digital estate does not mean throwing everything away and starting again.

Sitecore is a composable digital experience platform and provides a suite of standalone API-driven SaaS products and services covering content, engagement, and commerce. This allows seamless integration with either existing systems or new ones that are needed as new markets are entered and new services developed or inherited through acquisition or merger with other organisations. This helps maintain momentum through the transition and enables the ability to adapt the technology quickly as the business evolves and requirements change.

Introducing new technology platforms into the business and building out the infrastructure to support them can be complex and time-consuming. This puts an additional burden on the IT department to not only up-skill the team and configure the solution in the first place but also support, maintain, and optimise it ongoing.

Sitecore’s Managed Services and supported SaaS products can help mitigate this, by providing the ability to spin up new environments and services quickly but also providing peace of mind that the infrastructure and core applications are being taken care of without having to increase the workload on the IT team or adding headcount.

Streamlining operational efficiency

During rapid expansion, there are several operational challenges that can impact the ability to sustain growth. However, moving at speed, should not come at the expense of efficiency or quality.

Once the infrastructure and core technology platforms are in place, there will become the need to start rapidly creating new products and services across multiple markets. This in turn, significantly increases the management overhead required to manage and optimise the content and customer experience.

AI is woven throughout the entire Sitecore product suite. It provides a layer of intelligence and ways to increase efficiency by taking on some of this load. Helping with some of the more repetitive tasks, including automated content creation and optimisation, workflow automation (including content tagging, meta data creation) and real-time analytics and insights.

In addition, its granular and scalable API-driven and headless content federation and distribution capabilities maximises the reusability of content. Empowering individual markets to manage their own content at a local level, whilst maintaining brand consistency and communications centrally and globally.

In conclusion, Sitecore supports scale-up businesses by supplying them with the tools and technologies to increase efficiency and confidence to expand their digital presence – quickly, at scale and with confidence.

We have just scratched the surface of how Sitecore can help. If you would like to know more then get in touch.