Dive Brief:
- Experience management platform Sitecore and ad holding group WPP announced a new global strategic partnership, the WPP-Sitecore Alliance, according to a news release.
- The partnership aligns WPP’s existing Sitecore partners, including agencies AKQA, Ogilvy, Possible and Wunderman and creates a single team to work with Sitecore. The idea is to make creating personalized customer experiences less complex and less costly for brand customers while providing greater return on marketing investment. The alliance will also better enable collaborations that improve customer experiences across all digital touch points.
- Sitecore also unveiled the Sitecore Experience Cloud, providing content management, digital marketing and commerce tools for collecting real-time customer data and insights.
Dive Insight:
In the never-ending quest to acquire customers and build loyalty, marketers are looking for new ways to enhance digital customer experiences. With marketing spend also on the minds of brands, WPP’s partnership with Sitecore promises to reduce complexity and increase marketing return on investment at time when finding ways to connect with customers digitally is vital to brand survival.
By streamlining the process for creating such experiences at scale, the Sitecore-WPP Alliance could help WPP strengthen its relationships with brands. WPP’s stocks recently fell by about 11% after it cut its growth forecasts for the rest of the year, citing reduced ad spending by consumer product goods companies, like Procter & Gamble. These financial struggles have put WPP on the radar as a potential acquisition target, including by technology consultant firm Accenture.
Reducing digital marketing complexity lets marketers better target their efforts to drive customer loyalty, which is an ongoing battle as consumer interest in traditional ads is waning. One-third of retailers struggle to maintain customer loyalty. But, more than 10% report not using any technology to gather customer data, and among the ones that are gathering these valuable customer insights, more than half are not putting the data to good use.
Most marketers report that they lack the ability to track marketing ROI, and research shows that 60 percent of marketing spend is wasted each year because companies often don’t understand how to purchase digital marketing, manage their digital marketing budget or track ROI.
Sitecore and WPP are the latest digital solutions companies to join forces to offer combined expertise in innovation and personalization. The marketing and advertising agency Direct Choice Inc. also recently announced a partnership with global research firm Phoenix Marketing International to create holistic and improved customer experiences services, which, like the Sitecore-WPP Alliance, strives to drive digital personalization.