If you haven’t known it already, SharePoint, the content management system suite from Microsoft has comprehensive tools that can assist you in your marketing efforts. These tools provide for end-to-end marketing strategy right from customer analysis, demographic behavior analysis to targeted marketing communication and effectiveness tracking. Here is a lowdown on what’s available.
Web Analytics Dashboard : Before one can make any sort of categorization of customers, it is important to see what the existing customer profile looks like. The Web Analytics dashboard on SharePoint gives you real time analytics along with the ability to track custom events, paths and alerts. This helps you with building your customer profile and you can use the data export feature to perform further analysis through a spreadsheet program like Excel.
Campaign Tracker : Are you running an advertising campaign? The SharePoint Marketing Suite lets you track campaigns and analyze advertising effectiveness through the use of goals and funnels. If you have been using Google Analytics, you might already be familiar with this concept.
On-Page Optimization : Do you want to know what marketing communication works the best? Want to study which pricing brings you the most targeted leads? The optimization tools on SharePoint include services for multi-variate testing and behavioral targeting that your marketing team can use to arrive at the best marketing messages.
Voice Of Customer : Customer feedback and surveys are a crucial and inevitable part of any marketing process. The SharePoint marketing suite includes tools that facilitate the implementation of customer feedback surveys and polls that you could use for future marketing changes.
Message Bars : If you have migrated your SharePoint system to the latest version, you can avoid reaching out to the admin every time you need to make small announcements on the website. The marketing suite gives the users an ability to display custom messages and links on banners on the top of the portal page. You can use these to make announcements instead of asking the web admin to make these changes every time.
Website Insights : Has your website seen an unusual dip in traffic? Have visitors started bouncing too often lately? SharePoint has the capability to automatically detect unusual changes in the usage pattern and provides instant notifications to the marketing team. It’s extremely useful to monitor usage pattern changes and ensure they do not impact the results of your marketing campaign.
Plugin Integration : One of the most useful feature of SharePoint that is not readily available with other competing platforms is the ability to integrate readily with your CRM tools and third party plugins. This gives you the ability to channel your analytics data into meaningful leads that you can readily engage with using the CRM platform.
SEO Monitor : Monitoring SEO is tough work given that most of the changes are done in the back-end using scripts like HTML or PHP. SharePoint detects SEO coding errors as well as monitors page speed, website accessibility that help you ensure that your website is healthy from a search engine perspective. The marketing suite also gives you the ability to export reports from here to other spreadsheet programs for further analysis.
SharePoint is a powerful software that comes with a huge variety of features on offer. What are some other features from the marketing suite that you have used? Tell us in the comments.
