Sitecore Symposium Agenda picks by a Sitecore Strategy MVP

Sitecore Symposium is on every Sitecorians mind with only 3 days to go before festivities begin. Having attended almost all Symposiums since my first step into Sitecore almost 8 years ago, I have attended some great sessions and encountered some amazing speakers. Here are my top picks:

11/5

11:30 am - 12:15 pm: Marketing Track Keynote

This is a no brainer for the marketers attending Sitecore Symposium. In past years, marketing keynotes have been amazing at generating visions for the future of customer experience and digital marketing. This one by Elissa Fink at Sitecore, promises to back the visions with data.

2:35 pm - 3:20 pm: From lead to loyal member: Increasing revenue through a personalized customer experience driven by Sitecore and Salesforce

What drew me to this session by Derek Barka at SilverTech is the use of a customer case study (Credit Union of Texas) and their journey of personalization combining Sitecore and Salesforce. You can expect to see real results of a complete personalization journey.

3:40 pm - 4:25 pm: Valtech & Sitecore: A customer’s journey

For those marketers who have yet to start their personalization journey, and don’t know how to begin using the features that sold you on Sitecore, Valtech will provide their process for getting you started. You can then use the tips and tricks you learn here to start your personalization in Sitecore.

11/6

10:30 am - 11:15 am: Marketers’ guide to getting started with Sitecore Cortex personalization suggestions

Cortex has been the Sitecore buzzword for over 2 years, yet it is difficult to find a good use case of Cortex and the automated personalization capabilities within it. Una Verhoeven, one of the champions within the “Women of Sitecore” community promises to give the key steps to get started with this technology.

11:35 am - 12:20 pm: Getting started with behavioral-based personalization

In this session, Ed Kapuscinski will aid in taking the step from rules based personalization to predictive personalization. This session is great for those marketers who have started using the basics in personalization and require an advanced session.

1:30 pm - 2:15 pm: Marketing personalized at scale: Sitecore + SFMC = success

I am especially excited about this session having been a part of Altudo and helped create some of the material. A picture of me is rumored to be in this session as well. Beyond that, this session by Varun Nehra and Amit Thapiyal of Altudo, will give you a picture on how to combine your CMS and Marketing Automation tools to get a complete 360 degree personalization and view of your customers.

2:35 pm - 3:20 pm: Using Google Analytics to trigger Sitecore personalization

Sitecore Analytics, unlike most other Analytics engines, requires back end code to trigger conversions (or goals). With Google Analytics being much easier to configure for events and conversions by a marketing team, the Proof of Concept created by George Haeger at Horizontal Integration, can bring a shift in mentality of personalization triggered by conversion points configured by marketers.

11/7:

9:40 am - 10:25 am: Sitecore AI: First look

I am extremely excited about this session by Sitecore’s own Nancy Lee. Coming directly from the Product Management team (aka the horse’s mouth), we should see some exciting new features within Sitecore in this session. One of the biggest questions on getting started with Personalization is the difficulty in terms of skills and resources to keep your Personalization going and updated. This session will show you new features in Sitecore that aims to automate the process and relieve some of the pressures on marketing teams.

10:45 am - 11:30 am: Keep Sitecore and Google Analytics in sync using Google Tag Manager

This session is a great end to Sitecore Symposium. I am a bit biased as this session is conducted by RDA’s Walt Rolle and David Ruckman, an amazing team and great partner of mine. Most marktech stacks utilze Google Analytics, and this is the #1 question I face in strategy sessions, how do these two play together. The ability for marketers to control the role each play and how they are configured is an great educational session for most marketers attending Sitecore Symposium.

No matter the sessions you pick, this Sitecore Symposium promises to be a turning point for AI, marketing intelligence, and the integration points between Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Sitecore. I hope to see you all there! Watch this space for a recap after.