Digital marketing channels in Xperience by Kentico
Digital marketing constantly evolves, and marketers must reach and engage their audiences across different platforms and channels. In this guide, you’ll learn how Xperience understands digital channels, especially website channels, and how they fit into the digital experience you can build with Xperience by Kentico DXP.
What is a marketing channel?
Marketing channels refer to different ways companies and organizations communicate their marketing messages. Some channels, like print or TV, target the offline. In contrast, other channels target the digital world, such as websites, emails, landing pages, or mobile applications. Marketers can manage digital content through content management systems or digital experience platforms.
Find more general information about the channels in Let’s explore terms like digital marketing channel, multichannel, multiexperience, and headless on Kentico blog.
Channels in Xperience
By channel, Xperience by Kentico DXP understands any digital platform that a company uses to communicate in the digital world, including main websites, regional sites, different brand-specific sites, campaign microsites or landing pages, emails, mobile applications, or content fragments distributed, for example, as snippets to third-party websites.
Xperience customers typically maintain different marketing channels, and Xperience provides a toolset to help the marketing team achieve their goals.
Channels are critical components in making Xperience architecture.
In the past, marketers often managed their digital communication using different tools. If they wanted to keep their messaging consistent, they had to move the same content, such as images, testimonials, product marketing copy, or product messages, between different 3rd party solutions and platforms, usually by copying it. It was a solution, but suboptimal as it made content curation more difficult.
Marketers manage both content and customer experiences in the Xperience administration application.
They store the content they plan to reuse across different channels in the Content hub. The second part of Xperience, Contact management, includes tracking, segmentation, or customer journey mapping. From the central repository, the data is used in different communication channels. Most typically, Xperience by Kentico use the data on website and microsite channels. They also use their content for marketing emails and non-website apps.
Marketers can spin new website channels without asking developers for help, depending on the implementation of their project.
The out-of-the-box headless API is just another type of channel; it is represented by a mobile app.
Marketers or business analysts typically store detailed customer data in software like CRM and synchronize the data over API. They also transfer their marketing data to warehouses for advanced analysis with data visualization tools.
Website channels in Xperience
Marketers use websites to promote their companies, products, brands, or services or share their latest messages on websites and microsites. A common challenge marketers face is handling their marketing content across different websites.
With Xperience, marketers can store all their marketing content inside the administration and use it across their websites.
Their editors can work with a familiar UI and have the same tools across different domains. They can use the data they’ve collected about their customers to personalize the website’s content and tailor the digital journey to move customers from one touch point to another, getting them closer to conversion.
Websites vs. microsites
Xperience differentiates between website and microsites for licensing purposes.
- Website channel represents a typical company website that lives on its dedicated domain or subdomain, such as kentico.com or community.kentico.com. These two represent two separate websites, which means two channels.
- Microsites fall under the new concept of a marketing “microchannel”. A microchannel is a mini-channel that contains only a limited amount of content. A microsite can have maximally 20 items (pages with URLs, nav menu structure, folders, etc.) in the content tree Pages.
Learn more about how website and microsite licensing works in Xperience in the documentation Licenses or on the Partner Portal.
Summary
In today’s digital era, connecting with audiences across diverse platforms is crucial. With Xperience by Kentico DXP, any digital platform can be recognized as a channel, making it easier for marketers to manage content and user experiences seamlessly. Explore insights on marketing channels on Kentico’s blog.