Siteglide Spotlight

Siteglide's CEO Luke Wakefield was recently invited to speak on a martech podcast with Marketing Guys on 24th May (2022). Luke and Elias discuss how to offer digital experiences with an SME budget and resources.

Luke, like many SaaS founder stories, began Siteglide to solve the limitation issues that his agency (Wysi) had experienced over and over with every new platform. A lack of flexibility and locked in data prevented his agency from achieving the best digital experiences for their clients.

With over 10 years of experience, Luke built Siteglide to be the top-rated digital experience platform for small businesses: removing development limitations and providing SMEs with total control over their data.

Interested in Luke's and Siteglide’s history? Check out The history of Siteglide - The CEO’s story

Digital Experiences For SMEs

Digital Experiences are becoming increasingly popular, and fantastic for anticipating customer needs to improve customer satisfaction.

However, small businesses often have different priorities to enterprise companies and a reduced budget and resources. Due to the complexity and the budget needed, building digital experiences have been left exclusively for only corporate-level companies.

Siteglide is here to open up this aspect of digital transformation for small businesses to take part in too.

What Is A Digital Experience Platform?

A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is any tool or platform that encompasses all of the technology that allows users to build website experiences that use data to look at the customer journey, to help deliver better experiences for the customers.

All digital marketers want to make their customers’ digital experience and journey better, and this can be achieved with a DXP.

Many different tools can fall under the term “DXP”, such as content management systems (CMS - e.g. Contentful, WordPress), enterprise resource planning (ERPs - e.g.NetSuite), customer relationship management (CRMs - e.g. HubSpot) and more.

A DXP can help you to achieve -

• Something clever with your data with integrations to internal systems
• Providing users with their data via a front-end customer portal
• Build marketplaces
• Or simply an online ecosystem for your business so that customers can interact with you

Adobe And Sitecore Are Great For Enterprise, But What About SMEs?

Digital Experience Platforms are known for their vast variety of tools and functionalities that enable users to create just about any kind of digital experience.

In the DXP world, you often hear big names such as Adobe and Sitecore, these provide the perfect atmosphere for enterprise agencies.

With this multitude of tools comes complexity along with more budget, time and resources needed to implement and customise the many tools. Easy for enterprise companies to work with; but with SME’s reduced budget and resources, this often isn’t an accessible option..

There are plenty of suitable platforms out there that are perfect for SMEs, but where should you start?

It can be overwhelming researching the many acronyms to find a platform that solves your problems online.

Here’s how you can choose the perfect platform:

1. Start with how your customer interacts with your business and what kind of data you need to collect and have within your digital experience.

2. Next, decide where you need this data to be and how you’d like to link this data together.

3. A top tip from us would be to have a built-in CRM, to enable your users’ experiences to be personalised, with actions being automated and enabling them to self-serve and getting a far richer experience.

Let us help you find the right platform with our in-depth guide into Headless CMS, Hybrid CMS and DXP.

Data Siloes

We live and work in a data-driven world. Data is created and used to personalise and enrich user experiences.

SMEs and mid-market companies are often using all kinds of tools and platforms to achieve their customer experience needs… leading to the siloed data issue.

One option might be to transfer from your many platforms to using a singular platform that ‘does it all’. This can solve your data silo issues, but introduces the real warning that a platform built to ‘do it all’ does not work well with other platforms. If you end up hitting a glass ceiling in your functionality, you’re stuck.

How does Siteglide help in getting rid of data siloes?

What’s really needed is a platform that is built from the ground up to connect to anything.

A platform that is API-based, to allow you to share data anywhere and access data anywhere, but with some of those tools that you need already within the platform, so you’re ready to build.

Typical Timeframes, Costs And Resources Needed For Digital Experiences

With any project comes set timeframes, costs and resources.

Digital marketers need to be able to jump in quickly to get going and build high-quality customer experiences.

DXPs built with SMEs in mind are easy for marketers and developers to build digital experiences in phases. Not only that, but rather than taking an enterprise-level approach, you can start with basic functionality and build up from there over time, helping to keep costs and resource requirements low - perfect for an SME budget.

Project & Timeframe

As Siteglide is usage-based with no upfront cost, you can map out the basics in very little time and build up as you need, in phases. Introducing the flexibility to chop and change as you build - something a lot of platforms cannot say.

Siteglide has a wide range of agencies all over the world who build sites for customers and our agency (Wysi) has built a wide range of projects too.

Timeframes and budget can completely depend on the project, of course. Generally, you can have a website up and running in days; if more complex, a few weeks; if a course platform or marketplace, a few months.

There’s no barrier to entry.

Getting Started With Siteglide

Siteglide can be defined as hybrid within the MarTech stack, with all of the DevOps and infrastructure managed for you with enterprise-grade focus, with scalability, security, and reliability that can handle projects of any size. Siteglide is also the top-rated Digital Experience Platform for SMEs as rated by G2.

Let’s get started -

Featuring flexibility, scalability and usage-based, you can build in phases or in one go.

1.Deciding the functionality within Siteglide that you'll need is key.

Will your experience make use of eCommerce? Planning a marketplace? You’ll need to implement secure logins. Sharing news with your users? You’ll want to utilise the blog.

2. Next, you’ll need to install the appropriate modules for the functionality you’d like to have.

3. Then you can move on to integrations to bring this all together.

With full API access and a Zapier integration ready to go, you can also connect with similar platforms, such as HubSpot, finance systems, such as NetSuite, or data analytics platforms etc.

Digital experience platforms are the way to go for making the most out of digital transformation. It’s not just enterprise companies that can take advantage of this new technology anymore.

With Siteglide’s flexibility, reliability, security and usage-based pricing, this impressive new wave of digital experiences is now open to SMEs to build too.

Take a look at Siteglide for yourself with a completely free account!

Check out the great podcast episode: -