10 Reasons why Kentico Xperience 13 should be your next DXP
Content tools continue to imprint a solid stance in most industries. As a result, it is important to know how these platforms bolster the growth of your business. It is also crucial to know the subtle differences between content management systems and digital experience platforms as it will help you understand what Kentico Xperience, our core topic of the day, is all about.
So let us dive right away into the blog post by differentiating between a CMS and a DXP.
Table of Contents
- Key differences between CMS and DXP
- Stepping up the content game with Kentico Xperience
- When and how to use Kentico Xperience?
- Key Features of Xperience
- 10 Reasons why you should be using Kentico Xperience 13 as your DXP
- Wrapping Up
Key differences between CMS and DXP
A CMS(Content Management System) arms an organization’s website and related applications with enough tools to deliver content. The role of CMS includes managing workflow, editorial, reporting, and user administration. It is the primary software that enables an organization to create a strong digital identity, strategies for marketing, and engaging audiences.
On the other, a DXP (Digital Experience Platform) provides companies with an integrated suite of tools to foster multi-experience customer journeys. This constitutes delivering, managing, and optimizing contextualized digital experiences across a wide array of customer and potential business prospects.
DXP goes one step further than CMS by helping a brand establish digital experience across websites, portals, billboards, and so on.
Kentico Xperience is one of the most popular DXP available right now.
Stepping up the content game with Kentico Xperience
If you have used the Kentico CMS, you would have known that it has the best in class content management features with robust tools that provide multilingual content support, content authoring tools, workflows, and versioning to name a few. Most of these tools continue to operate in Xperience and have mature even further, improving the way that marketers manage content.
In short, Kentico Xperience integrates content management and digital marketing together in a single platform enabling you to collect and act on data in a way that serves a personalized experience to your targeted audience. The shift from regular content management to DXP was a radical shift and carried out by Kentico based on market trends.
When and how to use Kentico Xperience?
Just as the sites created with Xperience do not provide a one-size-fits-all customer format, your experience with Xperience will also be unique. It depends on a wide range of factors such as:
- Purpose of your site(be it commerce/informational)
- Size of your organization
- Budget
- Nature of your business
- Customer type (B2C or B2B)
A good launching point for your Xperience journey is to analyze where your organization sits in terms of strategic planning and taking your products to the audience. Nevertheless, some organizations like to dive in head-first, while some carefully decide their strategic steps and integrate them with Xperience. Either way, it has some pros and cons.
Kentico offers you three licensing options:
- Business(formerly Kentico CMS)
- Enterprise(formerly Kentico EMS)
- Corporate
The Enterprise and Corporate editions offer the same functionalities as the business edition but along with a lot more features such as content personalization, marketing automation, lead scoring, A/B testing, and so on. The enterprise edition is better than the business edition by offering a wholesome customer experience management system within a single platform eliminating the need for third-party content marketing tools. For a full-fledged comparison of business, enterprise, and corporate editions you can refer to Kentico's plans.
Key features of Xperience
Kentico Xperience 13 is the most recent version of Kentico Xperience and here are some of the core features offered Xperience in this version -
Content recommendations
Xperience offers you an extra module that integrates with the Recombee AI recommender service. The module gives the data of your web pages to Recombee, which then come up with page recommendations. The recommendations are generated based on the previous views of pages and content in currently viewed pages.
Bynder integration
This is another external module that connects Xperience with the Bynder digital asset management platform. This module adds a form control to Xperience administrative forms. By assigning the form control to a page field, users can select and retrieve images from the Bynder service when editing the pages in the ‘pages application’.
Online marketing
It comes with new options of online form submission activities for even visitors who have not given consent to be tracked as contacts. Data collected through these forms are used only for legitimate interest purposes giving visitors the best recommendations. It is not for any other nefarious type of tracking.
Search
Xperience now provides a single search index type for the content of pages, combining the original pages crawler and pages indexes. The data source for indexing can be configured separately based on the types of individual pages. This incorporates flexibility and accurate search indexing based on the content type of the pages.
10 Reasons why you should be using Kentico Xperience 13 as your DXP
Best-in-class marketing automation
It is easy to use and offers marketing automation tools that grant marketers the ability to build automated workflows using a simple drag and drop interface. This simple interface helps streamline customer communications and engagement, improving overall marketing performance.
Regular platform updates
The latest updates in Xperience 13 including search, dynamic routing, bynder integration, and online marketing are instrumental in reducing developer resources and bolstering productivity. Kentico Xperience 13 comprises a full-blown set for the MVC development model.
Integration with voice assistants
It has integration with voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Home, which helps users to control the administration interface. Xperience uses KEVIN, which is the code name for integration with voice assistants. KEVIN enables integration with voice assistants without a mouse or keyboard, reducing technical complications. It also helps people with disabilities or those who prefer voice to control the interface over typing.
Kentico toolkit
The Kentico toolkit is an absolute delight for marketers to ramp up their marketing game. Connecting with third-party CRMs has become a cakewalk using the Kentico toolkit. The latest extension, Constant Care for Kentico performs over 100 performance checks on your Kentico site on a daily or weekly basis.
Reusability
Xperience’s reusable content feature helps editors in creating, editing pages and sections by using reusable components in three different ways -
- Linking pages and sections through the new Linked node feature and interface.
- Utilizing related pages via the ‘related pages’ tab
- Ad-hoc related documents
The product management has keenly listened to the community and added the functionality of creating content in multiple places within the content tree.
New page builder components
The new page builder components help editors and marketers in composing visually appealing pages through a powerful drag and drop interface. With Kentico Xperience 13, the existing set is expanded to a rich package of widgets with the URL selector and attachment selector.
.NET core support
Here comes great news for not only marketers but also developers. With Kentico Xperience, developers can develop ASP .NET core applications with Xperience being the underlying engine. Developers can now leverage features such as feature folders, tag helpers, and docker to name a few.
Simplicity
Kentico Xperience represents less complexity in terms of deployment and capabilities of its DXP than some of its vendors. This can reduce the time to value for users on this platform.
A future proof web framework with industry-leading performance
Although marketers do not worry about the underlying code, they love the optimized load times and site performances that the ASP .NET core provides. Xperience 13 has proved to be great for developers as they can have good control over code and simplified development. In summary, Xperience 13 is continuing to make a good impression among developers and marketers.
Searching for widget content made easy
Imagine having a landing page with a number of widgets including text and title. Until recently these widgets were not a part of the search index. But with Kentico Xperience 13, there is a new page crawler search introduced that adds the widgets to the search index.
Wrapping Up
Kentico is the all-in-one DXP designed to make your life easier. With many more reasons and benefits not covered in this list, it’s safe to say that Kentico Xperience is a winner. If you’re looking for the perfect DXP with serious analytical and automation capabilities, Kentico Xperience is your tool.