How AEM Resurgence Helps Companies Overtake Their Competitors

How can medium-sized companies overtake their competitors? In my previous AEM Resurgence article, I addressed why Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) matters for medium-sized companies. The same benefits that AEM provides to these companies—speed, accuracy, personalization, and scalability—also allow your company to overtake your competitors. AEM resurgence helps your company surge.

The “Diagnose Project Status” and “Define Completion Roadmap” Phases: planning how to overtake your competitors

The first step in any execution is the “Diagnose Project Status” phase. In addition to addressing any technical issues with your website, such as slow-loading pages, you need to ensure that your content attracts your prospects…and your competitors’ prospects.

Who are your competitors?

Before you can surge beyond and overtake your competitors, you need to understand who they are.

Most companies have an understanding of who at least some of their competitors are. These are the ones you see at trade shows, in publications, on social media, and in proposal competitions. But which competitors do your prospects see? Your salespeople need to listen to your prospects as they name the companies they’re investigating. That is your competition.

How are your competitors performing?

Once you have a prioritized list of competitors, start with the most important one and analyze what each competitor is doing.

You can perform both a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of each competitor.

• Qualitative analyses can include strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (a SWOT analysis); positioning and messaging; marketing initiatives (advertising, trade shows, social media); and feature comparisons between your competitor’s product and your own.

• Quantitative analyses can include financials; positioning on industry analyst reports; bid performance; and website and social media traffic, engagement, keywords, and frequency of communication.

As part of the “Define Completion Roadmap” phase, you then determine where you fall short of your competitors, and define the steps to overtake your competitors.

KBWEB Consult can incorporate these steps into both an implementation health check (the output of the “Diagnose” phase, outlining the issues that need addressing) and a project roadmap document (the output of the “Define Completion Roadmap” phase, stating how to address these issues).

The “Execute and Optimize Implementation” Phase: How can AEM help you beat your competitors?

Once you have a list of steps to overtake your competitors, AEM can help you implement them. With AEM’s tools, you don’t need to be a massive conglomerate to change your company’s positioning. AEM resurgence ensures medium-sized firms can use the power or AEM to make rapid changes.

Completing the project through launch

If you already have an existing website, ensure that you pay attention to performance—especially if your site has technical issues such as slow-loading pages that drive your prospects away from your site to faster-loading competitor sites.

It’s most likely, however, that much of your attention will be drawn to improving the content of your website to attract your prospects, and your competitors’ prospects.

Regardless of whether you need to address website performance, website content, or both, your implementation will result in a favorable outcome: a fully operational AEM system that meets current requirements and positions you for future needs.

Four AEM competitor-beating capabilities

AEM helps you improve both your website performance and your website content, via its speed, accuracy, personalization, and scalability.

Speed

Before my work with AEM, I used to work with automated biometric identification systems (ABIS), many of which are measured via National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tests such as the Face Recognition Technology Evaluation (FRTE) for 1:N Identification. When a vendor scores well on these NIST tests, it wants its customers and prospects to know immediately.

If I were working in this industry today, I could use AEM features such as experience fragments and AI-powered automation to allow faster asset creation. This lets a vendor rapidly inform its website visitors and prospects to know that your company is number one…and your competition isn’t.

Accuracy

We all want facial recognition to be as accurate as possible. But there’s another kind of accuracy: making sure that your website has the correct, up-to-date information.

AEM allows your marketers to immediately provide the latest information before your competition has a chance to react. Within hours, your assets can prominently convey your response to market changes, while your competitor’s website lacks it. For example, if green becomes the “in” color, your product illustrations can be changed to show products in bright green, while your competitor is still displaying boring blue products.

Personalization

Have your ever encountered a salesperson who treats every prospect exactly the same? If so, that’s probably not a successful salesperson. Prospects want to receive the information that is tailored to them.

AEM includes tools that support personalization, allowing you to present dynamic, up-to-date, personalized content to your website visitors and email recipients. So while your competitors communicate with “To Whom It May Concern” impersonal messaging, you can send “Dear Krassimir” messages that encourage your customers to buy—from you, the company that understands them the best.

Scalability

Ideally, a firm wants more and more people to visit its website over time. Or the firm may want to expand to new product lines and/or geographic regions. Can the content management system scale to handle firm growth?

If AEM is your content management system, it certainly can scale. KBWEB Consult migrated MSI to AEM 6.3, specifically to ensure that MSI’s website could scale over time. This improved MSI’s content creation velocity three times.

How can KBWEB Consult help you beat your competitors?

KBWEB Consult is a boutique technology consulting firm specializing in the implementation and delivery of Adobe Experience Cloud technologies. KBWEB Consult can help your firm overtake your competitors in three ways:

• Project excellence. KBWEB Consult’s dedicated staff employs?the proven delivery process?outlined above: Diagnose Project Status, Define Completion Roadmap, and Execute and Optimize Implementation. This has yielded benefits to its clients, including a 150% implementation speed and a 65% reduction in AEM development costs compared to large vendors.
• Technical mastery. KBWEB Consult staff exhibit a deep understanding of Adobe Experience Cloud technologies, such as AEM Sites and AEM Assets. They can design an implementation that performs better than your competition.
• Business understanding. KBWEB Consult realizes that the technical solution is only part of a complete implementation. Based upon our experiences with other clients, we can advise you how best to use AEM’s technical capabilities, such as experience fragments, to achieve your business goals.

If KBWEB Consult can help your company overtake your competitors,?please contact us.