At the moment’s digital experience platforms are geared as much as serve each form of enterprise, conventional or disruptive, from D2C and ecommerce to banks, engineering and building and publishing.
How concerning the largest modern circus firm on the earth?
With an enormous presence in Las Vegas and exhibits around the globe, as we speak’s Cirque du Soleil is worlds away from the small troupe of performers busking in a Quebec city virtually 40 years in the past.
Pierre-Luc Camirand is the circus’s director of digital buyer expertise. “I’m in charge of all that relates to digital, so basically I oversee everything in regard to CRM, web development, our martech project management office, as well as everything in regard to customer data.” Whereas there are B2B parts in Le Groupe Cirque du Soleil’s enterprise, Camirand is chargeable for the person person aspect of the CRM that pertains to buyer help.
Managing an leisure portfolio
The necessity for this expertise got here out of an onslaught of an excessive amount of complexity. “In 2017 and 2018,” mentioned Camirand, “we went through an acquisition phase. We bought different entertainment companies like Blue Man Group; so we had to manage all these platforms. Sitecore allows us to manage a dozen platforms with a pretty small team of engineers.”
In contrast to the writer Wolters Kluwer, another Sitecore user, Cirque du Soleil wished to protect the person branding of their new firms, quite than migrate all of them to a central, widespread vacation spot. “Each brand has its own website, but when you look in the back-end behind it, it’s the same for everyone.”
Initially, the plan was for every web site to be operated individually. “We quickly realized it was way too much work, so the strategy quickly became to use the same baseline, re-use the same modules from one site to another, but keep a certain flexibility with the front-end and design.”
Cirque du Soleil used Sitecore’s expertise to make this occur. Their relationship with the tech firm precedes the acquisitions. “I think we started back in 2009 with Version 5,” mentioned Camirand, “so it’s been a while.”
The important thing Sitecore modules
In line with Sitecore’s offering of composability, Cirque is utilizing some Sitecore merchandise and never others. “Definitely the multi-site infrastructure,” mentioned Camirand. “We are now able to do release and deployment for all our websites at the same time. This is a huge advantage for us because it allows our development team to work faster and be more efficient.”
In 2018, constructing a brand new web site may take six months; a brand new web page or part, two or three months. “Now we talk about weeks,” mentioned Camirand. “Also what’s really important is the multi-language capability of Sitecore, because have shows everywhere on the planet — South Korea, South America, Europe — so we need to be able to manage, I think, ten different languages.”
Advertising and marketing groups use drag-and-drop features inside the CMS to create content material on their very own. Extra sophisticated challenges find yourself with a webmaster knowledgeable.
They don’t seem to be but utilizing the Sitecore DAM. Their huge trove of belongings reside in Widen which does have the potential to attach with Sitecore (one thing Camirand hopes to have in place subsequent yr).
The system lets Cirque guests to third-party ticketing platforms like Ticketmaster content material from its personal websites associated to the exhibits persons are .
“We want to go further than that,” Camirand mentioned, “using other sources of data; for example, if you’re looking at family packages, when you come back to cirquedusoleil.com we want to show you family content. Pushing the right content to the right person at the right moment is really key, so personalization is something we need to do.”
The worldwide nature of the enterprise means privateness regulation is a minefield. To deal with this, the corporate plans to create a CDP, not solely to deal with buyer knowledge from a number of sources, however consent data too. They’re at the moment a number of doable options and don’t count on to make use of Sitecore’s CDP.
The important thing channels
Maybe surprisingly, it chooses to not have a cell app. “It’s not easy to attract people to download your app and re-use it,” Camirand mentioned. “Most apps are not used; people use maybe 10% of the apps on their phone.”
As a substitute, a couple of yr in the past, they launched a platform they name the “interactive program.”
“It’s a mobile platform; a website optimized for mobile. The goal was to improve the pre-show and post-show experience of our guests.”
This system gives “fun facts” concerning the present, character descriptions and storylines. In contrast to an app, the cell web site can’t do push notifications. Nevertheless, it does permit Cirque to re-target prospects elsewhere resembling the primary web site.
That web site has a blog to bridge the hole between prospects and particular person performers. Performers are inspired to create content material for the weblog that may then be amplified on their very own social media feeds. “They’re quite happy to do it because they want the exposure.”
Down the street?
On Camirand’s casual roadmap, he plans to have a look at Sitecore connectors going past Widen. “I know there’s a connector for Salesforce and Sitecore.” (Cirque is utilizing Salesforce CRM.) “There’s probably a good way to connect both platforms together and better run our campaigns.”
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In regards to the writer
Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, however a New Yorker for over 20 years, Kim began overlaying enterprise software program ten years in the past. His expertise encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- advert data-driven city planning, and functions of SaaS, digital expertise, and knowledge within the advertising and marketing house.
He first wrote about advertising and marketing expertise as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a devoted advertising and marketing tech web site, which subsequently turned a channel on the established direct advertising and marketing model DMN. Kim joined DMN correct in 2016, as a senior editor, changing into Government Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a place he held till January 2020.
Previous to working in tech journalism, Kim was Affiliate Editor at a New York Instances hyper-local information website, The Native: East Village, and has beforehand labored as an editor of an instructional publication, and as a music journalist. He has written a whole bunch of New York restaurant opinions for a private weblog, and has been an occasional visitor contributor to Eater.
