Meet Sitecore Stream: A Marketer’s New Best Friend
Sitecore Symposium kicked off this week in Nashville with several exciting keynotes. However, the one that made the biggest waves was Sitecore’s announcement of its LLM-powered assistant and orchestration tool, Sitecore Stream. That’s because Stream is more than a feature, it's a vision for how marketers will collaborate with AI partners in the future to build campaigns, write content, and drive business goals and outcomes.
A recent survey by Stack Overflow shows that generative AI has had a major impact on software developers’ daily work. Of those surveyed, 76% use or plan to use generative AI tools. Sitecore's announcement makes it easy to imagine a similar shift occurring for marketers soon.
What is Sitecore Stream?
Stream serves as a marketer's co-pilot by offering valuable suggestions based on organizational context. The initial use case Sitecore has solved revolves around brand compliance. After submitting your brand guidelines (called "brand kits"), Stream will ensure that future content adheres to these guidelines. This addresses a common challenge marketers face: maintaining strong stewardship over their brand as it and their staff scale.
A VP of Marketing can't be everywhere at once, but Sitecore Stream can.
How Do We See Sitecore Stream Evolving?
Sitecore Stream’s initial use case for brand stewardship is compelling, but what we're most excited about at Velir is what lies beyond. Sitecore articulated that, eventually, Stream will take inputs from their entire product suite. This means your organization can easily leverage behavior data from Sitecore CDP, search terms from Sitecore Search, and content stored in Content Hub to influence campaign recommendations provided by the Sitecore Stream assistant. We also expect Sitecore to add new AI-assistant actions like the ability to generate new components for a web experience or email templates for campaign efforts.
We envision Sitecore Stream helping your marketing teams in the future with the following capabilities.
- Personalized Content Recommendations Based on Audience Descriptions: One of the biggest barriers to adopting personalization is the amount of content that needs to be written. Once you've identified your five segments to target, you must write five times more content. Given how adept AI agents are at writing content, a solution feels within reach. Imagine providing Stream’s AI assistant with descriptions of your audiences and the promotion you're offering, so it can generate personalized content for those audiences.
- Cross-Channel Campaign Ideas Based on Past Campaign Performance and Business Goals: As input, Stream could consume descriptions of past campaign performance broken down by channel and target audience. Additionally, it would make sense to provide it upcoming annual goals and audience research. By synthesizing this information, Stream’s AI assistant could recommend which messages to deploy on which channel for any specific audience segment.
- Suggestions for A/B Tests or Other CRO Improvements Based on Analytics Trends: We expect that Sitecore Stream will eventually ingest clickstream analytics data from Sitecore CDP. This unlocks several use cases around conversion rate optimization (CRO). Generating good ideas for A/B tests is often a manual process that requires a combination of experience, analysis, and luck. Having an AI partner in this endeavor with every funnel, data point, and content component at its fingertips can only increase your odds of developing a meaningful test that increases conversions.
- Providing SEO Suggestions within the Content Workflow: One common barrier to a successful SEO strategy is execution. Are your marketers, content writers, and website admins leveraging your strategy at every step in their workflow? Having an AI assistant aware of your SEO strategy and the execution steps can only help with adoption. Given the importance of the digital asset management system (DAM) and content management (CMS) in SEO, the value derived from Stream increases when you select Sitecore for your DAM and CMS.
These features make sense within the wider context of the composable digital experience platform (DXP) model. A composable DXP is valuable because your business can match its needs with specific platform components. The criticism of the composable model is that no governor works across those components to make them feel like a unified whole. Stream has the potential to be that governor, monitoring the state of each DXP technology and providing meaningful recommendations and guidance for marketers working on the platform.
Velir and its Data Studio, Brooklyn Data, Complements Sitecore's Roadmap
The DXP and AI spaces move quickly and it's hard to predict what new features may be released tomorrow or next year.
What is consistently true, however, is that businesses with strong governance over their data assets will be better situated to take advantage of these advancements in the future.
This is where Velir can help. Through our acquisition of Brooklyn Data, Velir stands out from other agencies with a dedicated data studio that enables you to govern and activate your organization’s data. As we recently posted, our data maturity assessments deploy a proven playbook for improving organizational data insights, data strategy, data teams, data infrastructure, and data governance capabilities. Maturing these areas will result in tangible benefits when your organization adopts tools like Sitecore Stream.
Our data services complement the Sitecore roadmap and product ecosystem by allowing a bi-directional data flow between Sitecore components. We know that blended, unified data is more powerful than siloed data. Our familiarity with Sitecore's composable suite allows us to ingest and blend data from Sitecore’s Composable DXP modules — Content Hub, CDP, XM Cloud, Search, Personalize, OrderCloud, and Send — as well as external platforms, into a unified data lake. Once blended data is available, Velir can activate this data in downstream systems such as Sitecore Stream.
Fueling Sitecore Stream with Unified Data
As Sitecore customers develop plans for leveraging Sitecore Stream, they should consider how well-organized and well-integrated data can power these AI-enabled applications. With the right fuel, your business can expect to deploy sophisticated personalized, data-driven campaigns that are both effective and scalable. Our expertise in data governance and integration ensures that your organization is AI-ready and that you can leverage these exciting advancements.
Want to know more about Sitecore Stream and how it can become your marketing team’s new best friend? Contact us. Our Sitecore MVPs would be happy to discuss Stream’s features and how you can make the most of them