Our highlights from Kentico Xperience Connection 2020

by Ned Hallett
As Digital Marketing Manager and JAM’s primary pair of lungs, I provide the JAM-y take on the ever-evolving worlds of DevOps, SaaS, MACH - and acronyms yet to be coined.
Published on November 2020

As always, we’ve learned a lot from this year’s Kentico Xperience Connection. And the move to online barely made a dent in our enjoyment. 

The event’s easy-to-use interface helped a lot here, allowing us to hop between keynotes and tech talks with ease. 

There was a lot to take in, but we’ve narrowed it down to some of our highlights.

Xperience can empower marketers by simplifying MartTech stacks 

Mike Wills of BlueModus gave a great talk on how to adopt Kenico Xperience’s new digital marketing features, and while this talk was obviously first and foremost about the features of the Xperience platform, Mike touched on a lot of points that are just as relevant to marketing teams adopting any new cloud-based marketing automation technology. 

One key takeaway was how Xperience can simplify MarTech stacks and reduce the average marketer’s workloads significantly. A great example of this was the content reuse capability, which means no more endless copying and pasting text for reuse in email campaigns and webpages.

Another was structured content, effectively freeing marketers from the hassle of specifying widths, fonts and padding in every HTML email: the running theme was simplification empowers marketers and reduces their need to lean on IT.

AI-powered recommendations live up to the hype

Elsewhere, Gabriela Takacova of Recombee gave a great demo of this powerful AI-powered recommendation service, showing us how just-for-you recommendations drove purchases and revenue up 30% for major US deal site Slickdeals. 

This talk was a great demonstration of an industry trend in action. And the key takeaway was simply that smart recommendations have a very real impact on companies’ bottom lines.

MVC is the future 

Lastly we had Brian McKeiver of Bizstream with a great guide on how to migrate from Portal Engine to MVC.

One key takeaway from this talk was that while Portal Engine will remain supported, all the innovation will be focussed on MVC – that’s where developers will be excited to work. And that’s what Kentico have singnalled with the release of Xperience 13.

There were also some great tips on the process of moving from Portal Engine to MVC, with our favourite being that this can be a powerful opportunity to reconsider your content model: moving away from old fields and templates that belong to the world of the early noughties.

Food for thought indeed.

There really were so many fascinating talks and speakers – but we sadly couldn’t see them all.

Going forward

We’re already looking forward to next year’s Xperience Connection – and hopefully to being there in person! 

In the meantime, we’ll carry on working with Kentico to enhance our knowledge of this powerful platform and provide Kentico users 24/7 full stack support. For this, or anything else, just get in touch.

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