Make your life easier with Adobe Marketing Cloud
Today’s consumer expects the same personalized, relevant, and real-time experience that they have for centuries. The fact that they’re in a digital environment makes absolutely no difference to the consumer. However, the challenge lies with the marketer because the marketer has to balance the needs of the organization with the desires for that personalized, relevant, and real-time experience of the consumer. The marketer has to be able to deliver this experience across so many different devices and channels, and the marketer also has to use so many different pieces of technology to be able to deliver this experience. Because of this fragmentation of technology, the marketer’s often dealing with disjointed datasets and an incomplete view of the consumer.
For the consumer, this results in a sub-optimal brand experience as they tend to see different messaging and different offers across the different channels and devices that they engage with the brand. For the marketer to be able to deliver on the promise of a personalized, relevant, and real-time experience, several things need to happen.
First, we need to understand who’s accessing the content. Profile attributes are often stored in so many different silos across the organization. There’s analytics data, there’s CRM data, there are third-party data, and all these different sources of profile attributes need to be combined into that single view of the consumer. So now that we have that complete view of the consumer, we need to predict what’s the best experience for that consumer to be able to push them further down into the conversion funnel.
This could be a buy one gets one offer; this could be a white paper to download to get them to fill out a lead form. Whatever the goals of the organization are, we need to be able to predict and test the different types of experiences we want to deliver to this consumer. Then we need to access and assemble the experience for the consumer.
Oftentimes, the content that we want to deliver is stored in multiple locations. We might have HTML templates in one location, third-party syndicated content in another location, JPEG assets in another, and then yet again rich media in another.
We need to be able to identify all these pieces of content and lastly, we need to be able to deliver this experience to the consumer. It sounds really easy to say we’re just going to deliver it but this is one of the most challenging pieces because as consumers accessing this content through so many different devices and different bandwidth connections, we need to understand if they’re using iOS or Android or they’re on a desktop computer, do they have a high speed or a low-speed connection?
We need to take all of these signals into account when we deliver this experience. We need to adapt that content on the fly before we deliver it to them, and astonishingly, all of this has to happen within about 300 milliseconds.
Adobe Marketing Cloud Components
Adobe promises to provide the marketer the technology to be able to deliver on this last millisecond experience. Adobe marketing cloud has many components including six primary solutions with
- Adobe Social and Media Optimizer about acquiring the consumer and engaging them with the brand,
- Adobe Target about predicting the experience,
- Adobe Experience Manager then accesses and assembles the content,
- Adobe Campaign remarkets to the consumer and then, of course, we use
- Adobe Analytics to analyze the outcome of the experiences that we delivered to further optimize for the consumer.
Adobe Social has two primary focus areas. First, it enables the marketer to be able to publish content across the social channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on and allows that marketer to be able to publish this content through moderated workflows and allowing predictive algorithms to help them determine when is the best time to publish this content and what is the potential engagement for this particular piece of content.
The second key focus area of Adobe Social is allowing the marketer to be able to listen to the conversations that are occurring across those social channels and evaluate those metrics along with the on-site metrics such as revenue or orders or lead form conversion or whatever the conversion goals of that organization may be.
Adobe Media Optimizer enables the marketer to intelligently manage ads spanned across display, paid search, and social channels. It allows the marketer to do so on a portfolio basis, and by that I mean the marketer can set ad spend and revenue goals for each portfolio, letting Media Optimizer calculate the appropriate spend and the appropriate media mix across all of these three channels.
Adobe Target is then able to predict and deliver the appropriate consumer experience using all of the available profile attributes from the Adobe Marketing Cloud. It also enables the marketer to perform ABN multivariate tests to help understand which content is preferred by which audiences.
Adobe Experience Manager, among many things, is a content management system allowing the marketer to access and assemble the content to deliver that meaningful experience that the consumer expects. It’s then able to pick up on the signals that the consumer is provided and adapt the content to the type of device that the consumer is using. For example, if the consumer is using iOS or Android or a desktop device, it’s going to adapt the size of the images and the layout of the content to ensure that the consumer gets that experience that they’re looking for.
A key requirement of any content management system is the ability to store and manage your digital assets. With Experience Manager Assets, the marketing organization has a centralized location to store, manage, and deliver creative assets of all types.
Adobe Campaign enables the marketer to have that personalized one-on-one conversation that the consumer expects. For example, some consumers may prefer offline direct email communication while others may prefer digital communication. Adobe Campaign allows us to understand those signals and then deliver these cross-channel marketing campaigns according to the consumer’s preference.
And last but not least we need to understand did we deliver the right experience to the right person at the right time.
Adobe Analytics allows us to dig deep into those metrics, correlating that with the goals and objectives of the business and using that information to further optimize the consumer experience. In further, with Adobe Analytics, the marketer has access to innovative new technologies, things like predictive analytics, the ability for the system to alert their marketer to anomalies in the data, advanced audience segmentation that can be shared across the entire marketing cloud and mobile, allowing the marketer unprecedented access into adoption and engagement of their mobile applications.
Core Services are centralized technologies within the marketing cloud that enable not only the solutions to speak to the data and content platform but also enable the solutions to be able to communicate more effectively with each other. Let me just highlight a few.
- Profiles and Audiences, for example, enables the marketer to have a single view of the consumer across all Adobe Marketing Cloud Solutions.
- Assets enable the marketer to have a centralized location to share and collaborate on assets that are being used in the various marketing campaigns across the organization, and with the
- Collaboration Course Service, the marketer now has an interface to be able to collaborate more effectively across the organization on the cross-channel campaigns and initiatives that are occurring within the Adobe Marketing Cloud Solutions.
With the technologies available within the Adobe Marketing Cloud, the marketer now can deliver that personalized, relevant, and real-time experience that the consumer expects.
