Adobe Systems announced “the next generation” of Adobe Marketing Cloud offerings at the 2014 Adobe Summit: The Digital Marketing Conference. Here’s a breakdown of how the company is expanding its personalization, mobile, and core services within the Marketing Cloud.
I) Personalization
Adobe Target Premium
One of the key announcements included the introduction of Adobe Target Premium. This personalization solution enables marketers to create automated, customized content and experiences across digital and mobile channels. The solution’s algorithm leverages consumers’ behavioral data and Web analytics visitor data to deliver relevant content for each site guest. The algorithm is also self learning, so it’s able to fine tune it’s targeting capabilities the more consumers engage with the site. Using this combination of data and automation, marketers can then recommend and upsell products to consumers. In addition, marketers can reach out to specific visitor groups through rule-based targeting and segmentation capabilities. And to help ensure that the targeting is effective, the solution comes equipped with A/B and multivariate testing capabilities.
Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Experience Manager is a Web experience management solution designed to facilitate faster and easier development of online and mobile marketing efforts. Prior to Summit, Loni Stark, Adobe’s director of product and industry marketing, told Direct Marketing News that the new version of Adobe Experience Manager is about creating seamless, cross-channel experiences for customers.
“We believe that every single brand cares about interacting with customers across channels,” she says. “There’s no company that’s just thinking, ‘What’s the experience on my website?’ [This is] because every single customer is a cross-channel customer.”
In this version of Experience Manager, Adobe homes in on five key customer experiences:
Site: This version of Adobe Experience Manager is designed to help marketers produce Web and mobile sites faster, Stark said. New template formats aim to expedite this production process and new dashboards are designed to help marketers identify what content resonates with its customers the most.
Assets: Experience Manager Assets aims to help marketers better manage, store, and deliver their digital assets across channels.
Communities: Experience Manager Communities is designed to allow marketers to moderate communities, drive engagement through sentiment analysis, and overcome language barriers through machine translations.
Forms: Forms can be a pain point for marketers. Experience Manager’s new offerings are designed to enable marketers to create adaptable forms for websites, mobile sites, and mobile apps.
Mobile apps: By combining with PhoneGap Enterprise, Adobe’s new mobile app development tool set, Experience Manager aims to enable marketers to edit app experiences without developers. For instance, marketers can push content updates from a brand’s website to its app. In addition, marketers can use Experience Manager’s “drag-and-drop” interface to add or edit content.
II) Mobile
According to Adobe, people spend three-times more time on mobile than they do on websites. Stark added that app users tend to be more loyal customers and have stronger relationships with a brand. So, it’s vital for marketers to make mobile experiences just as good, if not better, than the online experience. In addition to the introduction of PhoneGap, here are a few ways Adobe is building out the mobile experience.
Adobe Mobile Services 2.0: Mobile Services 2.0 is all about extracting the return on investment after marketers have spent time and resources creating a mobile app, Stark said. Mobile Services 2.0 is designed to help marketers measure which behaviors drive app downloads. They can also track user behavior post-download, such as engagement, content sharing, and purchases.
Apple iBeacon support: Adobe is now able to support the measurement and targeting of app users connected to iBeacons. For instance, marketers can identify the location of users within a certain proximity of an iBeacon and send push notifications.
App re-engagement: If a consumer stops using an app, marketers can use a combination of Adobe Campaign—one of the six pillars of the Marketing Cloud—and Adobe Mobile Services 2.0 to re-engage that consumer through push notifications, such as breaking news or flight updates.
“It’s around helping marketers better control the mobile experience, increase engagement around it, as well as return on investment,” Stark said.
III) Core services
When it comes to expanding its core services, Adobe is all about multichannel optimization.
“Adobe is investing a lot in integrating a lot of these core solutions so that marketers can drive more multichannel experiences, get there faster, and make sure that they’re not doing marketing in silos,” Stark said.
Master Marketing Profile: The Master Marketing Profile seeks to provide the coveted single view of the customer across the Marketing Cloud. Marketers can take an anonymous visitor and build a profile around that user so that they can deliver more personalized content over time.
Shared assets: Shared assets, according to Stark, aims to end disjointed customer experiences. Marketers can automatically deploy their videos, images, and other rich assets, across all of its marketing channels and solutions simultaneously.
Marketing Mixed Planning: Put simply, the Marketing Mixed Planning technology is a new Marketing Cloud capability that allows marketers to better optimize their media both on and offline. Marketing Mixed Planning leverages descriptive and predictive analytics for areas like attribution and forecasting across all channels.
Finally, in addition to these announcements, Adobe announced a series of partnerships. Among those cited were: Marketing services company Epsilon announced that it will be integrating the Marketing Cloud into its Agility Loyalty Platform and global digital agency Wunderman said that it will integrating the Marketing Cloud into its IMPACT 360 Consumer Engagement platform. Adobe also revealed a reseller agreement with SAP. The enterprise application software provider will resell the Marketing Cloud along with its SAP HANA platform and hybris Commerce Suite as part of the agreement.
