Today’s consumers are not the consumers of 20 years ago. They have expectations of a brand experience that demands things of us, the vendor, that were unimaginable 20 years ago. Or even maybe 5 years ago. The Adobe marketing stress report indicates that marketers think that marketing has changed more in the last 2 – 5 years than in the previous 20. and that pace is accelerating.
Today’s consumers expect a brand experience that is personalized. They truly expect that you know who they are, what they want, and what device they are reaching you from. And they won’t tolerate an experience that doesn’t measure up—there are simply too many choices available to them.
And in the meantime, your business KPIs haven’t changed, haven’t relaxed. So the only way to meet your business objectives is to satisfy your consumer’s expectations.
You’ve got to go through one to get to the other. Want to move the needle on your business KPI’s? Want to meet your goals and objectives? First, meet the expectations of your customer. Adobe Marketing Cloud is built with both in mind – knowing that true marketing success is when you have delighted customers and done so within the boundaries of what works for your business.
But this is hard. These types of challenges often lead to a fragmented brand experience for the consumer. The consumer journey is not a straight path, it never did run true, to paraphrase Mr Shakespeare. And fragmented consumer journeys, where we don’t have a cohesive strategy, or an integrated technology, or a comprehensive view of the customer, results in a terribly fragmented brand experience.
Do our customers fill out a form on the web, only to access our brand on a mobile device and not get recognized? Do they like us to win, only to get an unrelated offer of a product they don’t want?
That’s the result of multiple databases, disparate technologies, multiple channels, and myriad messages. A confusing and disjointed experience.
Adobe Marketing Cloud solves these problems with an integrated, comprehensive set of solutions enabling marketers to gather and analyze data, measure activity, and personalize and optimize marketing campaigns and digital experiences, ensuring that what they make, matters.
Adobe Marketing Cloud solves the inherent downside of a jumble of unrelated marketing tools with an integrated, comprehensive set of solutions enabling marketers to gather and analyze data, measure activity, and personalize and optimize marketing campaigns and digital experiences.
Unlike other marketing suites that claim to be comprehensive, Adobe Marketing Cloud truly enables marketing in the last millisecond. With Adobe Marketing Cloud you can
Create a common, complete customer profile
Store, select and deploy creative assets in real-time
Assemble and deliver engaging experiences across channels, devices, and campaigns
Manage your mobile strategy and execution from app development and publishing through to monetization.
Automate processes with decisioning and algorithms
Collect, aggregate, and interpret the data that enables effective marketing
Let’s start off with a quick look at the big picture. Everything we talk about at Summit is part of the big picture story of Adobe Marketing Cloud. Well, here is a quick look at Adobe Marketing Cloud, in all its glory.
I don’t want to spend a lot of time here, but we want to be clear that Adobe Marketing Cloud is not just a slogan, a campaign, or a gimmick. Analysts have universally agreed that when it comes to marketing clouds, or hubs, or suites, or whatever you care to call them, Adobe has the secret sauce that actually makes the sum greater than the value of the individual parts.
UNLIKE other marketing suites and bundles that are an incomplete collection of point products that are barely interoperable, much less integrated, Adobe Marketing Cloud is a comprehensive set of best-in-class, integrated solutions, all built on a common data platform with a common set of powerful core services that creates a lift and, dare we say it, synergy you can’t get with a jumbled toolbox.
Adobe Marketing Cloud consists of 8 comprehensive and integrated solutions. This is where the execution happens:
Adobe Analytics—Get real-time analytics across online and offline channels to continuously improve the performance of marketing activities.
Adobe Experience Manager—Organize, manage, and deliver creative assets and other content across digital marketing channels.
Adobe Campaign—Plan and execute orchestrated campaigns across all channels.
Adobe Target—Test and target digital experiences to maximize business results.
Adobe Media Optimizer—Manage, forecast, and optimize your media mix to deliver peak return on your spend.
Adobe Social—Manage social marketing with a comprehensive platform that enables social listening, publishing, and analytics.
Adobe Primetime--Engage viewers across devices and deliver targeted ads independent of platform or device.
Audience Manager – Identity Management. Audience Activation, Cross Device Measurement, Audience Marketplace , Audience Optimization
And above and beyond best in class individual solutions, once you own any part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, you get the secret integrated sauce.
Adobe Marketing Cloud Core Services—A set of core technologies that allow each of the solutions to tap into a common framework and architecture, including Profiles & Audiences, Assets, Activation, Mobile, Exchange, Collaboration, the Exchange partner network, and User Management and Administration, all built upon a common data platform.
Okay, now let’s see how what we’re talking about today fits into this framework . . .
The focus of our strategy – providing an end-to-end value proposition that integrates content creation with content delivery, measurement, optimization, and monetization – and delivering it via cloud and subscription-based models – is getting positive response from our customers and partners.
9 of top 10 internet retailers,
5 of top 5 leading media companies
9 of the top 10 commercial banks,
5 of the top 5 global auto manufacturers
5 of the top 5 airlines in North America
2/3 of Fortune 100
to help maximize & measure your impact in more ways than ever before
that span across solutions to integrate data, build customer profiles, activate instant content delivery & reporting, and collaborate with team members
Content Management
Web
Mobile
Social Communities
Cloud Management
Digital Asset Management
Dynamic Media
Video
Personalized Media
Areas of R&D focus: commerce integration, emerging channel authoring
A/B Testing
Multivariate testing
Rules-based targeting
Automate behavioral targeting
Segmentation
Recommendations and cross-selling
Areas of R&D focus: visualization, automated personalization, easier deployment
to help maximize & measure your impact in more ways than ever before
that span across solutions to integrate data, build customer profiles, activate instant content delivery & reporting, and collaborate with team members
But Adobe isn’t about incremental improvement. It’s not about making our
hammer just a little bigger, our drill a little sharper, or our sandpaper a little finer.
Adobe didn’t set out to fill our bucket with one extra tool. We want to help our
customers build things that matter. So we blew up the very idea of a toolbox. We
took our already world-beating marketing solutions and added a special sauce
that no other vendor has—Adobe Marketing Cloud Core Services.
Adobe Marketing Cloud Core Services consists of technologies that allow each
solution to tap into a common framework and architecture, including Profiles and
Audiences, Assets, Activation, Collaboration, User Management and
Administration, Mobile, and the Exchange partner network, all built on a common
data platform.
Better together
Here are just a few examples of the way Adobe Marketing Cloud creates a bettertogether
synergy that no other vendor can match.
• The ability to create a common profile across Adobe Marketing Cloud enables
you to truly leverage your investment in Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions to
create powerful experiences in real time.
• Assets, the shared library for approved marketing assets, is easily deployed
across Adobe Marketing Cloud using Adobe Social or Adobe Campaign.
• Adobe Analytics plus Adobe Target plus Profiles and Audiences plus Activation plus
Mobile equals creating a personalization experience that no other product can match
for delivering the right experience to the right audience at the right time.
Core Services
Adobe Marketing Cloud core services are shared technology that connect solutions.
What it is:
Marketing Cloud Profiles & Audiences manages profile- and audience-sharing across the Marketing Cloud.
As a core service of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, Marketing Cloud Profiles & Audiences is included with current eligible Marketing Cloud subscriptions at no additional cost.
Which solutions it supports:
Analytics and Target currently, with Campaign and other solution integrations coming in 2015.
Marketing Cloud Profiles has two primary benefits:
Common ID: Marketing Cloud Profiles assigns a common Marketing Cloud ID for identifying a person across solutions.
Consolidates IDs across the Marketing Cloud, enabling all solutions to execute against a common Marketing Cloud-assigned customer ID for consistent experiences across channels, experiences and solutions.
Aggregates anonymous data like demographics or behavioral segments with known data like average order value to create a comprehensive profile of each individual.
Attributes: Marketers can import attributes by which to identify and segment customers directly to the Marketing Cloud, as a single point of import for use across solutions.
With a common profile identifying a person across all Marketing Cloud solutions, marketers can activate marketing experiences that are more relevant and meaningful, based on an enhanced understanding of that person across the Marketing Cloud, in real time.
Marketing Cloud Audiences furthers this concept by enabling marketers to reference not only a common profile, but a shared audience library for marketing segmentation and campaigns. Marketing Cloud Audiences lets you share audiences two ways:
Create real-time audiences in the Marketing Cloud that can be used by any solution.
Share audiences created in a Marketing Cloud solution, like Analytics, to the Marketing Cloud to be used by other solutions. (When sharing an audience from a solution to Marketing Cloud, it is not real-time as it requires daily syncing with the solution where the audience originated.)
What is isn’t:
Marketing Cloud Profiles was formerly known as Master Marketing Profile. This term is no longer being used and referred to a broader concept. (Nix it from your vocabulary!)
Marketing Cloud Profiles & Audiences, the core service, is also separate and distinct from Adobe AudienceManager, the industry’s best data management platform (as stated by the Forrester Wave Report for DMPs).
AudienceManager is considered the premium version of Marketing Cloud Profiles & Audiences. It enables advanced audience capabilities such as algorithmic audience modeling, cross-device identification, and syndicating audiences for use by non-Adobe solutions.
What it is:
- 3 things to call out (use cases)
Marketing cloud has two main capabilities
Common ID – one ID that maps to other other IDs in other solutions
*Attributes is the ability to import any data from any owned system (first party system)
How it helps you sell
ANALYICS
Nike has onsite data from which audiences can be created. But if you want to see not only did erin click on shoes but was also at the nike outlet shopping for running, and didn’t do well on her nike fuel band. This is all first data so this data can be imported into Attrbitues. The system of origin can hold categories such as “moderate activity”. This will be sent into attributes.
TARGET this data
Target on fuel band
Target on website use this most as opposed to leaning on offsite
How Marketing Cloud Profiles & Audiences works:
Shared profiles and audiences across all solutions increasing the power and effectiveness of your marketing.
Integrations for all Marketing Cloud solutions are forthcoming, but currently Profiles & Audiences adds the most value to Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target.
For Analytics: Profiles & Audiences gives Adobe Analytics a single ID to reference across the Marketing Cloud. Profiles & Audiences enriches Analytics data with additional attributes about a customer or segment. It is also a big differentiator from the competition, providing a complete view of your customer in which data from every solution enriches each marketing touchpoint.
For Target: Profiles & Audiences enables audience sharing with Analytics as well as all the benefits listed above for the purpose of testing, targeting and optimizing your customer’s experience based on everything the Marketing Cloud knows about them. Target users can also utilize Profiles & Audiences to run reports and segment based on Analytics data.
Activation, formerly known as Dynamic Tag Management, is the industry’s most robust tag management solution and it’s also much more than that. It can be the broker between customers’ onsite-data and their marketing technologies. To add some clarity around how valuable Activation is, before Adobe acquired them in 2013 they had customers paying over $100K for their services – today Activation is offered to Marketing Cloud subscribers for free. Before I delve into what I mean about Activation being a broker, I’d like to highlight that while I’ll be focusing on how Activation helps sell Analytics, Target, and Media Optimizer, Activation can support any JavaScript/HTML based tag – not just Adobe’s.
WITHOUT ACTIVATION
To understand how Activation helps sell Analytics, Target, and Media Optimizer let’s quickly review how these solutions are deployed and used.
Deployment – To deploy these solutions our customers would place the Analytics beacon and Target mbox.js at the top of the page, sprinkle a few mboxes down the page and drop some Media Optimizer pixels at the bottom of the page to create audience segments. Meanwhile tip toing around the 10, 20, or even 50 other tags and pixels in between. That’s just deploying tags, now to enhance each of these implementation typically marketing will have to go to some technical resource like IT to manually make changes in the code of the page to track new events for Analytics, run a test on a new portion of the page for Target, and lastly build a new audience segment for Media Optimizer. Imagine this process for an account with hundreds and hundreds of pages.
This heavy reliance on IT hampers our customers’ ability to extract the full value from our solutions because when enhancements are needed marketers ask for favors from IT and then play the waiting game.
WITH ACTIVATION
What if we could reduce the complexity of all this for IT and marketers so that measuring new information in Analytics is easier, Target users can run more tests faster and cheaper, and Media Optimizer non-technical marketers could drop pixels easily on webpages?
- With activation it’s a completely different story. Logic…Controlled by rules…That marketer defines
Activation also builds trust with IT through permission-based workflows
Activation provides [3 sol] with three primary benefits: Agility, Efficiency, and data flexibility (technology agnostic)
Efficiency: Analytics: Activation also brings greater efficiency to our solutions. For those of you selling Analytics, Activation can be used define rules that control when a certain variable is tracked for instance if a marketer was interested in tracking how many times a product was seen Activation would handle all the heavy lifting to make that happen. Target: no server call wasted. Media Optimizer: tag any combination of pages from one place
CLOSE: We’re using activation to augment the value of mkt cloud, the more successful our customers are with our solutions the more likely they are to increase their investment with Adobe.
At the end of the day Activation can add value to any of our solutions, especially Analytics, Target, and Media Optimizer by making our solutions more agile, efficient, and brokering the distribution of data from one technology to another.
My recommendation to you is to share the benefits of our tag management solution in all your conversations because I guarantee that your customers and prospects will gain more value from the solution you’re selling with Activation. For any questions feel free to reach out to me, your solutions consultant, or our internal consultants – they’ve seen huge success is deploying Activation with our tier 1 customers.
Exchange, formerly known as Data Connectors or Genesis is the go to place to find all Marketing Cloud integrations and apps with third party technologies. To date Exchange houses more than 160 apps and integrations that can be browsed by technology category like Email Service Providers or by Adobe Marketing Cloud Solutions.
Exchange examples:
CAMPAIGN DATA INTEGRATION For Analytics reps a common objective for our customers is to tie data from various marketing channels to their onsite data. These are just a few of the many campaign data integrations that the Exchange offers. Sizmek and Double Click are both ad servers while Eloqua and Exact target are email service providers. With each of these integrations and those not listed here our customers can see in-line how the audiences of ad or email programs behave once they land on our customers’ website.
UNIFIED CONTENT AND COMMERCE For Experience Manager customers with any sort of commerce functionality on their website the Exchange should be a part of all your due diligence efforts. For instance if you find that your prospect uses Elastic Path, Hyrbis, intershop or Magento using the integrations in Exchange customers can control the user experience before and after the shopping cart from the AEM user interface. Instead of users managing products, dynamic pricing, and cart experience in other user interfaces these integrations allow AEM to plug into their commerce providers.
CUSTOMER DATA INTEGRATION Media Optimizer customers want as many lenses to view their customers as possible. Exchange provides all the lenses our customers could want. Using the partners listed here along with a host of many more partners in Exchange our customers can layer demographic, psychographic, and transactional information on top of their customers’ audiences to better understand who they are and what they want.
Finally, let’s talk about mobile. Mobile app marketing is a big and growing market, and Adobe now has the best solutions for it in the industry.
Customer interaction across industries is shifting dramatically from web to mobile, and this presents new opportunities for marketers.
The Adobe Marketing Cloud Mobile core service delivers in-app analytics, audience segmentation and testing through integration with Marketing Cloud solutions.
With Marketing Cloud Mobile, marketers gain a mobile app-specific hub in which they can view and manage their mobile app marketing, metrics and more.
One of the best stories of the Adobe Marketing Cloud is that we integrate everything, and core services is one of the best manifestations of that. Because we take all of this and combine all resources into one, we have better people working on it, it’s more connective, etc. (An SDK that turns on multiple things is better for the customer than an SDK that only does one thing.)
Two components of mobile core service:
SDK: framework to connect APIs such as Analytics which can enable intelligent location marketing (beacons)
Mobile app marketing UX: this is the whole story and framework; you can move from workflow to workflow for your app and it all works together.
Understanding how mobile affects your marketing strategy is pivotal. Individual consumer behavior changes by device, and knowing how an individual is interacting with your brand across channels as well as specifically in your app helps marketers deliver the most relevant experience possible.
Marketing Cloud Mobile plus Adobe Mobile App Analytics provides in-app analytics that measure detailed usage data and allow marketers to set intelligent triggers that send in-app messages, all from a dedicated, app-specific Marketing Cloud Mobile interface.
Marketing Cloud Mobile also gives Mobile App Analytics customers the ability to send in-app messages based on segments identified in mobile. (This is a value-add feature of the Marketing Cloud Mobile core service.) For example, marketers can identify users who haven't opened an app for 30 days and automatically send an in-app message with a promotion, or other message to spark engagement.
When you combine Adobe Mobile App Analytics and Target with Marketing Cloud Mobile, marketers can create A/B or multivariate tests and even personalized app experiences for specific customer segments. Adobe Mobile App Analytics customers who have the Marketing Cloud Mobile SDK installed already have the code in place that they need to begin testing, targeting and optimizing their mobile app experience (based on Analytics data).
With Analytics and Media Optimizer, Marketing Cloud Mobile allows marketers to understand in app-activity and target specific audiences, like inactive users. Through Media Optimizer and AudienceManager, we can form segments around these users and deliver targeted search and display to nudge them back to app activity.
Mobile app traffic is increasing in the double digits year over year across industries, and Adobe can help customers maximize the shift. Adobe Marketing Cloud Mobile helps marketers understand in-app behavior and act quickly.
With solution-powered in-app measurements, in-app and onsite segmentation, and in-app targeting all in one place, Adobe Marketing Cloud Mobile gives your mobile app marketing a home while ensuring it is connected to all the other customer touchpoints that matter.
