Part 1: Adobe’s Art + Science for Today’s New Marketer

Adobe Creative Cloud solutions such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, and Adobe InDesign built Adobe into a powerhouse for developing creative content. But Adobe leadership realized that a natural extension to world-class tools for content creation was an investment in marketing tools that would help organizations understand the value of the creative content they produce, and how to effectively drive consumer engagement with it.

That realization started Adobe on a very deliberate path, one based on a vision of Adobe technology helping our customers drive the entire marketing process—from campaign planning and creation, to execution and optimization. This vision would expand our well-established art, or creative side, to include a new, data-driven science side.

The result of these efforts is the Adobe Marketing Cloud, built through an aggressive build-and-buy strategy combining organic product development with 14 marketing acquisitions to date. We’ve also invested heavily in unifying these solutions through a shared technology architecture and a single user interface. This integrated marketing platform of our best-in-class solutions lets marketers power their marketing plans right away.

The Role of Adobe Marketing Cloud in Facilitating the Consumer Life Cycle

Currently, Adobe Marketing Cloud boasts six main solutions:

It also includes the Adobe Marketing Cloud Core Services platform for data, content, and user management to encourage enterprise-wide collaboration.

Together, these solutions fully optimize the consumer life cycle.

Core services overview
http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Core-services-overview.jpg

Attract and Acquire Customers

At this stage, you’re introducing your brand to consumers who may be interested in your services or products. Adobe Social helps you garner interest by managing your social campaign calendar, including your brand pages on Facebook, monitoring the conversations taking place across social networks, and publishing content throughout your social media channel ecosystem. It also lets you connect your social activities to business results.

You also need to ensure that you maximize the results from your advertising spend. Adobe Media Optimizer does that, helping you manage your paid channels by giving you insight into the optimal media mix of social, paid search, and display advertising, adjusting your adspend to meet any of your defined goals based on data.

Combined, these two solutions help drive visitors and customers to your site (for simplicity, I’ll just use the term “site,” with the understanding that it could be a website, mobile site, or an app).

Manage and Deploy; Engage and Convert

At this point, visitors come to your site unknown and anonymous. They may have visited before, but they haven’t provided any definitive information or established a buying history. Although anonymous, their visits still provide a number of signals, such as geolocation, device, referrer, and operating system. Adobe Target uses those details to gain insight into visitors and predict the type of personalized experience they should see.

Now it’s time to deliver that experience. Adobe Experience Manager assembles disparate pieces of optimized content, images, HTML templates, rich media, and so on, into the personalized and meaningful digital experiences that today’s consumers expect. It also adapts this content based on visitors’ devices and connection bandwidth to ensure it serves an optimal experience.

Once visitors have converted you know a bit more about them. Often, they’ve explicitly provided information about themselves or simply provided additional signals around content consumption. Now you can use these signals, along with known customer information, to expand your personalization efforts using Adobe Campaign.

With Adobe Campaign, you deliver the next best offer simultaneously across multiple channels—email, websites, mobile sites, point-of-sale systems, call centers, kiosks, and others. You can even remarket to visitors who may have not completed an action. For example, you could send a personalized follow-up email with an offer a few days after a visitor drops off without completing a purchase. And of course, you can ensure that email contains optimized content by first testing it in Adobe Target.

At this point, you’ve deepened the customer relationship and are progressively personalizing content across the entire customer life cycle.

Report and Analyze

Now you need to understand the outcome of the experience you delivered—what worked and what didn’t. Use Adobe Analytics to analyze and report on the results. Leverage that information in Adobe Target to further optimize customer offers and experiences and in Adobe Campaign to engage customers across multiple channels. All of this leads to higher conversion rates. Similarly, use analyses and reports in Adobe Analytics to improve results by determining how and where to tune social media efforts in Adobe Social.

These analyses and reports also help you properly attribute how testing and targeting, multichannel campaign management, and social engagement impact your bottom line. Bingo! Now you can see the monetary value of these activities, and, going back to where we started this journey, to the associated creative content.

In my next post, I’ll dig deeper into some of the core capabilities of the Adobe Marketing Cloud and how the core services architecture enables you, the marketer, to become more effective in delivering the personalized and optimized experience your visitors expect.