How Replatforming Fueled HP’s Customer-Centric Marketing Strategy

Although tech giant HP has been digitizing its customer journeys for a number of years now, the company’s marketing transformation truly started in May 2017, when it went all-in on prioritizing customer experience.

Although tech giant HP has been digitizing its customer journeys for a number of years now, the company’s marketing transformation truly started in May 2017, when it went all-in on prioritizing customer experience.

This change was about the same time that HP shifted its conversation internally to put data at the center of marketing. Previously, HP didn’t have access to the data they needed, as approximately 98% of it was actually being procured by HP’s agencies. As a result, the company had very little visibility in terms of what the cost breakdown structure was for things like paid media and data.

Step one in HP’s transformation journey was a replatforming initiative, aimed at gaining better transparency and insight into customer behaviors. HP operates many different websites across various business units, so connecting the consumer data flowing through each was crucial. At the time, HP’s data was siloed into small pockets of the organization. They needed to bring all of that data together into one unified platform to better guide customer experience management—in real time.

Building a digital foundation

Before replatforming, HP was using a data management platform (DMP), along with data within its CRM system. There was a mass of first-, and third-party data to pour through in order to drive insights. Because the DMP and CRM systems didn’t integrate, barely 2% of advertising was driven by the data in these technology platforms.

After careful consideration, in March 2018 HP implemented Adobe Audience Manager, a DMP that centralizes customer data. Adobe Audience Manager is used to pull in insights from multiple parts of its business to better understand customer behavior, and perform look-alike modeling to find potential customers who are similar to those who have already converted.

Until it implemented Adobe Experience Cloud, HP’s analytics infrastructure was siloed across various sites, with no two implementations being the same. As a result, the company couldn’t tap into analytics as a core infrastructure for data and insights.

Used in tandem with Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager, HP can now analyze data from multiple sources, to develop audience segments. The seamless integration of the three Adobe Experience Cloud solutions creates a real-time customer view, with actionable behavioral customer insights.

With this new digital foundation, HP can now also personalize the end-to-end customer journey both on and off of the site. On-site personalization is enabled through the use of Adobe Target, which uses HP audience data and performance results to serve the right message to the right person at the right time. This also increases return on ad spend.

Today, about 26% of all ad impressions HP serves is based on its data (up from the previous 2%)—and that number is growing.

Furthermore, the front-end experiences of HP’s various web sites still vary, as well as the personas they target, but now, behind the scenes, there is a common ecosystem that is stitching together the data and experiences.

HP’s replatforming initiative is helping to create great customer experiences, and it went a long way toward changing mindsets internally, too — guiding the conversations happening within the organization to focus on a new way of doing business. HP is now able to focus its marketing strategy around engaging with customers in ways that best serve them.

HP uses Adobe Experience Cloud and its analytics and audience management solutions to stay customer-centric. Learn more here.