How A Reader-Centric Mindset Sets CMO By Adobe Apart

Rebuilding a website that gets more than 4.6 million page views a year isn’t something to take lightly. A few bad design and technology choices and your readership could plummet.

Risks aside, the CMO by Adobe team took on a full site redesign in 2019 to upgrade the reader experience. The content team that manages Adobe’s thought leadership site partnered with key stakeholders from around the organization, including creatives, brand teams, data scientists, web developers, and more, to plan a successful revamp.

“The site wasn’t organized in a way that was reader-friendly,” said Giselle Abramovich, executive editor of enterprise thought leadership at Adobe. “For example, our top navigation put content into buckets based on format such as narrative stories vs. Q&A, but our data in Adobe Analytics indicated that format wasn’t important to our readers. We found that there are specific topics that are important to readers and used that information to redesign that top nav.”

Beyond getting the site layout right, another goal for the team was to ensure readers didn’t leave the site soon after they arrived. When pages load quickly and seamlessly, the “bounce rate” will decrease. This is one of the areas where Adobe Experience Manager plays a critical role in site performance.

“After all, no matter how compelling a piece of content may be, people need to be able to access it immediately and seamlessly, otherwise you risk losing them to your competitors,” said Tamer Mina, product manager for Adobe.com. “This was one of our driving factors behind the migration to Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service.”

Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service is a cloud-native, purpose-built solution for content and digital asset management.. It enables brands to achieve agility and scale to build and launch new initiatives quickly. With its modern architecture based on containerization, microservices and DevOps, IT and marketing teams can focus on innovating and delivering on business value instead of planning for product upgrades. Brands such as Under Armour and Esri, as well as CMO by Adobe, are already reaping the benefits.

Additionally, with Cloud Service, the CMO by Adobe team, including content creators and developers, was on-boarded with access to the Experience Manager application in just minutes.

“We were able to transition to Cloud Service in just two weeks. Knowing that our teams will have access to future innovations in AEM as soon as they are developed and made available, this was a big win for us.” Tamer said. “Cloud Service offers rich out-of-box capabilities and content customization options that marketers and developers demand, with SaaS-like agility.”

Since implementing the cloud-native CMS, CMO By Adobe is already experiencing efficiencies. For example, the team is able to upload assets, including graphics and videos, in half the time it used to take before. On the reader experience side, bounce rates are down 20%.

“It really does boil down to site experience, and Cloud Service has really helped us deliver an even more exceptional experience for our readers. The decreases we’ve seen in page load times for both web and mobile is a huge contributing factor to readers staying longer, consuming more content and viewing more pages,” said Giselle.

When asked what the team is most excited for in the new year, personalization via Adobe Target was at the top of the list, according to Giselle. “We’re going to go deeper with Adobe Target to further personalize the site experience. We want to ensure that people are reading the right piece of content for them, at the right time.”