Adobe introduces Real-time CDP for B2B brands

Despite the dizzying acceleration into digital experiences, cranked up to warp speed in the COVID-19 era, B2B engagement is and will continue to be heavily rooted in trust and relationships. With in-person events on hold, work-from-home mandates, and bedroom backdrops during work meetings, B2B marketers are finding more creative and personalized ways to connect with customers on a more authentic, real level.

For brands dedicated to selling to businesses, the challenge of managing customer experience is multiplied by the complexity of the B2B buying process. Selling to multiple, large buying groups is hard enough with over half of B2B marketers reporting that it’s difficult to figure out how to market to B2B buyers. Various personas with different needs, long sales cycles that average 29 months and buyer turnover also impact the ability to win B2B customers. Then when you layer on complex tech stacks, disconnected data, and siloed sales and marketing teams, meeting customer expectations remains a challenge.

Adobe Real-time CDP offering expands to support the unique needs of B2B brands

Last year, Adobe’s Real-time Customer Data Platform, built on top of Adobe Experience Platform, was introduced to help brands combine disparate data into unified people profiles made up of both anonymous and known customer data. Now, Adobe is extending its Real-time Customer Data Platform to support B2B data and workflows, so that B2B brands can create, manage and activate unified people and account profiles. These B2B enhancements, available next year, will allow teams to coordinate consistent, account-based experiences at scale across channels and teams based on a full understanding of their customers for the first time.

With expansions to Adobe’s proprietary, open-source Experience Data Model (XDM), B2B brands will soon be able to ingest and activate data via B2B-centric data sources and destinations. A new pre-built connector for Marketo Engage will allow B2B brands to connect industry leading B2B engagement data from these applications to create, enrich and update unified people and account profiles.

According to a recent Forrester study, nearly 90 percent of B2B marketers believe that turning data into actionable insights is one of the most important challenges their organizations must prioritize. Having access to unified account profiles is a game-changer for B2B brands and is a capability that customers have been asking for. The expanded B2B capabilities will enable brands to combine multiple account records into a single account profile that updates in real-time and provides all the critical account-level information needed to provide the best account-based experience possible. Customers will be able to view unified account details, attributes, people, opportunities, and more. For example, Adobe’s RT-CDP will be able to update a person’s profile and account association accurately if that person changes jobs during the sales cycle so that a business can stay engaged with the brand champions.

Adobe customers are excited to reap the benefits: “Data provides the pulse of the customer experience, the more complete picture we have of our customers at both the individual and account levels, the better we can tailor our communications,” said Scott Berns, senior director of marketing technology and operations at Lumen Technologies. “Having a unified account profile across Adobe Experience Cloud that’s updated in real-time opens the door to better identity management, which reduces conflicting experiences and enhances our ability to better orchestrate engaging customer experiences.”

For companies with B2B and B2C businesses, Adobe offers a single platform to connect customer experience management (CXM) data and deliver the right experience to every customer. The new B2B capabilities allow brands to bring consumer and professional profiles together into one single profile, while applying appropriate governance controls. This introduces IT efficiencies and opens entirely new use cases for reaching audiences with personalized messaging and offers, and reporting on marketing efforts.

Adobe builds on a steady drumbeat of innovation for B2B brands

The new CDP capabilities for B2B brands are just one of many investments Adobe has made to help B2B businesses succeed:

• Marketo Engage is integrated across Experience Cloud, supporting content workflows with Adobe Experience Manager, bi-directional audience sharing with Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager and RT-CDP and AI-powered content personalization and audience segmentation via Adobe Sensei.*
• Bizible and Adobe Analytics’ integration helps B2B brands uncover new customer insights by enriching individual customer profiles with B2B attributes such as account name, account status, funnel stage, and attributed revenue. B2B revenue teams can analyze site traffic by account or segment customers based on account attributes to get account-level insights on content consumption and overall interests.
• Marketo Engage expanded its account-based marketing (ABM) capabilities to discover net-new target accounts with AI-powered analytics and an extensive repository of B2B company and intent data. Combined with deep integrations to LinkedIn, B2B brands have an end-to-end approach to ABM from discovering the right contacts within accounts to coordinating engagement with sales across the customer journey to measuring the ROI of every touchpoint.

Having all B2B data centralized, unified, and accurate provides brands with the insights and confidence they need to provide the most effective customer experience possible.

*All integrations listed above are not available for Marketo Engage HIPAA ready instances.