An integrated solution to digital marketing
Mike Quinn explains the key products that make-up Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite
For more information on Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite please visit the website here.
The pace of change in the digital landscape is continually accelerating. With the explosion of social, video and mobile content, consumers can today interact with businesses from a wide range of sectors using multiple channels and devices, such as smart phones, tablets and laptops. As a result, they need to figure out how to best attract, engage, and retain customers in a world where the reach and quality of experiences directly impacts their success.
In order to effectively compete and connect, brands must adapt by providing relevant, consistent messaging across all forms of media and show that their investment is optimising consumers’ experiences. At the same time, they also need to be providing solid metrics to demonstrate this success – particularly in social media channels.
In this new environment, other areas are also feeling a knock-on effect and no more so than in marketing. As well as shifting from traditional to digital media, consumers now have more choices and control over how and when they want to engage with marketing messages, leaving marketers faced with more and more challenges. Not only do they have to create digital content to interest and convert customers, but they also need to measure the success of their campaigns to ensure they are delivering the greatest return on their marketing spends.
On top of this, the consumer is also changing. Online customers today have constantly evolving needs and expect to be served relevant content from the wide variety of sites and sources they can choose from. Whilst marketers need to ensure they are meeting these needs, it’s vital that brands get this right. Just as it’s wonderful to receive a personal greeting from your favourite brand, it’s at best irritating, at worst an insult, to receive content that has been personalised, but doesn’t resonate at all with that particular consumer. If brands are able to deliver personalised content to suit the mood of the customer, they are then able to attract their attention for longer.
In developing personalised content, they’re a variety of options available to marketers which meet the customer’s ever changing and demanding needs, whilst also providing a significantly greater return in online marketing spend. However, with the multitude of platforms and channels available that offer these services, businesses can end up with 10 or more suppliers for different products just in digital marketing and so need to tread carefully. Resolutions therefore need to provide a comprehensive service that includes everything from web analytics to optimisation as well as powerful insight into the performance of online marketing initiatives, such as the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite. By using one provider that offers all of these services businesses can save both time and money and ensure they are giving the right online experience to the right person at the right time.
How Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite helps marketers:
Optimise ad spend
The Adobe Digital Marketing Suite maximises the impact of a company’s advertising spend across and within channels. Well before the customer even gets to a company’s website, marketers need to be able to run effective search engine marketing management, which requires continuous optimisation based on data from multiple sources to effectively process pay per click bid management. For example, Adobe Search Center+ enables the process of bidding on keywords to be automated, ensuring that each advertisement still gets a top place on a page but doesn’t pay the premium cost – saving businesses both time and money.
Once the customer has landed on a website, there is a whole treasure trove of non-PII (Personally Identifiable Information) data on people visiting a site that can be used to make sure relevant content is being delivered. These could be insights such as whether the customer is a new or returning visitor, what they’ve done on the site on previous visits, what products they’ve previously shown a high interest in, what campaigns they’ve been exposed to and so on. Depending on the individual, the consumer can then be served a bespoke experience of the site, benefiting from a personalised page suited to their needs.
For example, if you’re an airline, you can geographically target consumers with relevant advertisements of flights, or based on screen resolution, a consumer goods retailer may want to display a mobile products page. The level of detail that marketers can drill down into is phenomenal – from the time of day, day of the week, frequency of visits or where they were directed from, such as from a search engine, via an affiliate or by bookmark.
Gain real-time insights
Managers can use the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite to gain a complete picture of how consumers are interacting with the business using real-time segmentation, dashboards, and reports. This technology plays a core role in providing businesses with key insights and understanding about customer behaviour that is so beneficial to them.
For example, Test&Target, enables retailers to run real time multivariate tests around subjects such as site behaviour, environment, timings and where the customer was directed from. Using this data, marketers can provide the most compelling and relevant content for different audiences, increasing conversion rates and getting the best possible ROI. Test&Target results may show that a relaxing picture placed on a page may convert more sales in the evening and weekend than a more business looking image on the page, however on a weekday the opposite may be true. This allows brands to ‘push the winner’ – in other words, promote the page or product that is most likely to convert a sale in the relevant circumstances based on the variables mentioned.
Search&Promote is a slightly different spin on this and instead brings up relevant items to complement other customer searches. For example, if a consumer wanted to buy a pair of shoes, it would also bring up socks and shoe polish, enabling sites to potentially benefit from multi-selling.
Bring data together
The Adobe Digital Marketing Suite manages, collects, and brings data together from multiple systems into a flexible, integrated platform allowing businesses be able to complete the jigsaw and see the bigger picture. With a business acquiring large quantities of rapidly evolving data from a variety of channels, such as call centres, mobiles and email, they need to be able to analyse large volumes in real time in order to make well informed strategic business decisions. Adobe Insight addresses this challenge and allows organisations to make a timely, intelligent business decision. Through collecting and extracting the data from multiple sources to visualising and analysing it and making it easy to share, Adobe Insight has fast become a favourite product within the Digital Marketing Suite and essential for any business that doesn’t want to be left on the back foot with its marketing strategy.
Once a digital campaign is implemented, it’s important that marketers are able to analyse and provide insight into the performance of online marketing initiatives. Using tags, Adobe is able to track a complete journey, from a tweet to the person arriving on the website, which not only allows businesses to see their ROI and provide sales percentages to the boardroom, but also allows marketers to see where a person drops out along the chain. And what’s really great about this, is it allows the business to pick-up with people who dropped out and retarget them with similar deals / relevant offers so a sale from a brand that may have lost can potentially be picked up and made to that same person at another time.
With the growth of social media, more and more marketers are being expected to provide metrics to prove their investment is worthwhile to the business and as such analytics is steadily becoming hot property. With marketers constantly finding it difficult to get the answers they need, Adobe launched SocialAnalytics. It removes the guesswork associated with social media engagement, and replaces it with strategies and experimentation. It’s also able to drill down into the actual conversation in terms of tweets, comments and blogs so marketers are able to see the type of people driving discussion and influencing others.
Atlantic Records is an excellent case study of how this can work. Having signed some the world’s biggest artists, social media is a vital form of promotion for them but they were previously unable to link its impact to record sales. Using SocialAnalytics, they were able to see how a tribute to Amy Winehouse, at MTV’s 2011 VMA awards, drove 170,000 social media mentions and how that social media spike was followed up with 159% increase in visit to the artist’s website and a 302% increase in sales of the record. Likewise, during the promotion of Bruno Mars’ new single they were able to see when a particular Tweet from his phone drove spikes in traffic to his website and who downloaded his tracks.
Leverage insights
As consumers continue to increase their expectations of speed, quality and efficiency online, it’s important that they continue to receive an experience that exceeds this. Therefore tools which allow imagery to be optimised in real-time including sizing, editing, colours and 360 spin are a great way to reach and interact with consumers. A great example of a brand doing this is Very.co.uk. The company was able to tell that customers who watch product videos on its e-commerce sites tended to convert three times more than those who do not, and therefore, wanted to replicate the same, detailed customer experience on the new mobile app. By using the Adobe Scene7 platform, mobile shoppers were able to easily select items to zoom in on for extra detail using a pinch and zoom touchscreen feature, and to examine other images and full screen videos, helping them make a more informed purchase. Shoppers can also easily change colours of the product they are browsing and access alternative views – enhancing their experience on this site.
Just as the web reshaped the advertising world a decade ago, the new world of digital and social media marketing is forcing companies and ad agencies to re-evaluate where, how and when they engage with potential customers.
For more information on Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite please visit the website here.