As I mentioned in my last blog post, the time I spent in the desert with Adobe at the sales conference was incredibly valuable. As the best of breed digital platform, three key themes resonated with me and want to take the opportunity to delve a little deeper into the benefits of the adobe partnership and how it impacts the work we do for clients.
One of the first things I learned is that Adobe has grown tremendously over the past few years and has really cemented its place as the leader in digital content creation and marketing. What was made equally clear is that Adobe’s stable of world-class partners has been instrumental to Adobe’s success. In fact, joint engagements between Adobe and its partners were brought up numerous times as examples of customer successes. This was true across verticals (e.g., Retail, Media, and Financial) and Adobe solutions (Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud). Based on what I saw at the Worldwide Sales Conference, I expect Adobe will continue to engage with its digital agency and systems integration partners throughout 2014 and well into the future.
The second theme centered on the tremendous growth of digital marketing and the importance of creating a compelling and personalized customer experience. Marketers know that every interaction between a business and a customer is a marketing opportunity and a chance to drive revenue. The challenge is that customers control how, when and where they will interact with companies. In fact, customers use a multitude of channels (web, mobile, social, video) and devices (tablet, phone, computer) to engage with businesses. This creates a significant challenge for marketers to determine how and when to engage clients within each of these channels and provide a compelling reason for the customer to take the next step forward in the sales cycle. Adobe’s response to this was clear: Brands interested in driving significant revenue through digital channels must deliver the right message, to the right channel, at the right time. Creating this type of customer engagement requires a well-defined strategy and an enterprise-grade platform with deep solutions capabilities.
The final theme– which ran throughout the duration of the conference – was that Adobe’s strategy, vision, and product platforms – Creative Cloud and Marketing Cloud – have made it possible for businesses to deliver the digital experiences that clients expect. First, I want to segue to a little history lesson that provides context to Adobe’s approach to digital marketing.
Adobe has a deep heritage in digital content creation solutions (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, etc). Legions of digital marketers have been using Adobe’s creative products to generate extremely rich and engaging digital content for many years. The challenge for those marketers was twofold: how to manage all of that content and how to get that content to their customers. Thus, the strategy and vision of Marketing Cloud was born.
The vision for Marketing Cloud was to provide marketers with one location to manage, publish, and analyze the content they were creating. The first strategic step towards the creation of Marketing Cloud was focused on organic product development and/or acquisition of market-leading content management, analytics, mobile, social, customer segmentation, media optimization, and marketing campaign orchestration solutions. The second step of the process involved seamless interoperability between the Marketing Cloud systems and the creation of a Touch Interface to manage everything. This provided marketers with a singular and actionable view of the customer and a singular interface for the management of all marketing processes and activities. The final step for Adobe was to integrate the full suite of solutions from Creative Cloud to Marketing Cloud. This created a unified content creation, management, and publishing system that covered the full marketing lifecycle. Adobe’s strategy and subsequent cloud-based platforms provide end-to-end solutions for creative and digital marketers. By having the right tools in place, marketers can deliver on their vision: to provide the right message, to the right person at the right time.
This conference offered an outstanding opportunity to learn more about Adobe’s business, their solutions offerings, and also engage with key members of teams. I came away from the conference with a fuller understanding of Adobe’s sales and product strategies along with their key value propositions and differentiators from others in their space. I’m excited to see how Adobe’s latest acquisition of Neolane – now Adobe Campaign – will help to orchestrate successful online and offline marketing campaigns designed to drive increased revenue for our clients. Based on the Adobe Campaign sessions I attended and the conversations I’ve had with clients since then, I anticipate tremendous success for this solution.
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