Agile is the Key to Digital Marketing Success

Another key topic coming out of the Adobe Summit 2015 is this idea of structuring the organization properly.  Now this is an age old problem and doesn't necessarily just revolve around digital marketing, many organizations fight the structure issue.  I had a mentor that preached to be a successful organization its 80% structure, 10% people and 10% process.  Now that made the people really mad when he said this, because people always want it to be about them.  In reality, it is about them, what he was trying to say is without the proper structure, it doesn't matter how good your people and processes are, they can't thrive if they are always being stifled.

So a day in the life of a digital marketer is too reliant on other individuals for them to be a success, they are stifled by the system.  Now they may produce content and delivering good results, but if the structure of the organization is not optimal, it is preventing these outstanding individuals from being great.  Once the marketer has to jump through so many hoops to achieve the end goal, they are already making compromises.  It may be they are making compromises on the content because they know the content creators will give them push back, or have too long of a timeline, so the request becomes watered down.  The landing page may need a little extra something to up conversion, however that may need a new set of requirements for the web team to build, so to keep things moving the marketer doesn't add that piece.

To be great a digital marketing organization needs to be agile.  Things are changing constantly and the digital marketer needs to move at the same pace, if not faster, than the consumer.  Today the digital marketer is 10 steps behind the pace of the consumer.  The organization tends to be divided into marketer, technical and creative.  These all need to live under the same umbrella.  The second a marketer is waiting on IT or a creative agency, the marketer is not fast enough.

The marketer needs to have those departments set them up for success.  So IT needs to set up the hardware and get the marketer the tools to be self reliant.  IT should not try to control the content being moved and updates that need to be made to websites, landing pages or apps.  Creative agencies need to set up multiple templates and ensure there is enough creative content to fill those templates, but they should not be a roadblock to any content that is released.  If a new email and landing page needs to be created for a real-time need, the agency or brand should not be involved in slowing this process down, the digital marketer should have all the tools and messaging already at their disposal.

If the organization is set up so the digital marketer can see the opportunity (data), glean insight from the data (analysts), create an audience (technical), create a new email marketing campaign (database marketer), create a landing page for the email (creative and technical), create a cross channel ad campaign for that audience (media and creative) and then measure the results (data and analysis), then the organization is set up correctly.  The digital marketer should be enabled to go through this entire process without needing IT tickets, agency or brand approvals or pro-forms to be created and approved from the executive team.  Allow your digital marketing team the freedom to be successful.  Measure their success, give them a budget and guidelines, but empower the digital marketer to drive revenue and jump on opportunities.  The results will speak for themselves.  

Data + Insight = Action and Back Again

Adobe Summit brought with it a great nirvana of a near-future where marketers are able to deliver relevant content to customers creating great experiences.  The words that permeated throughout the conference were those, content, experiences and data.  The big stars of the show were content and customer experiences, which I believe are extremely important as I have written before.  

However, there is no right content delivered at the perfect moment to create wonderful customer experiences without data.  Data is the key to making this all work, and not just any data.  No, I'm not talking about "big data", I'm talking about actionable data.  

Most companies are sitting on a treasure trove of data already.  Without purchasing third-party data, understanding every click, customers have data that can transform their business.  The issue is in interpreting the data, making it actionable.  Actionable data isn't a product, it's a culture.  

Actionable data is the combination of art and science.  The path to actionable data isn't necessarily going out and hiring a bunch of talented data scientists, though it doesn't hurt to have these people on your team.  The path to actionable data is marrying the data with the business acumen.  It's not enough to have data telling you something happened, there has to be an understanding of the business as to why it happened.

Once there is an understanding of what happened (science) and why it happened (art), you have actionable data.  Now you can create optimal tactics to deliver relevant content to create targeted experiences in the digital age.  The great thing about this process is it's circular.  Once a company creates great targeted experiences for their customers, customer behaviors will change and the entire process starts all over again.  There are always puzzles to solve and amazing content and experiences to create.  

Marketing Beyond Marketing

Adobe Summit has come and gone and if there was one big messaging push it was "marketing beyond marketing".  How can marketing be beyond itself you say?  Well that's a good question.  What Adobe had to say was marketing is your product.  So if marketing is your product, then as marketers we have to think beyond what we have traditionally thought of as marketing.  

I love going to conferences with great speakers and company examples of excellence because it really gets your mind flowing.  Of course Adobe is a company that wants to sell you their products in the end, but I truly believe they want marketing to advance regardless if they are your solution choice.  They want to be thought leaders in the space, which in turns sells you more products.  Which oh by the way, is an example of Adobe marketing beyond marketing.

Now as hokey as these tailgates can be, I believe Adobe is out in front of what lies ahead for digital marketing tools.  They want to enable that lifecycle approach to marketing that has only been a tagline.  To manage the customer experience from beginning to end and change the behavior of your customer by being relevant in the content that is provided takes marketing to a whole new level.  

But marketing has to go beyond marketing in organizations.  Up until now the brand marketer has been able to infiltrate the C-suite, but it is the age of the digital marketer and Brand is just one piece of the marketing puzzle.  Brand focused CMO's tend to be advertising first and lack execution around them.  They also tend to defend the brand in strategic meetings instead of evolving the brand around the latest trends, whether they be digital trends or customer related trends.  

Digital marketers have found the C-suite title, with the Chief Customer Officer, but I believe this is just a knee-jerk reaction to an identified problem.  The C-suite doesn't necessarily need to get larger, the role of the CMO must transform.  The CMO must be more of a generalist, someone that understands brand value and developing brands, but they must also be tech savvy and have an extreme customer focus.  CMO's can no longer be the spend first and advertising will fix everything type of leaders from the past, CMO's need to be savvy marketers with an eye on tailoring their marketing spend to better reach the customers when they want to be reached with an experience that matters.  An ad being fed that promotes awareness does not cut it anymore.

When your message is omnipresent in multiple channels when your customer wants it to be there, marketing has truly gone beyond marketing.  We are a long way from that reality, but the framework is being laid which will allow marketers to deliver meaningful content when it matters most.  It's cheesy, yet high concept at the same time, which is why I don't think many people in the audience understood what Adobe was trying to say.  I had a leader who taught me you have to say something seven times in seven different ways for people to understand what you were really saying, well this is one time in one way, so I can't wait to hear or see the next articulation of this concept. 

Adobe Marketing Cloud Summit 2015

Upon returning from Adobe Marketing Cloud Summit 2015 I've had some time to digest the experience fully.  The Summit is a great weak of digital marketing discussions.  Of course since this is an Adobe event, the discussions are around the products Adobe is selling with the marketing cloud.  Fortunately for me, and Adobe, the overarching strategy Adobe is putting together with their products is extremely compelling.  

Just five short years ago Adobe had $0 of revenue from digital marketing products.  I believe in 2014 the amount of revenue was over $1.2 billion, but I didn't write the number down, it's not important.  What is important is Adobe, through mostly acquisitions, has created the most compelling digital marketing hub/cloud in the industry.  Adobe rates highest on the Gartner Magic Quadrant and it is in its infancy.

Having come from a software product background also, it is impressive they have been able to start to integrate most of these products together.  What Adobe is setting out to accomplish is no small feat.  Creating a singular platform from many disparate products is what marketers have to do on a daily basis with their own systems, but Adobe is attempting to make that life a whole lot easier.

Last year we were introduced to the marketing cloud strategy, a set of 6 products with 6 core services that support all the products.  I was very bullish on what was being layed out by Adobe.  The idea of taking a customer through their lifecycle with the company from anonymous to known, from new to dormant, all in one platform is very appealing to me as a marketer.  Adobe is trying in essence, to let marketers control their own destiny.

Today marketers have to fight to get things done.  Marketers destiny is in the hands of many other groups, from website developers, IT, database engineers and creative agencies.  Sometimes it amazes me that we as marketers are able to get an email out the door, or target an individual on a website.  The amount of effort sometimes makes a campaign not worth doing at all.  

There are three main thoughts I came away from the Summit with this year.

1. Audiences are the key to digital marketing
2. Adobe has a messaging issue
3. AEM should be the center of the marketing cloud universe

Audiences

I have always firmly believed the customer is the center of all businesses, yet I never believed they were the center of the marketing universe.  My belief is that everything starts with the customer and they are all different in their various ways.  Advertising tended to lump all the customers into one bucket and make the product the center of the universe.  Digital has come along and helped marketing become more targeted, but the hardest part of targeting is creating the single customer database.

Marketers have had to deal with a plethora of disparate databases of customers, which has made targeting especially difficult.  The need for database engineers to create a data warehouse bringing all the different customer databases together with each individuals spend slows the process of driving behavior through targeted experiences down to a crawl.  

Adobe audiences are referred to as a Core Service.  What that basically means is that all of the applications of the marketing cloud can use this customer database.  This makes audiences the key to allowing the marketing cloud to be the most targeted customer solution I have seen to date.  

Adobe tracks a customer from their first anonymous visit, to authentication, through the entire customer lifecycle.  The applications then allow marketers to target those customers in so many different ways.  From purchasing of ads, to email marketing, to push notifications for mobile apps, through retargeting campaigns, audiences can be used in all of these ways.  Same database.  No need for database engineers.  Hallelujah.

For example, a customer may come into the website, authenticate and reach a certain part of the purchasing funnel.  Through Analytics, this group of customers can be identified and a custom audience can be created.  Through AEM, email creative and a landing page can be created, by marketers, with approved assets from the brand team, to be used to create an email campaign for these guests.  With Target, different messages can be tested to determine what is the most effective message and offer for a customer to create the conversion.  Through Campaign, this audience can be used to send an email, measure the results, and a new audience can be created with all of the customers that didn't convert to create retargeting campaigns.  That's pretty powerful stuff right there.

Adobe Messaging

One of the concerning parts of the conference was the introduction of 2 new products for the marketing cloud.  The idea of having 6 products is already a little overwhelming.  The constant comments I was hearing from other attendees was confusion on what products they need and why.  This is a problem for Adobe.  I believe they have 1 product, the Marketing Cloud, with many features inside the product.  By keeping the multiple product structures, it is showing some infighting within Adobe.  As I said earlier, these products were purchased by Adobe to then be integrated into the cloud.  It seems those product owners are fighting for their power, which is making it confusing to develop the strategy with Adobe as a partner.

I also believe this product strategy makes the cloud more cost prohibitive.  Because so many products have to be purchased, it becomes more expensive than turning on features.  There also tends to be salespeople dedicated to the certain products, so there is a loss of 1 dedicated resource.  

I'd like to see Adobe move away from products an into features.  This will simplify the messaging and allow customers to purchase based on what they need, instead of what Adobe is trying to package.  It will allow more customers to be locked into the ecosystem of Adobe, instead of keeping their current products that aren't as integrated.  They should take some lessons from Apple.  The ecosystem is the most important play for Adobe right now and they should have a longterm vision for this strategy.  Once customers start crossing over into different products within the marketing could it will make it impossible to leave, because the customer database and all the processes are driven by Adobe.  

AEM is the Center of the Cloud

The digital marketing platform all started with the purchase of Omniture which turned into Adobe Analytics.  Analytics is the heart and soul of the Marketing Cloud and I believe has the largest  user base by far.  Analytics may be the soul, but I don't believe it should be the heart of the solution.  

Adobe Experience Manager is the heart of this solution.  It is the product that puts the marketers destiny into their own hands.  The ability to manage assets, create approved templates, change website messaging, create emails and create landing pages with variable content is so powerful.  It even can build mobile applications across platforms and manage all those apps in realtime.  

This is the heart.  Analytics allows the identification of opportunities to enhance conversion and make more money, but without AEM a marketer is stuck waiting for many other departments to help them take advantage of the opportunity.  Campaign allows for great multi-channel marketing, but without email creative and dedicated landing pages, the marketer is in a waiting game.  Target allows offers to be measured in real-time and a winner is chosen, but to get to that point, AEM has to manage all of the content and messaging.

Content is the key to delivering targeted experiences to customers in the digital age.  Let me say that again, content is the key to delivering targeted experiences to customers in the digital age.  The faster a marketer can deliver that content, through whichever channel, be it mobile app, website, email, social or ad, the bigger a competitive advantage that company will have over its competition.  This is why AEM is the heart of the marketing cloud/hub.  AEM will ultimately create the competitive advantage, because without it, the content will not be delivered at the speed in which customers will not only demand, but will also change their behavior.  

Bravo to another great Summit from Adobe.  Adobe is truly the leader in this nascent category and they are continuing to push the envelope with their vision.  I am super bullish on Adobe and what the future holds for the Marketing Cloud  Plus, having Imagine Dragons play at the bash was super awesome!!!