The State and Drivers of Data Marketing

What matters most is the optimization of the customer experience, relevance and (perceived) customer value as a driver of business value. Data-driven marketing certainly is not (just) about advertising and programmatic ad buying as some believe. Nor is it just about campaigns. On the contrary: if done well, data-driven marketing is part of digital marketing transformations whereby connecting around the customer across the customer life cycle is key.

Very succinct vision of what data-driven marketing is, it's all about the customer experience.  The advent of "big data" was nothing more than gathering extra data about the customers.  Gathering data is only the first step of the process, albeit a time-consuming one.  The good news is after the hard work of gathering the data has been completed, the harder part starts.  Once you have data, making sense of the data and creating actionable outcomes to enhance the customer experience becomes the goal.  This is very hard work.  It takes plenty of analysis and insight to reach this goal.  But the companies who will do this the best will be the ones that succeed in the digital age.

Among the key takeaways of the data-driven marketing report by the GlobalDMA:

• 77% of marketers are confident in the data-driven approach and 74% expect to increase data marketing budgets this year.

• Data efforts by far focus on offers, messages and content (marketing) first (69% of respondents). Second ranks a data-driven strategy or data-driven product development. Customer experience optimization unfortunately only ranks third with 49% of respondents.

• Among the key drivers of increased data marketing: first of all a need to be more customer-centric (reported by 53% of respondents). Maximizing efficiency and return ranks second followed by gaining more knowledge of customers and prospects.

I believe the first step in the process is understanding where the puck is going to be and skate in that direction.  Marketers are understanding this data revolution is coming and they are saying the right things in surveys.  The real question will be how to get there.  It's easy to identify problems, it's hard to implement solutions.  The marketers who will show they are adept at change will thrive in this new paradigm.  

Customer analytics is something I have focused my entire career.  In the casino industry we have had the optimal opt-in mechanism for many years and have collected amazing amounts of data about our customers behavior.  We have used this to create targeted marketing campaigns to our customers, so I believe in the direction the entire industry is taking.  Always start with the customer.  It will lead to creating better experiences and more profitable results.

 

How Not To Use Marketing Automation

Normally I would never suggest not using a marketing automation for anything, but it is a funny title so I'll let this slide.  I would even argue that bad marketing automation is better than no marketing automation, but not by much.

Generic Broadcasting – The time that you save with marketing automation should be used to not only improve your content in the first place, but also to personalise through segmentation. Consumers in all market places are becoming more and more sophisticated, and can spot poorly executed marketing automation. And their perception is likely to be that you don’t care about the communication.

This is the first step of marketing automation.  So many times the implementation strategy of the marketers installing the new system is to do what they are currently doing, but in a new fancy tool.  I think this is an okay step if the desired outcome is to QA the output to make sure all the data is correctly hooked up.  Other than that, marketers should have an understanding of what the new capabilities of the tool they have purchased and at least start with a few general segments to make sure there are some differentiation in the messaging.

My advice is to bring in a group that has experience in the tool who focuses on the strategy behind utilizing the tool to help build a roadmap.  It's okay to start broad, in fact I recommend it.  But don't tart from scratch.  Start implementing the "low hanging fruit" opportunities in your business right away.  This will be your baseline and then you start to grow from there.

Being A Spammer – Automated emails are a great way of engaging with recipients who have shown an interest in your email, but you should still spend time focusing on the quality of your communication. Avoid the usual spam trigger words and don’t go sending an email to thousands of people all at the same time. Marketing automation can increase the risk of spam, but a good email provider will help you with this.

All the good Email Service Providers (ESP) will provide services to assist you in "warming up" your domain to the Internet Service Providers (ISP).  This is a necessary first step to make sure everyone can see your emails when you send them (deliverability %).  

However, this does not mean your job is over.  If you decide automation will allow you to send emails to your customers everyday with messages which do not resonate with most of them, you will quickly be flagged as spam.  If this happens too many times, the ISP's will block your emails.  When I started at one property, Yahoo was blocking all the emails and the deliverability rating was in the high 60% range.  It took a long time to get unblocked, so make sure your content is relevant and you stop sending to customers that are not opening your email.

Bad Time Automating – Automated communications are tricky: you’re writing them at a time where the context of how the communication will be received isn’t known. Most of the time, this is absolutely fine as you are only scheduling a few hours ahead, but beware of shifting events. 

Most of the time your emails will not be "set it and forget it".  You may run with an automated email blast for customers that signed up today with an offer to engage further, and that is fine in most cases.  In a lot of the cases the automation is used to increase the segmentation capabilities, not to create a generic email blast to all your customers over and over again.  

If you run into this problem of timing, then forget about scheduling too far in advance.  Take your time and make sure the message is relevant to the customer at the time the email is sent.  This will save you from looking like someone that doesn't understand the customer at all.  That is the worst thing that could happen.

Communicating Constantly – With marketing automation, communications with your audience should become a lot easier. But don’t get carried away. If it is easier, then the temptation will be to communicate more often, but this is as off-putting for a recipient as communicating poorly. It can also have a detrimental effect on the size of your audience.

The quickest way to being marked as spam or unsubscribed is to over communicate through email.  Just because its easier to do, doesn't mean you should.  Make sure you are communicating a little more than your customer is engaging with your brand.  Its okay to communicate everyday if your customer is buying something everyday, but this is usually not the case.  If your customer purchases a product once a month, maybe every other week is a good cadence to start.  Remember, the beauty of a marketing automation tool is your customers don't have to all be on the same communication cadence, they can be on their own, as long a you have enough content to make that strategy make sense.

Send And Forget – One of the objectives of most communications is to elicit a response. Whether that is an open from an email, a click on an advert or a reply / share from a social media post. So when you are automating, you should always have a process in place for monitoring their impact – you should be able to set this up as an email or smart phone notification. Ignoring this can result in recipients not talking (positively or negatively) to anyone, something to avoid at all costs.

As I said above, this strategy can be detrimental to having a marketing automation tool.  Never send without analyzing the results.  All marketing automation campaigns are living and breathing entities, they need to be changed and enhanced constantly, because as you change behaviors the communication cadence and the offers need to change with it.  There are also segments of customers in the campaign who are not getting what you are throwing out, so constantly look for opportunities to enhance the campaigns taking these customers into account.  Analyzing is the most important step of the process.

Why CEOs Say Yes to Marketing Automation

Ten short years ago, it was rare for a company to have a marketing automation platform in place. Since then, it’s become ever more clear that acquiring marketing automation (and applying the expertise to make it hum) is a huge competitive differentiator. SiriusDecisions research indicates that 80% of the organizations with the highest-performing demand waterfalls (based on the number of won deals per 1,000 inquiries) have implemented marketing automation platforms. This tallies with other research; the 2015 report “Rethinking the Role of Marketing” from Gleanster and Act-On found that Top Performers were 20% more likely than the average organization to use marketing automation technology..

I think it is still rare for most organizations to have a marketing automation platform, but what is even more rare are companies who are taking advantage of their platform.  The promise of marketing automation is very enticing as this article articulates.  The benefits of a well-run marketing automation program is an extreme competitive advantage.

1. Marketing Automation Lets You Put the Customer in the Center of Your World.

List management. Marketing automation lets makes it easier to segment your lists by field values (explicit data such as title, department, industry, company size) and by implicit, inferred factors (often actions) such as web pages visited, eBooks downloaded, emails clicked on. It also lets you sync chosen data back and forth with a CRM system.

Well beyond the realm of salespeople, marketing automation lets you manage your customer base on a level of personalization that is not possible otherwise.  Some say these platforms make the relationships with customers less personal, but that is a fallacy.  With the amount of personalization and targeting capable with these platforms, the customer gets a more personalized experience with marketing automation.  

The amount of time manual processes take to manage the customer, it is impossible for these processes to really give the best experience to the customer.  There is just not enough time in the day.  However, a marketing automation platform can create customized communications based on all of the data described above, including behavioral information, geo aware messaging and preferences of communication channels.

Campaign management. Automated programs can save time (which is money, yes) and take a little human error out of your programs. You can set them up to replicate successful lead nurturing or onboarding programs, for example, and they will run exactly as programmed, no matter who misses work on Tuesday. You can add prospects as they enter your world (perhaps through a form) and exit them (perhaps to another program, or to sales) as you learn more about them, or as they become increasingly qualified. You can set up trigger emails (thank-yous, congratulations, expiring trials) and landing pages that make offers or fulfill requests, showing how responsive you are.

Campaign management is a difficult process if you have different programs pulling lists, then fulfilling communications and measuring results.  The amount of time saved by having a platform where everything is integrated and can trigger off the behavior of the customer is very powerful.

6. Marketing Automation Takes Care of the Established Customer

The platform gives you a structure you can scale in your retention strategy. Start with using a nurturing educational strategy to support onboarding. Move on to keeping your customers in the loop, educating them about new features, showing them new plays with old features, and keeping them abreast of changes in the industry that affect them. Take the same techniques you use to notice when a lead is warming up and apply them to noticing when a customer is looking at an upsell … or needs attention to prevent churn.

Retention is the most important part of the database.  The greater the number of sales coming from your established customer base allows for the greatest growth in your business.  Marketing automation at its heart is best for the established customers.  The platform is designed to drive more business from this segment.  Since the majority of most companies revenue comes from loyal customers, having the ability to grow this groups sales is essential to a longterm stable business model.  The marketing automation platform should be at the center of this model.

7. Marketing Automation Spurs Revenue and Growth

These benefits are all pieces of a puzzle that every company using marketing automation puts together in its own unique way. The common denominator is that most companies that apply marketing automation – whether they use every feature or just the basics – will see faster growth and post more top-line revenue.

Well who doesn't want that?

6 Rules for Creating Killer Email Campaigns

Email marketing still reigns supreme for most businesses when it comes to ROI.  The funny part is how many businesses are not taking full advantage of the medium.  Email is a channel and should not be seen as a strategy unto itself, it is just another way to communicate to the customer.  But because of its low cost and effective targeting capabilities, it is a channel that should be at the top of most companies priority list.

1) Map out the customer flow

Once upon a time I worked on the growth engineering team at Twitter. We were tasked with building something that could turn new signup users into die-hard Tweeters. The secret sauce to user activation was…email! But before we knew when to use email, we had to map out the Twitter user journey.

This is key to a marketing automation.  The first step of a campaign is to identify the goals for the campaign.  After that, the visual mapping of the workflow will save hours of time and allow for better if/then scenario processes to take place within the campaign.  When done visually, it also is easier to see pitfalls and mistakes.  This may seem like double work, but it is an essential step.

2) Master the balance of building your list, while not asking for too much

You’re ready to begin building your email list and customer base. You’ve also heard that the more info you have on a customer, the better. Besides, how are you supposed to create highly personalized email campaigns without any data on a user? Before you start pushing sign up forms with 20 form fields to all of your website visitors, you must first understand that customer intelligence should be built over time.

I am a big fan of finding out 1 thing about your customer in every interaction.  Transactional data about what your customers are buying is the best information to have, but also asking your customers a question with each interaction is not time consuming for them and through time will build a plethora of information for you which then can be used to further segment your customers.  Be careful what you ask.  If you ask something specific about behaviors, your customer may expect you to use this information right away and if you don't, they may become disenfranchised.  

3) Embrace marketing automation 

People say marketing automation isn’t personal and ruins your brand reputation with robot-like communication. I’m going to argue that it actually makes your communication more personal because it can be used to send messages based on individual behavior. Marketing automation makes it so that no two people receive the same messages.

This is a must in my book.  There is no better way to have targeted, individualized communication with large sets of customers without it.  Marketing automation tools should be a fundamental piece of the marketing technology.  It allows for the management of the customer, regardless of the channel.  It makes multi-channel communication possible.  I believe this is the center for all outbound communication, regardless of the channel.

4) Offer value with every touch  (Eat24)

You don’t need a reason to call grandma, but you should have a reason for sending an email to your subscribers. Promotional blasts are the bread and butter of ecommerce companies, and I’m not saying they’re a bad practice, since they do generate revenue. But, before you send another marketing campaign, you should always ask yourself, “Will my customers care?” The answer of course should always be, “Yes!”.

I worked with a company that did an email blast every 2 weeks regardless of if there was anything new to communicate.  The offer that was sent was usually the same offer with a different twist.  

Not only does this approach start to feel the same, which will lead to customers ignoring the email, it also doesn't create a sense of urgency for the customer.  If there is always a timed offering and it is always the same offer, customers will not feel the need to reply to the call of action.  They will start to learn there will be this new offer next week so maybe I'll just wait until then.  This limits the effectiveness of your communications.

5) Recognize lapsed users and bring them back  (Memebox)

Customers sometimes leave. While some loss is inevitable, others are absolutely preventable. A bad marketer doesn’t know who has left or who is about to leave. A good marketer recognizes the signs of churning and targets those users with the perfect message to bring them back.

The best time to market to a customer is before they become inactive.  Once a customer is inactive or has left, it is usually too late and those customers are very hard to regain.  It is very important to identify customer that are about to churn or are changing their buying habits in a negative fashion.  

For instance, a customer may purchase from you with a frequency of once a month, however over the past 3 months they have not purchased anything.  Lets say in this instance your active customer database is purchases within 12 months.  If someone who consistently purchases every month, but has not in the last 3 months, you as a marketer have to change your communications with this customer.  This customer is in danger of churning and you can't wait for 9 more months before they become inactive to recognize this.  At that point it will be too late.

6) Perpetually tinker with A/B testing

Email campaigns, like fine art or software, is never finished. There will always be something else you can do to improve the performance of a campaign. When looking for an email platform, find one that allows you to A/B test any part of your email.

Marketing automation campaigns are never finished.  They are constantly evolving no matter what the situation is.  Testing should be a standard part of all your campaigns.  It is important to remember that a baseline needs to be established before the testing takes place.  Also, be careful not to overlap tests that may have influence on results at the same time.  You always want to make sure you understand what changes drove what results.  If there are too many tests and changes at once, there is no way to possibly understand the impact of the tests.

I would add a number 7, analysis

Find yourself a good, easy to use business intelligence tool and analyze the performance of these email campaigns.  Create many different attributes of your customer.  Slice and dice the data to look for opportunities.  Identify groups of customers that aren't performing up to the standards of others, these are the customers that become new segments to target with different communication and content strategies.  This also is a must in my book.

What does it mean to be a data-driven marketing success in 2015?

Ian Michiels writes for mycustomer.com:

Micro segmentation over 1:1 personalisation

Even when data is readily available to inform highly targeted engagement, someone actually has to produce the creative and copy to trigger the engagement.

I was on a panel at an Adobe event late last year when the topic of 1-to-1 marketing came up.  I have always been a huge advocate of trying to get as close as you can to 1-to-1 marketing, but that comes with a caveat.  The cost to get to the elusive everyone is individualized is massive.  When I say as close as you can, what I mean is start from the top of your customer list (not by alphabetical order, but by some worth and frequency or potential worth metric) and work as far down that list as you can to create 1-to-1 marketing for your best customers.  The other customers you want to have as many segments as makes sense, but always allow the data to drive those segmentation decisions,  

Automating up-sell and cross-sell campaigns

Marketing is the only function in the business that actively communicates across the entire spectrum of the customer lifecycle, from the inquiry to a loyal customer. That raises two very interesting questions that data-driven marketing has answers for:

• Should marketing own the customer lifecycle?

• How should marketing allocate time, budget, and effort across the customer lifecycle?

As I commented on recently in my article Retention is King, retention's the first place I start when implementing a marketing automation program.  The customer lifecycle should be owned by marketing.  Marketing has all the tools to automate the communications in the relationship and target based on behavioral and demographic data.  When it comes to the question of time allocation, make sure the retention programs are dialed in.  They will never be finished and you will always be tweaking, but then you can move on to acquisition and reactivation.  It is much easier to cross-sell or up-sell a loyal customer than it is to acquire a new one.

A/B testing on landing pages and email campaigns

According to the 2014 Gleanster Marketing Resource Management report, only 60% of small and mid-size firms conduct A/B tests on email, landing pages, and website properties. It’s actually shocking to learn how much you really don’t know about your customers when you run A/B tests on creative and copy.

In sales they say "ABC", Always Be Closing.  In marketing automation and data driven businesses we should say "ABT", Always Be Testing.  The caveat to this saying is there needs to be an understanding of a baseline first.  So if you are implementing a new program, let it run for a bit (unless it is a total disaster), use analytics to look for opportunities and test those opportunities.  Don't just test for the sake of testing, always let the data drive the opportunities and then test the hypothesis.

Machine learning is your best friend

One consistent theme that keeps coming up in our advisory sessions is that marketers want help in data analysis. Thanks to advances in computing power, data analysis that previously took days can now be done in seconds and often in the cloud. Machine learning applies rules to data sets and looks for correlations between data. Does this do the job of a marketer? Heck no! What machine learning does for marketing is help isolate trends that should be investigated further. Marketers still need the context about customers and products to translate those correlations in the data into action.

As I said just above, let the data drive your testing.  Machine learning and data mining techniques can uncover insights within your data that the human eye could never perceive just by looking.  Many marketers want a predictive modeling tool to spit out an answer as to what they should do and just go do it.  If that were the case, why do we need the marketer?  It is important to make sure to understand what the outputs of these tools provide and test their findings.  Without the business acumen, the output could be very flawed.  Don't jump to a conclusion, use the insight to form hypothesis about your customers and test away.  Remember as I wrote before, Data + Insight = Action.

Retention is King

There are too many companies asking, “How do we acquire more users?” that should instead be asking “How do we get better at keeping the users we already have?”.

Its easy when approaching the problem of growth to think that you just need to get more users, after all that seems to be the very definition of growth. However, if you take a step back though and think about growth as the maximization of user-weeks over time, it quickly becomes apparent that focusing on retention has a much larger effect than topline growth. This is also much more of a sustainable growth mindset. Rapid user growth followed by rapid user attrition is an indicator of unsustainable growth. Strong retention of users over time is a good indicator of product-market fit, something you’re hopefully looking to achieve anyway.

Retention is the place I start everywhere I go.  Building a strong retention program is the key to success for any business.  There's the old "It's much cheaper to keep a customer happy than find new ones" saying, but it goes beyond that.  If one thinks about it logically, the bigger base of loyalty business that is retained, the more money one will make.  Retained/loyal customers have many advantages over new or dormant ones.  

Customers in retention campaigns have a well-defined pattern of behavior

These customers are perfect for targeted promotions, cross-sells and upsells.  Because of the purchasing and communication interaction behavior stored from these customers, tailoring offers specific to the needs of customers is the easiest way to convert into sales.  The less that is known about a customer, the more shotgun approach is taken and less likely to obtain real revenue.

Customers in retention campaigns have less expensive communication channels

Because the customer is known, the communication with the customer is much cheaper on a converted basis.  Even through the direct mail channel, which can be as high as $3-4 per piece depending on how elaborate it may be, the conversion rate is much higher on this type of communication.  Most communication in this channel can be near free, with email and push notifications through apps.

On the other side, acquiring new customers is very expensive.  Even if going completely online, the conversion rates are so small compared to the cost per click or action, that it makes the customer acquisition cost upside down for 2 - 3 purchases for many companies.  If the business needs to go traditional advertising routes, now the cost becomes staggering.  

Retention customers bring in the most revenue

While this varies from business to business, I doubt you will find many longterm successful organizations that don't have this phenomena.  The loyal customer is the bread and butter for the business and can be relied upon to grow revenue.  Within retention campaigns there are customers of all different types and understanding the loyal customer that can spend more money is the best opportunity for profit growth.  

It may seem counterintuitive to look for growth in your loyal customer base, but I have always thought of it like this.  The more customers that I can have in the active customer base, the more opportunity I have for growth.  Acquisition rarely can go away and there should always be a plan to acquire more customers, but that cost should decrease as the business matures.  For a very mature business, this cost should be as low as possible.  

A simple way to illustrate this is 

New Customers + Retained Customers + Reactivated Customers = Active Customer Base.

So if the business can acquire at a consistent base, lets call this 1 million customers per year and retain the majority of their customers, lets call this 10 million customers, then they can grow their active customer base by close to 1 million per year.  Now if those customers are retained and a new million come in, the growth lies in increasing the retention customers.  Otherwise, it costs too much to try to double your acquired customers, especially the more mature the company is.  Try to focus on retention first, it is truly the King.

Southwest Airlines Making an Impact in Marketing Automation

I love Southwest Airlines.  They have been the ,most profitable airlines by creating a business model which serves both their customers and their shareholders.  Southwest has managed to delight their customers and they are one of the few airlines that actually turn a profit, plus they haven't gone to the nickel and dime your customer model that has been popular in the industry.

The one area they have been weak in is database marketing/marketing automation.  The emails my wife and I get from them are very generic.  These emails have never been tailored.  This is the same in direct.  I have a Southwest Visa card and I still get an application direct mail to this day.  They also send some of these applications multiple times per week.  I tend to forgive because I am not a fan of the nickel and dime approach most other airlines employ.

Out of the blue I got an email that was actually targeted, well I hope it was targeted and not everyone received.  They sent me a tier upgrade promotion if I flew 3 roundtrips in a 2 month period.  To give a little background, I was flying much more a year and a half ago and I was an A-list, but recently I haven't needed to fly as much and I lost that status.  What I hope they are doing is looking to see that I have the propensity to become an A-List and they are betting that I will take them up on this offer. 

I happen to be taking a couple of flights in that time period, but I was going to be one roundtrip short.  Now this is where the psychology of tier benefits are interesting.  In my experience, a company doesn't necessarily get a customer to do something drastically different in their behavior to get to the next tier level.  This is true in my case.  If I hadn't been taking those 2 other trips, I would not have flown 3 roundtrips to make it to A the rest of the year.  But since I was taking those trips and I was going to be close, I decided to take 1 more trip up north and see my stepdaughters.  I would not of otherwise taken this trip.  So the promotion made them some incremental revenue and has kept my loyalty with Southwest.

This could be a less targeted approach and I just happen to think it is because of my propensity.  They send me an email last week reminding me of the promotion ending, however they did not reference I was 1 roundtrip away, so they aren't exactly where they need to be yet.  But, if Southwest can put together a strong direct program with their superior business model, then other airlines will have even more to worry about.  Here is to hoping they are moving in that direction.

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.  

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!!!