Adobe Summit 2021: Why Marketing Teams Need To Fully Embrace The Digital World
- Written by Kelly Lindenau
- Published in Industry Insights
The industry’s rapid transformation to the digital medium blurred the lines between B2B and B2C buying experiences, paving the way for prospects’ demands for self-service buying experiences and community-driven approaches. While B2B marketing teams have no choice but to meet these needs, they often lack the tools to execute it.
To help address these pain points, the two-day 2021 Adobe Summit revolved around the need to embrace the digital medium while simultaneously rolling out new solutions to support organizations through their journey and provide the digital engagement customers are looking for.
Featuring a variety of famous faces, including Serena Williams, Dan Levy and Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s CEO and Chairman, thought leaders dove into the world of digital transformation and examined how it will shape the industry moving forward. With more than 400 sessions, training workshops and community activities, the tracks included Analytics, Insights and Activation; B2B Marketing and ABM; Campaign Management; Collaborative Work Environment; Content Creation; Developer Ecosystem; Digital Commerce; Digital Document Productivity; Personalization and Trends; and Inspiration.
As the Summit provided solutions, tips and tricks and advice on how to create a more personalized experience for customers and prospects, key trends that were highlighted include:
- The importance of personalized content;
- How to take a humanized approach to selling;
- The continuing evolution of AI and how it assists almost every marketing endeavor;
- Personalized, data-driven selling experiences; and
- The latest innovations and solutions needed to embrace the digital medium.
Building A Community Of Like-Minded Peers
Instead, marketing teams should go beyond just building a cohesive brand experience and turn it into a complete, diverse community culture within the brand, which includes connecting all customers by creating a collaborative platform. In Peloton’s case, for example, it has built a community of fitness enthusiasts who work hard and motivate each other, and has even delved into sub-groups, whether it’s “Working Moms” or “Black Girl Magic” to forge more intimate relationships. The fitness giant also enables its users to seek each other out based on common interests.
Given the desire for personalized and humanized experiences, Treseder explained that a community-based strategy will help customers and prospects feel more connected to the brand and valued, thus more likely to take further action. Additionally, she continued, this enables customers to become brand advocates, highlighting the need for organizations to keep interacting with customers post-purchase to ensure they don’t feel like just another number.
Building a community between a brand and its clients revolves around listening and letting customer input guide marketing technique and tactics. When building this community, internal teams need to make sure they’re aligned and communicating the insights and feedback they’re receiving.
The Continuing Role Of AI
Of course, the Summit also emphasized the need for the behind-the-scenes work that builds this diverse, humanized culture. With all aspects of marketing campaigns requiring personalization, almost all the session speakers highlighted the importance and ever-increasing capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI).
AI is the gift that keeps on giving, as software and technology companies are constantly reprograming the intelligence to satisfy a variety of needs. Whether it’s scaling personalization, increasing an organization’s agility in reaching new buyers or even working to fill the gaps left the phase out of third-cookie parties, some sort of AI implementation is essentially a necessity for all marketing organizations at this point.
In terms of generating first-party intent data, specifically, the speakers pointed to AI’s ability to identify a prospect’s journey in real time and direct that feedback to sales reps and/or marketing teams as a huge component of personalization.
Though empathy falls into the same field as personalization, empathy takes tailored content to the next level by saying, “we don’t just see you, we feel you, too.” As stated in a session presented by Amit Ahuhja, VP, Experience Cloud Platform & Products, Adobe; Alyssa Raine, Group VP of Customer Marketing Platforms, Walgreens; and Kara Kelley, Principal Consultant, Adobe, marketing teams can’t be afraid to show their humanity and provide content that relates on customers and prospects alike on a more personal level.
As it stands, the days of overly formal sales pitches are an aspect of the marketing past. With all the information prospects need at their fingertips, they’re beginning to look for organizations that they relate to on a personal level. In order to remain competitive, organizations need to embrace the nuances of the digital world head-first and work to keep up with the latest trends and demands to see continued success and convert key accounts.
Exciting Innovations
Throughout the course of the two-day event, there was no shortage of new product innovations and releases from Adobe. All seven of the new resources are designed to help marketing teams thrive in the digital age and address common pain points, including optimizing the customer journey, utilizing first-party intent data and much more.
The Adobe Journey Optimizer is an enterprise application for marketers that optimizes the customer journey across both inbound and outbound customer touchpoints. Key features include combining outbound marketing with one-on-one engagement and using intelligence decision-making to create customer journeys that are more relevant.
For its part, the Adobe Real-time Customer Data Platform (CDP) helps user build relationships with customer through first-party, data-driven customer acquisition and engagement. As a complement, Customer Journey Analytics help brands integrate and standardize online and offline customer data for simple analysis, while the Marketing System of Record manages and connects cross-functional teams and their work across the entire marketing lifecycle.
The two new updates to the Adobe Experience Manager include Headless content management systems, which can deliver content as data over APIs and help with content automation, while the Experience Manager Assets Essentials is now the default asset management capability across all Experience Cloud applications.
In terms of Adobe Commerce, its new capabilities include live search for relevant content on an organization’s website and product recommendations for customers.
Adobe Experience Platform Collection Enterprise leverages Adobe’s globally distributed network to collect and deliver data to Adobe applications and other systems and provide data collection software development kits to ensure apps are providing the best CX. For more digital experience insights and takeaways, as well as Adobe’s latest product launches, check out the Summit on-demand now.