Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly

This week’s articles include a look at the viability of responsive design as mobile conversion rates hold steady, considerations for launching an affiliate marketing channel, and steps retailers can take to better leverage mobile to connect with customers.

• As mobile conversion rate stagnates at 1pc, time to reassess responsive web design? [Mobile Commerce Daily]: Mobile buying behavior is unique, and responsive web design may not be the best solution to optimize mobile conversions.
• Affiliate Marketing: Advanced Commission Structures [Practical Ecommerce]: An overview of the various considerations when launching an affiliate marketing channel.
• 4 steps for leveraging mobile to better connect with customers [Retail Customer Experience]: Supporting customers’ in-store goals with mobile and investing in systems to better understand digital influence on in-store sales are included in ways to better use mobile.
• How Retailers Use Welcome Emails to Engage Consumers [MarketingProfs]: The findings of a new survey include evidence that 40 percent of marketers are not engaging with customers within 24 hours of their first interactions with the brand.
• Google PLAs are poised to produce over half of retailers’ paid search clicks by year-end [Internet Retailer]: Google’s product listing ads’ click volume is growing significantly faster than standard listings.
• Sears borrows from Pokemon Go for app-based in-store scavenger hunt [Mobile Commerce Daily]: Sears moves to incorporate learnings from the success of the augmented reality-based game, Pokémon Go.
• 56% of online retail searches take place on mobile devices [Internet Retailer]: More than half of retail-related searches are occurring on smartphones or tablets, and that increases to around 80 percent for location-based searches.
• This is the first airline to list seats for booking on Airbnb [Business Insider]: Lufthansa, in a surprising move, becomes the first airline to list flights available for booking on Airbnb.
• How Virgin Hotels’ digital marketing strategy has taken shape [Tnooz]: Responsive design and A/B testing have played important roles in the development of Virgin Hotels’ digital marketing strategy.

The post Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/news-and-resources/point-sale-retail-travel-weekly-58-18/

Why and how chatbots will dominate social media

Since the early 2000s, brands have experimented with social media platforms and networks to communicate with customers and prospects — first through weblogs, then eventually through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Although the capabilities and sophistication have continued to evolve, at its core, social media has remained a platform to facilitate human-to-human communication.

But then the robots moved in.

Robots, though more specifically virtual robots or chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI), are transforming the way brands do business with their customers. Domino’s was one of the first companies to dabble in AI, allowing customers to order pizza by tweeting a pizza emoji to @Dominos. On the backend, a bot scans to confirm the tweet was not a hoax and processes the order.

More recently, Taco Bell unveiled its TacoBot within the Slack messaging platform that allows busy workers to chat with a bot to order a taco. And at Facebook’s F8, 1-800-Flowers, CNN, Spring — a retail shopping startup — and others released chatbots for Facebook Messenger. These bots offer new ways to shop, make purchases, read the news and more within the Facebook platform.

While all this sounds exciting, what does it actually mean for consumers, and what’s to become of the “humans” on social media?

Chatbots as the factotum for all business needs

The first thing to understand about chatbots is that most won’t introduce new capabilities; instead, brand chatbots will centralize where and how customers engage, using social media as an operating system.

Consumers will engage with bots in three ways: content consumption, customer service and productivity or transactional engagements. Social media is already part of many of these activities between brands and consumers, but social media acts as a gateway to direct consumers to the brand website, blog or separate channels. Instead of using social media as a portal, consumers can read and receive information, ask technical questions and even make purchases from one chatbot.

Take for example customer support. More than one-third of customers already prefer using social media rather than the telephone for customer support, and most consumers expect a response within an hour — if not faster. That’s a taxing load for brands, but the enhanced AI through chatbots makes it feasible to accommodate.

This won’t be the painful automated voice response for most phone customer service — which is good news since consumers are increasingly impatient with customer service. Chatbots will be able to quickly understand the contextual request or problem from the customer rather than force them through a series of selection menus to understand the problem.

Personalized to the context of your life

The second way consumers will benefit from chatbots is through personalization — and this is where social media plays a big part. Unlike the SmarterChild bot hosted on AOL Instant Messenger, the potential for bots is not just completing tasks you assign to it, but understanding the context of the user’s life. With Facebook integration, chatbots already have a rich data source to understand user habits around when they check their device, interests, most valued relationships and upcoming plans and schedule, so bots can deliver relevant updates, information and recommendations that are both location- and context-aware.

Many brands already target content on social media to specific audiences and locations, but there is no silver bullet currently to fully personalize what, when and how messages are delivered to customers. Even the current chatbots available on Facebook have room to improve in this department. Try using one if you haven’t yet, and you’ll receive a flurry of push notifications and updates from the bot to continue to share news and updates. But there is hope: Bots should get smarter with more human interaction, and will learn which information individuals really want, and when they prefer to receive it.

The future is now… almost

While there is no doubt this bot-driven social media system is the future, there is still need for improvements before the bots officially take over. Even beyond the need for improved contextual understanding of when to share updates, there is also no common language or intuitive way to initiate or end chatbot conversations.

Kinks aside, the good news is that artificial intelligence learns, and the more we all experiment — both brands and consumers — the better these tools will become. Although a PR disaster, Microsoft Tay was in some ways a success in demonstrating the incredible speed that AI can learn and adapt. (And also raised the need for brands to find ways to code against or prevent AI from learning unsavory and offensive language.)

Although bots are moving in, and likely to become mainstream within three to five years, humans will still have a place in social media. However, that too will change. As bots become equipped to handle text content, the human side of brands and consumers will gravitate toward new, richer ways to engage, including virtual and augmented reality. So despite the Hollywood horrors around bots versus humans, social media will remain — at least for now — a dual arena where both can coexist.

This post originally published in Techcruch.com. To view the original post, click here. 

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/social-media/chatbots-will-dominate-social-media/

In the World of Content Marketing, the Consumer Is King

The post In the World of Content Marketing, the Consumer Is King appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/36819/

ADI: Zika Fears Could Keep Americans At Home For Olympics

New analysis by Adobe Digital Insights (ADI) indicates that while Americans are quite interested in the the 2016 Rio Olympic games, many are going to be watching from home this time around, partly because of trepidation about the Zika virus.

As part of its analysis, ADI looked at global flights booked to Rio and surrounding airports for the first six months of 2016. Not only are flights to Rio down overall, but flights booked are also lagging the major growth in bookings seen for the 2014 World Cup—despite the fact that the Rio Olympics offers twice as many tickets.

“We’re dubbing Rio Olympics 2016 the ‘stay-at-home Olympics,’” said Becky Tasker, managing analyst at ADI. “We think Zika could be driving some of this. We looked at social mentions surrounding Olympics and the Zika virus, and we found that the U.S. is exponentially talking about it compared with other countries. We think that could be affecting travel to Brazil.”

“Our prediction is that this Olympics will be very mobile-centric in that people will be watching it from their mobile devices,” Tasker added. “The UEFA report the team produced a couple of months ago predicted that the event was going be the most mobile event ever. Based on the fact that booked flights to Rio are down, we should see more mobile consumption for the Rio Olympics. It will be interesting to see if marketers have shifted their strategies in terms of advertising to communicate with this audience that is trending toward being stay-at-home.”

ADI is also betting that Rio will boost some product category sales around 80%. “We typically see that major sporting events drive the desire to gear up,” Tasker explained. As an example, during the Sochi Olympics, sales for winter sports gear (figure skates, hockey equipment, ski equipment, and snowboard equipment) grew 82%. “Expect similar trends for the Rio Olympics,” Tasker said.

In terms of social buzz, the Rio Olympics is lagging behind other events. It’s possible that nonrelated events are taking away from the Olympics’ social media thunder, ADI said. According to the analysis, daily pregame social buzz is lagging the World Cup and Sochi Olympics a month prior to opening ceremonies.

When looking at social buzz across the world, the U.S. takes home the gold for Olympics-related fan engagement in social media. Great Britain is in second place and Canada is in third.

 

Additionally, U.S. athletes are seeing the most social mentions, ADI found. U.S. tennis champion Serena Williams is generating the most global buzz on social channels heading into the Rio Olympics. She has five times more social buzz than any other Team USA athlete.

See the infographic for Rio Olympics trends; click here to view it on SlideShare.

This post originally published on cmo.com. Click here to see the original publication. 

The post ADI: Zika Fears Could Keep Americans At Home For Olympics appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/adi-zika-fears-keep-americans-home-olympics/

Blog post planning

Blueprint Redefined: Building a Better Foundation for Customer Experiences

Digital marketing has evolved incrementally over the last two decades. Marketing teams have grown from managing single websites, to managing dozens of web properties, and then to managing email marketing, search, display, social media, and mobile. New, and often disparate, technologies are implemented each time an additional channel is added.

With renewed focus on customer experience, it’s more important than ever before for marketers to rely on a comprehensive digital foundation. Businesses that have this foundation stand above their competitors because they’re prepared to respond to the rapidly growing list of challenges the experience age throws at them.

Higher Customer Expectations Impact Digital Marketing.
In an increasingly mobile world, people need to be able to complete any task in any location, or at the very least, start processes or journeys in one location or on one device and seamlessly complete them on another.

Additionally, people want experiences to be both relevant and personal. They expect the option to vote, board a plane, call a car service, order a meal, enter a stadium, check into a hotel, see a concert, buy a vehicle, ride the subway, and much more on their own terms — and all through the technology embedded in their phones, watches, or any other devices they choose.

Experiences and Campaigns Need Something in Common.
Delivering a consistent customer experience requires a common set of tools and processes. Companies must focus on building foundations that centralize the core components of experience creation and delivery: personalization and analytics along with campaign, asset, and audience management.

1. A Centralized Layer for Content and Campaign Management
By combining the processes used to assemble and deliver campaigns for websites, mobile, and email, you can ensure the consistency and quality of the experience. The goal is to allow the assets, messages, and offers attached to one marketing campaign to be easily repurposed, delivered, and optimized as the customer engages with the brand across channels or devices. Think “design once, use repeatedly” while personalizing your message for each channel and audience.

2. A Common Layer for Audiences and Personalization
Companies need ways to assemble content differently for diverse individuals and customer journeys. For example, if your webpage doesn’t change its content to reflect a search-engine query or an action in your mobile app, you’re missing opportunities to improve customer experiences through personalization. When done right, personalization can decrease the number of steps customers need to take to complete their given journeys by offering more relevant information at each stage.

Delivering personalized experiences at scale also requires audience management, which facilitates the creation of comprehensive customer profiles. The heart of audience management is a combination of powerful first-party data, augmented with relevant information from second parties, and then further enhanced with third-party data from the open market.

3. A Common Analytics Layer Pre-Engineered Into Every Channel
Customers leave fingerprints on each screen and channel they visit. If you’re actively listening, you can ensure that you assemble the right content and then target it based on the rules for each channel, campaign, and audience. But, this requires a centralized approach to analytics — an approach that understands behaviors on mobile devices, within apps, or on websites and then connects those to specific individuals whether they’re authenticated or anonymous.

4. Security for All Layers, Processes, Touchpoints, and Data
Your customer information, permissions, and preferences are gold — but only if you don’t violate customer trust! An important component of trust is communicating how you use and secure your valuable customer data. It’s important that your organization establish a policy of transparency when you communicate what you’re doing with the data you collect — and then you must manage that policy. Another important step for security is ensuring that your enterprise meets all of the relevant security and compliance standards such as FedRAMP, SOC 2, HIPAA, GLBA, and/or ISO 27001.

The key to securing customer data is to build a foundation where all touchpoints, channels, and campaigns can share the same centralized customer profiles — with a common security, authentication, and personalization layer on top of that.

These Steps Will Help You Build an Experience-Based Foundation.
As we’ve seen, there’s room for improvement with foundations based on the incremental adoption of disparate digital-marketing toolsets. Below are some steps to consider as you move toward a more experience-based foundation:

1. Prioritize the capabilities that position you for growth.
2. Determine what your ultimate core competency should be.
3. Find the common ground on which you can start building now.

The Blueprint Is Redefined — and Your Future Depends on It!
Digitally based super brands — like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Netflix, and Amazon — have created new industries by providing breakthrough customer experiences. If you want to be a leader — and not just have your business survive the digital transformation wave, but also thrive by riding it — your organization must fully embrace the complex needs of its digital experienced-based foundation. To learn more about building an experience-based digital foundation, be sure to read our guide on The Blueprint Redefined.

The post Blueprint Redefined: Building a Better Foundation for Customer Experiences appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/blueprint-redefined-building-better-foundation-customer-experiences/

Introducing Segment Comparison for Analysis Workspace

Segmenting is one of the core strategies that marketers are taught in any Marketing 101 class. The basics state, “not all of your customers have the same characteristics or behave in the same manner, so you should employ different marketing tactics for each distinct group.” For example, Pixar movies appeal to some very different groups (children, parents, couples — come to think of it, almost everyone!), but the messaging and ways in which their movies are promoted go beyond just getting a five-year-old to laugh.

How Does Segmenting Work?
Traditionally, segmenting was based on simple perspectives (e.g., age, gender, geography). For example, if a new Pixar movie was coming out, they would make sure they advertised the movie heavily on children’s shows and did tie-ins with other promo partners. These ads and tie-ins might focus more on getting quick laughs or introducing adorable characters. Then, the movie would be positioned on shows like Ellen (even before Finding Dory) or promoted on social channels to focus more on the storylines or how it promised to be a bonding experience for parents and kids.

With the massive amount of customer and behavioral data at marketers’ disposals nowadays, how can we leverage this data to identify the key characteristics of audience segments that are most important to our businesses? How can we, as marketers, better understand the behaviors that drive more positive interactions, sharing, and conversions among different groups of customers?

Segment Comparison Ups the Ante!
Segment Comparison intelligently discovers the differences between your target audience segments through automated analysis of all of your metrics and dimensions. Released last month, the Segment Comparison tool will be the first in a series of audience analysis and discovery tools within the Segment IQ feature of Analysis Workspace. You can now uncover new customer insights, that were previously time-consuming — or even impossible — to obtain, just by comparing and surfacing the significant behavioral differences between segments as well as actionable insights to drive your key performance indicators (KPIs). With this new capability, marketers and analysts can gain new visibility into which segments are most important to their businesses and why, so they can acquire and convert new customers much more efficiently — saving both time and budget.

In visiting with customers, we noticed that many analysts spend a lot of time and effort comparing their various Adobe Analytics segments to each other to understand the actionable differences between them. Often, segments overlap one another or may have not-so-obvious differences that may be lurking deep within the data. Uncovering these hidden insights can be like trying to pick a needle out of a haystack! There can be hundreds — even thousands — of different data points to compare between segments. Manually sifting through these cascades of data to find the most significant differences is often a HUGE bottleneck — if not altogether impossible!

The best part is that all of this is done with a few clicks of your mouse.

So, How Can You Benefit From Segment Comparison?
First, let’s recap! Segment Comparison allows you to:

1. Complete a comprehensive segment analysis within mere minutes;
2. Use advanced data-science techniques to automatically compare every single dimension, metric, or data point between any two segments; and
3. Automatically discover the most statistically significant differences that distinguish one Adobe Analytics segment from another.

Now, how can this benefit you specifically? Having this information will enable you to more effectively create highly targeted marketing strategies that will resonate with your segments based on their unique behaviors. Stay tuned for even more tips and tricks to help enhance your bottom line!

The post Introducing Segment Comparison for Analysis Workspace appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/introducing-segment-comparison-analysis-workspace/

Say All the Right Things With Personalized, Real-Time Marketing Offers

Helping a customer solve a problem by delivering the right real-time offer can be a big win for your marketing campaign. Saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, however, can be detrimental to your brand image, resulting in a poor experience that leads to decreased loyalty, lower conversions, opt-outs, and lost revenue.

According to Zimm Zimmerman, vice president of personalization at Merkle, “Personalization isn’t a technology; it’s a strategy. It’s a conversation with the customer, and to do it well you have to listen to people and respond accordingly.”

The best conversations arise from a deep understanding of your audience and what matters the most to them at any given time. When customers receive on-target offers across their digital devices in precisely the moments they are ready to consider them, you are joining them in conversations that are critical to the success of your brand.

Saying the right thing doesn’t have to be a grueling endeavor. Just as public-speaking skills can be improved through training and practice, implementing personalization and real-time, predictive offers across marketing channels can be perfected by learning how to carry on robust conversations with your customers. The key is to start small, be willing to accept lessons learned, and celebrate wins throughout your marketing organization.

Speak Clearly and Concisely.
Conversations that start with mixed messages tend to go nowhere fast. Many of these miscommunications can be contributed to the way some organizations are structured — with separation and silence taking precedence over teamwork and communication.

Effective real-time marketing often requires significant changes that are implemented from the top down. Through leadership and initiative, it’s up to the chief marketing officer to make sure all of the different teams are aligned and working together efficiently and sociably.

In many cases, this all boils down to eliminating both technical and organizational silos within the organization while focusing on the customer journey. Brands can start by shifting their physical work environments to dynamic settings where ideas can circulate. By allowing team members to create, test, share, and learn with one another in unrestricted environments, businesses will essentially be cultivating workplaces where innovations flourish.

Listen Carefully to Your Customers.
The English writer G.K. Chesterton once said, “There’s a lot of difference between listening and hearing.” Sometimes, we hear our customers and believe personalization is as simple as using their names in the subject line. However, if we really listen, we discover personalization requires a deeper understanding of our customers.

How do marketers listen to their customers? By evaluating the data. Between emails opened and links clicked to social interactions and downloaded apps, your customers are doing a lot of talking across their digital devices.

That’s why it’s crucial for you to really listen to what your customers are saying by understanding the data they are generating. Start by going after relatively connected channels such as emails, websites, and digital displays. Focus on picking this low-hanging fruit before moving on to more difficult integrations.

Respond Thoughtfully.
Once you’ve listened, you should be ready to deliver the perfect responses via personalized, real-time offers that prove to your customers that you know exactly what they want, when they want it.

Real-time marketers have a wide range of possible offers to extend to customers — from enticing them into making last-minute purchases to providing valuable on-property information designed to deepen relationships while creating brand advocates. The possibilities are endless, making it necessary to carefully consider various factors and competing goals — such as revenue, loyalty, and likelihood of success — when crafting your next offer.

Another consideration to make when defining the best response is the context of the offer. Geolocation technologies, such as iBeacon, make it possible to incorporate valuable context into real-time offers. Brands that are tapped into the capabilities of real-time interactions can further improve reactions based on the past and present behaviors of customers as well as the information they are providing along their customer journeys.

Watch What You Say.
You may have the technology in place to facilitate relevant and personalized real-time marketing, but that doesn’t mean you should be calling your customers by name every chance you get. In other words, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. You don’t want to be disruptive, intrusive, or violate privacy.

Consider the ramifications of targeted offers that your customers may find a little creepy. Missing the mark with personalized messages not only demonstrates that you don’t understand your customers’ tastes or context, but also may lead to opt-outs, reduced loyalty, and negative brand perceptions.

Real-time marketing is inherently personal, and personalization done poorly can be disastrous. Before you begin new conversations, make sure you take the time to know and understand exactly what you are saying to your customers.

Start Conversing.
Carrying on conversations with customers across channels requires acting in a coordinated and unified fashion to deliver smart, timely offers to consumers. This can be a huge shift from traditional static campaigns carried out across disparate teams and systems — which is where integrated marketing solutions, such as Adobe Campaign, can help.

Once you have integrated customer data across marketing channels, and you are keeping a close eye on the customer journey, your marketing team will be able to deliver consistent, relevant, and personalized real-time offers that cultivate dynamic and responsive conversations with your customers.

By going beyond talking to have valuable conversations with your customers, you’ll be making their lives simpler and more familiar. And, there’s a serious payoff when you are saying all the right things at the times that matter most.

To learn more about creating personalized, real-time marketing offers, be sure to read our full whitepaper, Your Most Crucial Conversation.

The post Say All the Right Things With Personalized, Real-Time Marketing Offers appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/campaign-management/say-right-things-personalized-real-time-marketing-offers/

Landing pages and why they matter

Keeping Data Security as Top-of-Mind Saves Time and Money!

In the past few years, there have been enough data breaches in the news to convince us that we don’t want to be there. The bad reputation will cost you in current business and seriously impair the prospects of gaining new business — and that is all on top of the millions of dollars in immediate cleanup costs. Marketers are taking notice. In a recent survey, 51 percent of respondents cited security concerns as the top reason their companies delayed the acquisition of marketing technology.

This makes sense. Taking reasonable steps up front to ensure good security certainly saves time and money down the road and puts your company in a much better position to prevent problems, react to new vulnerabilities, and lessen the impact of any breach or suspected breach. The right marketing-platform provider will help you to form a secure foundation for your marketing efforts.

Security Compliances Should Be the Keystone of Your Secure Foundation.
Best-in-class companies use security programs that establish a baseline or model for them to use and follow, with guidelines that come in the form of security controls that enable you to establish and follow a process that regularly searches for, identifies, and addresses potential risks.

These protocols go a long way toward streamlining the process of adopting a digital platform. For example, after reaching our Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) compliance, I was on a call with a customer who said, “All right, tell me about your security program.” I replied, “Sure, we just achieved FedRAMP compliance, and we’re working toward SOC 2 (service organization control 2) and ISO (International Organization for Standardization). We don’t feel that those are going to be very difficult because FedRAMP was such a high bar.” The customer said, “Oh, you’re FedRAMP compliant? Okay, I don’t have any further questions regarding security.” We’ve since added SOC 2 and ISO 27001 as well as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). From a security perspective, we’ve seen that having those compliances up front goes 80 or 90 percent of the way toward providing customers with the marketing solutions they need.

A Good Partner Helps You Guard the Perimeter.
No security program is perfect. Perpetrators are continuously developing their skills and finding loopholes, making security an endless battle. Open communication about security compliances and practices is critical at every step in the vendor relationship. You’re putting trust in that vendor to handle your solution, and you don’t want to risk that they may be compromised or that you might be part of a compromised solution in the future with them.

When looking at vendors, it’s important to find ones that are transparent in their security, meaning that they’re willing to discuss and disclose, to allow for auditing, to both walk through and talk through what they’re doing for security — and even to discuss their various shortcomings, acknowledging no security program is perfect. They also should have the capacity and willingness to create custom security features based on a client’s needs.

It’s also important for the vendor that you’re using to have a real structure in place to address security situations as they happen. Having a good security model in place allows you to identify threats and react to them quickly, significantly minimizing — or altogether avoiding — any damages.

Here’s an example of how this can work. We once had a customer who noticed some anomalies happening within his environment. He knew the first step was to contact our internal security team, so he initiated the process, and we set up a war room. We engaged all the potential parties that would be able to help influence and affect the systems. By immediately going in and addressing the irregularities, we were able to ensure that nothing was compromised. Even though we found a vulnerability, we were able to isolate it, mitigate it, and address it before a breach actually occurred.

Bottom Line
Knowing that the vendor and customer both want to ensure everything is as secure as possible — and having that kind of openness — is really beneficial to establishing a secure digital foundation. It helps keep customer data safe; it helps with user experience; and ultimately, it helps with building and maintaining customer loyalty, reducing legal fees, and increasing the bottom line. It all comes down to the old adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Follow this link to learn more about how a digital foundation leads to digital success.

The post Keeping Data Security as Top-of-Mind Saves Time and Money! appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/keeping-data-security-top-mind-saves-time-money/

New Adobe Experience Manager + FrameMaker Integration Facilitates Great Customer Experiences.

Today’s digitally sophisticated customers expect a broad spectrum of content to be available as they research their purchasing options. It is becoming evermore common for potential customers to expect to read user manuals, service and repair guides, and other technical documentation before making their purchase decisions – especially in industries where both the sales cycle and the product is complex.

When technical communication is unavailable or doesn’t display optimally on users’ devices in the manner we already expect marketing content to, end users often become frustrated, confused, and unable to accomplish what they initially set out to do. If your technical communication is causing frustration, your customers — as well as your potential customers — are likely to direct that frustration at the product and not at the help and support documentation. It is all too common that such frustration turns into dissatisfaction with the product AND the brand.

Existing customers are demanding technical content that is natively published across all channels, mobile devices, and formats, including mobile apps. They also want it delivered and displayed faster with useful personalization filters in place to enhance their consumption experience. They want the technical information to be easily consumable, easily searchable, interactive in nature and immediately actionable. These challenges that use to only plague marketers are now extending to technical communicators as well.

Unfortunately though, most companies that produce technical content for their products are still producing unstructured documentation that doesn’t translate well onto mobile devices, which is where most people are attempting to view it. Customers equate poorly presented documentation as an indicator of less-than-optimum product quality and performance.

Companies that ARE creating DITA-based technical documentation that plays well in the multichannel world often have it hosted on yet another platform within their organization. This creates another silo that complicates your ability to understand the customer journey, resulting in poor customer experiences across purchase and use of your products.

Sales Cycle Impacts
Gone are the days when you had the luxury of getting phone calls from confused customers. Today, consumers would much rather tap or swipe their ways to your competitor — one that may have an integrated platform that creates a smoother, more consistent pre- and post-purchase customer experience.

To address this problem, Adobe has recently integrated the popular Adobe FrameMaker document-authoring-and-publishing application with Adobe Experience Manager. This integrated solution speeds up the delivery of technical content on the market-leading platform that has helped marketers deliver compelling digital experiences.

“Our tech doc team manages a library of over 200 technical guides, and typically publishes over 25 guides each month, said Kathy Miller, Senior Director at CyberSource, a Visa company. Given our Agile software development methodology, we operate with short release cycles and need to reuse a lot of common content across our library. To increase efficiency, we wanted to find a solution in which we could author, review, approve, and publish all within the same tool set. And, since we currently author our content in FrameMaker, it made sense to stay in that environment to reduce the team’s learning curve. Adobe’s solution will allow us to do this, as well as help streamline our localization process.”

For almost three decades, FrameMaker has been keeping pace with demanding technical-communication needs for small-, medium-, and very large-scale documentation environments. Its integration with Adobe Experience Manager represents a full appreciation of the changing needs of your multichannel customers, as they do the majority of their work on mobile devices.

Combine Your Component-Content Management and Web-Content Management
There are powerful advantages to storing your technical documents along with your other content in a digital asset management system (DAM). Document managers and creators will have access to your entire content collection, and marketers will have easy access to technical documentation. Additionally:

1. You can measure and gain insights into how customers are using your documents in the context of your entire content collection and customer journey. This can inform product production and innovation strategies as well as help you optimize your marketing initiatives.
2. You can track what your customers are searching for within your documents, providing insights into what content you can further recommend that would be most helpful and lead to cross-sell opportunities.
3. Technical-communication teams, like marketing teams, will be able to measure the impact of their efforts on customer engagement and other business objectives.
4. Marketing data about customer needs becomes more available to document teams, ultimately providing opportunities to create more relevant documents designed in response to customer needs.
5. Just as technical-communicators will have greater visibility regarding how their efforts directly affect customer satisfaction and business success, marketers will see how good documents can enhance — even accelerate — a complex sales cycle.

“The XML Documentation Add-on for Adobe Experience Manager and seamless integration with FrameMaker show Adobe’s commitment to supporting the growing needs of companies by addressing the full XML workflow of creation, editing, review, and publishing,” said Maria Casino, Marketing Manager, Intersil.

Great technical communication that meets customer needs can attract and convert customers, sustain client relationships, and turn your users into brand advocates. Integrating technical communications with marketing initiatives enables companies to provide the most relevant content at every stage of the customer journey.

With this FrameMaker integration, Adobe Experience Manager becomes the single platform for marketing and technical communication departments. It is both the leading digital experience platform for marketing and now, also a full-fledged enterprise-class DITA CCMS for technical communications.

To deliver the seamless experiences that customers demand, a digital experience platform must span across organizational silos to drive greater customer insights and deliver the right content in the moment that matters.

For additional information:

Read more about the solution: http://www.adobe.com/products/xml-documentation-add-on-for-experience-manager.html 

Sign up for a webinar on August 30 to learn more: https://2016-08-30-aem-dita-ccms.meetus.adobeevents.com/

The post New Adobe Experience Manager + FrameMaker Integration Facilitates Great Customer Experiences. appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/new-adobe-experience-manager-framemaker-integration-facilitates-great-customer-experiences/

Content Marketing Strategy, Done Right

Content is top of mind for marketers and brands.

We all have access to incredible content, as well as innovative content creation tools and resources. It’s what enables us to connect with consumers in bigger, better, bolder ways, to carry them across our brand experiences seamlessly. We even encourage these same consumers to go create content for us — unique, usable and totally relevant content that fuels the momentum of this powerhouse cycle.

Content Works
A recent CMO Council survey reported senior marketers around the globe tie rich, personalized content to “higher response and engagement rates,” “more timely and relevant interactions” and “greater customer affinity and word-of-mouth.” Content is also directly linked to increased conversions and added customer retention.

Whose marketing wish list doesn’t include that?

The end result has been a massive rush to create strong, shareable, meaningful content at scale — and it’s not slowing down. Three in four marketers plan to increase their content marketing efforts in 2016.

While exciting, we’re in need of a quick industry-wide gut-check.

High volumes and high speed are all well and good when you’re talking about content, but it’s essential to balance that velocity with relevance. Simply charging out of the content gate and producing image after image, video after video, and articles, listicles, infographics, whitepapers, etc. might drum up some initial engagement, but it won’t be long before that starts to plateau, or worse, drop altogether.

Finding balance is essential to creating a content marketing strategy that actually works.

Steps to Content Marketing that Works
So how do you do it? How do you create high value, highly relevant, high velocity content that engages and activates, while still delivering meaningful, measurable ROI for your organization? Follow these steps:

This post originally published on CMSWire.com. To read more, click here. 

 

 

The post Content Marketing Strategy, Done Right appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/personalization/36757/

How to Become a Mobile-Implementation Ninja: Tips and Tricks

What makes an individual a ninja? The formal definition of a ninja is “a person trained in ancient Japanese martial arts and employed especially for espionage and assassinations.” That’s grim, I know. But, I found another definition, this time in the Oxford dictionary: “a person who excels in a particular skill or activity.” That’s what I want to talk about here. To help you become a mobile-implementation ninja, I have some great tips and tricks — primarily based in our Adobe Core Services solution — some of which will also help leverage the power of mobile analytics.

To become a mobile-implementation ninja, you need three things:

1. Precision,
2. Fundamental skills, and
3. An array of special moves, deployed through powerful tools.

When I think of a ninja, I remember video games I played in which the warriors would deploy “finishing moves” when the opponent was running out of strength. As the battle progressed, the moves became more powerful. This is the approach I advise customers to take as they develop their mobile app measurement strategies. So, let me provide you with some basic skills and help you maximize the precision of your moves and finish off your mobile implementation with some ninja finishing moves.

Basic Mobile-Ninja Skills
First, let’s learn some new basic skills!

Know Your JSON config file.
I like to think of the JSON config file as the brains of the mobile software-development kit (SDK) operation. This file is fully configurable through the mobile services user interface. One of the most important settings is LifecycleTimeout. By default, it’s set to 300 seconds. This setting determines how long your app can be in the background before triggering a new app-launch event, and I recommend that you tune it based on your app’s average session length. Also, you can enable mobile app acquisition by setting the ReferrerTimeout to a value greater than 0, which is the primary way to collect mobile app-acquisition links in Mobile Core Services.

Switch JSON at Runtime.
A constant issue I’ve noticed is that clients will use a JSON config file that points to a development or preproduction report suite while they’re still developing the app. In the rush to publish apps to app stores, this setting is sometimes overlooked, and you’re left with data that’s being sent to your development report suite. But, you are able to override the location of the JSON config file at runtime, giving you the option to toggle between a development config file for testing and a production config file for your launch!

Special Moves to Improve Tracking
Now, let’s move on to maximizing the precision of your moves!

Utilize the “Secret Menu” of SDK Variables.
The Adobe SDK collects the majority of its data via context-data variables, but there are a couple of exceptions. There are variables you can call if you want to set up specialized use cases:

• &&products/eVar — The products variable must be set using this specialized syntax. If you have merchandising eVars you want to send in along with the products variable, you can call them out specifically as eVar in the products string.
• &&events — We only recommend using this if you’re using serialized events. For example, if you are a retailer, you can serialize an event (like the purchase event) so it isn’t counted more than once. Unfortunately, processing rules can’t do event serialization, so set this variable for more precise tracking.
• &&tnt — When using Adobe Target, set this variable to send data into Target.
• &&currencyCode — One of my new favorites! Again, this can’t be done via processing rules, so use this variable to denote the currency-code conversion.

Keep Tracking in the Background.
This one is a cautionary tale more than a tip. If you’re going to have tracking services (like notification- or location-based services) that will ‘wake up’ your app in the background, make sure to use the proper tracking calls to prevent these services from inadvertently triggering Analytics calls.

Finishing Moves — The Awesome Ones!
And finally, we get to the good stuff!

Track App to Web Handoff.
Many apps will use a combination of native app screens and web-views that are formatted to appear as if they’re loaded from within the app. You can track a seamless visitor handoff from your app to your web-view by syncing the Visitor ID across the two platforms. You can do this by determining which Visitor IDs you have set within your app (including the Adobe Marketing Cloud ID) and sending them to be collected and used in the web-view. This will help you avoid a broken journey, which happens when a different Visitor ID is set as the user moves between the app and the web-view.

Trigger an In-App Message From an Adobe Audience Manager (AAM) Segment.
Yes, you can do this! In the Adobe mobile SDK, Adobe Audience Manager returns segment/audience information via JSON response. You can fetch the JSON response, parse the segment ID values, and pass them into Analytics as a comma-delimited context-data variable. Once this variable is collected by Analytics, you have the ability to use the value(s) to trigger an in-app message in real time based on the values you set. Conversely, you could use it later to send push notifications to selected segments of your app users. Awesome!

Now, Become the Mobile-Implementation Ninja You Were Meant to Be!
Use these mobile-implementation tips and tricks to gain the most from your mobile app analytics solution. For more, check out my mobile-implementation session at this year’s Adobe Summit — session #358.

The post How to Become a Mobile-Implementation Ninja: Tips and Tricks appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/mobile/summit-session-358-become-a-mobile-implementation-ninja-pro-tips-and-tricks/

Beyond Predictive Analytics: Cognitive Analytics and the Man/Machine Frankenstein

Self-driving automobiles are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. While this provides a lot of value in itself, the risk is having people who are literally asleep at the wheel. There’s not a great business case for machines completely replacing humans — that’s not the goal. But, blending the efficiency and learning capabilities of machines with the human ability to course correct when needed allows you to arrive at the best decisions as quickly as possible. That’s the basis for cognitive analytics — blending man with machine.

How Cognitive Analytics Is Different
Predictive analytics is incredibly valuable to organizations but can still be somewhat time-consuming. As an iterative process, it not only takes time to dive into the data, but also to then assess the insights and take action on those insights through testing. As data continues to grow, there needs to be a way to speed up this process.

Predictive analytics intends to predict outcomes of various scenarios. Similarly, cognitive analytics strives to scale the process of insight-to-action by combining all relevant data to make predictions on future outcomes and then reasoning to make the best decisions. By understanding the data within context, cognitive analytics creates an intersection between machine learning and cognitive reasoning to deliver relevant, highly personalized experiences for users. In essence, cognitive analytics uses machine learning to scale the predictive-analytics process.

It’s not necessary to be a master in predictive analytics just to dip your toe into the cognitive-analytics waters. In fact, most companies can be successful by running these types of programs in parallel. Depending on the types of goals you have for a particular campaign, you may choose either predictive- or cognitive-analytics solutions. Cognitive analytics acts as another tool in your analytics toolbox.

Why Use Cognitive Analytics?
As technology evolves, there are an almost-infinite number of ways for a customer to interact with your brand. You’re no longer in a face-to-face situation. There isn’t an owner at a mom-and-pop shop who knows your every purchase and can predict your upcoming needs because he knows you so well. There isn’t a single salesperson who can be dedicated to every customer on every platform.

Instead, analysts can work hand-in-hand with cognitive-analytics applications to help meet customers where they are. If a thousand people hit your website at once, a single person — or even a whole team of people — is unlikely to push a personalized offer to each of them in the time they are on the site. A cognitive-analytics application can help you to push a personalized offer — or tailor the customer experience in other ways — to each of those users.

For instance, when the customers hit the website, a cognitive-analytics application can push the most appropriate banner ad for each user based on his or her past browsing histories. A human would need to drill down through more and more data to figure out which banner works best for each user. By the time he’d determined what was best for all 1,000 website visitors, those customers would be long gone. Cognitive analytics allows you to quickly parse that data, make a decision, and customize your customer experience — all at the drop of a hat.

This leads to increased cost savings as well as increased conversions. Like any strong analytics campaign, the goal is to better understand your customers to increase positive customer experiences, and thus, increase conversions.

We are at an exciting point in history in which we can see how man and machine are working together. Much like the industrial revolution changed the face of business, the partnership of man and machine will revolutionize how we currently do business. Cognitive analytics plays a major part in that process.

As self-driving cars and other automated processes continue to evolve, it’s important to remember that machines do not inherently have all of the information or all of the backgrounds that humans do. While they can definitely advance your agenda and campaigns, it’s important to start using cognitive analytics on the right campaigns while supplementing the findings and decisions with human intelligence as appropriate.

The post Beyond Predictive Analytics: Cognitive Analytics and the Man/Machine Frankenstein appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/beyond-predictive-analytics-cognitive-analytics-manmachine-frankenstein/

Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly

This week’s articles examine the state of predictive analytics, present four ways in which email can help increase the effectiveness of other digital-marketing channels, and view how Macy’s is partnering with IBM to create an in-store personal-shopping assistant.

• A Closer Look at the State of Predictive Analytics [eMarketer]: Marketers in a recent survey cited siloed organizations and internal knowledge and expertise as the largest obstacles to investing and executing predictive analytics.
• 4 Ways Email Can Drive Other Marketing Channels [PracticalEcommerce]: Email marketing can help influence the effectiveness of direct mail, display, social, and paid search.
• Macy’s Teams With IBM Watson For AI-Powered Mobile Shopping Assistant [Forbes]: Macy’s On Call is a shopping assistant that shoppers can use to find products, departments, or brands while in-store.
• Mcommerce to capture 49pc of online retail sales by 2020: report [Mobile Commerce Daily]: A new report estimates that mobile will continue to grow over the next four years to account for nearly half of all e-commerce retail sales.
• Facebook Thinks Shoppers Will Use Their Phones More Than Ever This Holiday Season [AdWeek]: A study by Facebook indicates mobile purchases made during the holiday season increased 33 percent between 2014 and 2015.
• 4 Ways Retailers Can Save Their Stores [Forbes]: Creating a brand — and expressing that brand in meaningful ways both digitally and in-store — is becoming more important for retailers that want to give consumers the experiences they are expecting.
• Hotels: From Pokémon Go to the Pokeconomy [Hospitality Net]: Taking advantage of the exploratory nature of the game — as well as steps to ensure your hotel is Pokémon friendly — are simple, initial actions hoteliers can take to immediately jump into the Pokémon craze.
• Travel brands need to be creative when thinking about programmatic [Tnooz]: Starting with geotargeting, and expanding into behavioral and contextual data, is a common path many travel companies take in the quest for success with programmatic advertising.

The post Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/news-and-resources/point-sale-retail-travel-weekly-58-17/

Insights in Instagram analytics

Three Things Content Marketers Don’t Know About Machine Learning — But Should!

We hear a lot about how machine learning will be a part of every content marketer’s future. But, in reality, machine learning is here and ready to work for you now. The best way to extrapolate the future is to look at what machine learning is doing today.

Marketers are under pressure to achieve faster content velocity. Demand for content is exploding, driven by the number of channels, the specificity with which marketers want to create targeted content for audiences, and how specific they want to be in messaging to individual audiences through those channels. The challenge is how to use, reuse, and remix content in new ways to reach those targeted audiences — motivating them to engage and respond — without recreating lots of content. There is no way to do this manually and at scale. Machine learning can help in three ways: by automating repetitive tasks, using content in targeted ways, and creating the right content.

Automate Repetitive Tasks — So You Can Focus on More Important Issues!
How much time are you spending on administrative tasks, such as asset tagging, versus content creation? Tagging assets with relevant keywords is essential to making them searchable, but it is also a tedious, time-consuming task that most marketers would rather avoid. Machine-learning technology can smartly include the most valuable or least expensive keywords in copy. It can associate similar or related assets, making it easier to combine relevant copy, images, and videos for target audiences. If your audience has consumed one bit of content, it can smartly recommend what to offer next for the highest conversions. It can help predict what content will lead to the behaviors — sharing or engaging with content, increased sales, improved customer loyalties — you’re trying to attain from customers. Adobe’s Smart Tag technology is available now to automate the insertion of metadata, so you can achieve better search results while slashing the amount of time you spend on this task.

Use and Reuse Your Content in Channel- and Audience-Specific Ways.
Each marketing channel presents a unique set of requirements for the size and resolution of marketing assets. When a new platform emerges — or if you decide to add a new channel — it could require the time and expense of redesigning existing assets. For example, if you have a piece of content delivered to a web channel or blog, machine learning can smartly crop that content for a mobile channel or reduce the copy in smart ways. Visual content and videos can be shortened to optimize experiences for different channels based on the patterns by which people are consuming them.

Machine learning will either provide recommendations — or actually provide a first draft of the new content — that can then help accelerate the pace by which you get those different pieces of copy or creative or even videos out onto the various channels and to the selected audiences.

Create the Right Content Without Creating a Lot of Content.
You don’t want to have to create massive volumes of content, hoping that just some of it will be effective. It’s more important to be able to create the right content that is effective in your channels, learn from that, and then create more content based on those insights and expand from there.

Machine learning can provide you with the intelligence needed to quickly determine what’s working as well as recommendations to point you toward amplifying things (or something similar) that also might work with that audience. The learning part of machine learning means that, over time, the machine becomes smarter. We are still in the early stages with this, but machines could potentially learn so quickly that you could remix, reuse, and adapt content almost instantaneously; test it; and learn whether it will be an improvement over your previous campaign or you need a different approach.

The Future Is at Your Fingertips!
The best way to think of machine learning is as an intelligent assistant that can quickly make conclusions or recommendations based on large amounts of varied data. Marketers can then learn and understand how content is consumed, how it impacts consumers’ behaviors, and how to create more relevant, interesting, and engaging experiences for consumers. The potential impact of machine learning on all aspects of the customer experience is vast — look for marketing-technology solutions that allow you and your team to experiment with deep learning to see how it can boost your productivity now.

The post Three Things Content Marketers Don’t Know About Machine Learning — But Should! appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/three-things-content-marketers-dont-know-machine-learning/

Three New Ways to Think About the Customer Journey

At the end of the day, we all want happy customers. Given the high expectations of today’s customers, this is no easy task. People want brands to know them and to connect the dots as they constantly move between channels and devices. In fact, according to Infosys, 86 percent of consumers say personalization plays a role in their purchasing decisions.

Have you ever researched a product online and called to ask a few questions only to be treated as a brand new customer when you decide to purchase a month later? No bueno.

The real question is: How do you achieve this level of familiarity with every single customer at every single stage of the customer journey? It takes more than connecting your marketing technologies and internal teams (which is a huge challenge in and of itself, don’t get me wrong). What I’m talking about is really understanding — and tapping into — the latest trends and technologies that are impacting the way your customers behave and interact with your brand.

Creating a consistent, seamless customer journey is one thing, but being able to do this while delighting and exceeding the expectations of your customers is marketing nirvana. Here are three fresh ways to think about connecting with your customers along their winding paths to purchase — with real examples from brands.

Use Mobile to Be More Human.
I know, I know — everyone has gone mobile. You know that already. What’s interesting is the way people are using their phones to connect with other people and the world around them. From the augmented reality of Pokémon Go to the immediacy of Facebook Messenger or Snapchat, your mobile phone is no longer where you painstakingly click around with fat fingers. You can have immersive, connected, beautiful experiences via mobile — and the brands that can find authentic ways to tap into that as part of the overall customer journey will benefit.

For example, check out how AT&T used Facebook’s 360º video to create a racecar driving experience on mobile that transports you. It quickly makes you feel human emotions like excitement, fear, and anticipation. And, the #StrongCan hashtag gives you a way to easily dial into the conversation online if you choose to.

Create Consistency Between Online and Offline Channels.
Today’s customers don’t think about being online or offline. They’re just thinking about how to best get whatever they need at a particular moment. As a result, consumers are switching between devices and channels like never before. According to Google, 90 percent of consumers use multiple devices to accomplish their goals throughout their paths to purchase.

So, as marketers, we need to think of online and offline engagements in a more cohesive manner. It’s not enough to know our customers at the beginnings or ends of their journeys — we must know them throughout. This means knowing — and acting on — their preferences, what they clicked on or called about, and how close they are to purchasing.

For example, Tuft & Needle claims to have the #1 rated mattress for the absolute best value, and they do a great job of spreading this message across channels. They know where you are in the purchase funnel and give you the right messages and resources across the channels and devices you use, ultimately driving you toward a purchase. Lots of other great brands have put together effective omnichannel marketing strategies too.

Have Real Conversations.
When we need to make big or complicated decisions, even the most advanced chatbots can’t hold a candle to a human conversation. In fact, in a recent survey of 2,000 US adults, Invoca found that more than twice as many people use their phones to call businesses in a month than fill out online forms, and millennials are three times as likely to call businesses than they are to tweet at them. Conversation is a bigger, more impactful part of the customer journey than I think most marketers realize, and we should be treating it like we treat every other marketing channel (e.g., email, social, web) in terms of being a critical step of the customer journey that we optimize for and measure.

If you need more validation about the rise of conversation, Facebook recently announced its Offline Conversions API, which enables marketers to optimize their Facebook advertising based on offline purchases (e.g., in-store or over the phone). Here’s a video explaining more. I would expect to see some brands taking advantage of this soon.

A Few Closing Thoughts
The customer journey will never be linear nor constant. It is the forever-evolving, driving force behind your marketing efforts. Avoid letting this overwhelm you by striving to do what’s right for your customers — not those of your competitors or peers. Make sure you’re creating seamless, consistent, and memorable experiences for your customers. Your customers will thank you, and the experiences you create will pay off.

The post Three New Ways to Think About the Customer Journey appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/campaign-management/three-new-ways-think-customer-journey/

How to Measure and Optimize Your App for Over-the-Top (OTT) Devices

If there’s one thing consumers love more than content, it’s having the ability to control it.

The popularity of over-the-top (OTT) devices is undeniable. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over half of the average American’s leisure time was spent watching television, and many did so by interacting with OTT devices and apps.

In my previous post, I touched on several use cases for developing an OTT-device app, including the psychographic needs that could be met through an immersive affinity app designed to turn customers into brand advocates. The value proposition for OTT-customer engagement is profound — as long as brands know how to effectively analyze, test, and optimize the user experience.

Let’s dive deeper into the world of developing OTT apps for these devices by turning our attention to Apple TV.

What Can OTT-App Developers Learn From Apple TV?
The simplicity and sophistication behind Apple TV is something every OTT-app developer should consider before traveling down the road of OTT-app creation. Apple TV utilizes a grid-based layout that is easy to navigate.

The most important aspect of the Apple TV grid layout is the Top Shelf. This high-value real estate showcases personalized, dynamic content while providing a direct path to specific content within the app. This could include highlighting a user’s favorite television shows on a particular network or displaying home décor ideas that may be of interest based on user preferences.

Top Shelf app placement can be huge for your brand. Top Shelf placement reveals strong customer loyalty and can provide high value for both your business and your customers — when done properly. This requires using analytics and optimization tools to enhance the customer experience. How can your brand accomplish this?

Apple TV: Analytic Tips
Analytics plays an integral role in gaining a real-time understanding of how your customers interact with your brand on Apple TV. Further, software development kits (SDKs) are available for Apple TV that include Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target. Here are some quick tips to help you get started.

• Capture How the App Is Launched.
  Are customers launching your app from the home screen or from the Top Shelf? By placing the launch location in conversion variables (eVars), your brand can determine where your customers are engaging with your app most frequently. Of course, this is important to know for analysis; but did you also know that, when your customers place your app in their Top Shelf displays, they are telling you that they highly value your app?
• Use SDK Timers to Measure Time Spent in Content as Well as Load Times.
  Engagement falls by the wayside when load times are lagging. Whether you are delivering a large piece of content over a fast connection, or a small piece of content across dial-up, using SDK timers will help you evaluate how content load times may be affecting the user experience.
• Use the SDK Lifetime Metric to Differentiate High- and Low-Value App Users.
  This metric helps differentiate between high- and low-value app users by measuring data such as videos completed, recipes viewed, or content favorited over the lifetime use of the app. The lifetime-value metric can also be used from an analytics standpoint to segment the customer behavior of high-value users and compare it to others.
• Use Analytics to Find the Sweet Spot of Preloaded Vs. Streamed Content.
  Because Apple TV apps are limited to 200 megabytes in size, it’s important for your brand to determine what the value of upfront delivery is versus streaming content in. Brands can use Adobe Analytics to find the perfect optimization point, creating the best user experience so users — especially those on slower connections — don’t have to wait.

Apple TV: Testing and Optimization Tips
Below are tips to help you develop an OTT-device app that delivers personalized customer experiences by using a SDK for Apple TV with Adobe Target.

• Use Target Recommendations for Personalizing Content Within the Top Shelf.
  Delivering video recommendations to your customers based on their past viewing histories is a great example of OTT-app personalization. Other examples include listing top-five recommended recipes based on previously favorited recipes or workout suggestions based on previously completed routines.
• Test What Content to Show Based on Time of the Day and Day of the Week.
  Finding the optimal time for content consumption is key to optimizing the user experience. For example, a public-television app may test to see whether more content is consumed based on promoting children’s programs weekdays during early morning and midafternoon hours. Another example would be for a financials app to measure content consumption by displaying a stock ticker during trading hours and relevant news updates before and after trading hours.
• Use Rules-Based Targeting to Turn on “Bonus Content” for High-Value Users.
  Including a hidden app feature that comes to life after your customers have watched one hundred shows or spent a hundred hours interacting with your app gives your customers members-only experiences that make them feel as if they are part of something special. Marketers can also use rules-based targeting without having to contact the IT department.

Looking for ways to measure and optimize for wearables? Then check out my previous post in which I discuss ways you can analyze, test, and enhance your brand’s app for Apple Watch.

Still wondering whether your brand should take the leap into wearables and OTT-app development? Read my post titled, “Marketing Across Wearables and Over-the-Top (OTT) Devices: Should Your Brand Take the Leap?”

The post How to Measure and Optimize Your App for Over-the-Top (OTT) Devices appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/mobile/measure-optimize-app-top-ott-devices/

How marketers tap sports fans in connected stadiums

Marketing to sports fans has changed a great deal over the last few years, and marketers face new challenges to bring fans into stadiums.

Let’s start with the fact that the economy is still terrible for the younger millennial generation. The jobs they’re getting don’t pay much, and their wages aren’t growing. According to the government’s Current Population Survey, the median income for people between 25 and 34 has fallen in every major industry but health care since the Great Recession began nearly 10 years ago. Couple that with the rise of prices for sporting events, parking, food and drink at stadiums. And with advances in TV and video technology, consumers can enjoy “the best seat in the house” from their couch with HD onscreen action and replays without spending the money and time it takes (traffic woes, parking, long concession and restroom lines).

With these challenges, it’s more important than ever before that sporting brands focus on creating experiences that enrich live events and cater to tech-savvy fans who could (and want to) engage with four or five screens when at the game.

It is common for fans — 90 percent of whom have a smartphone — to expect “smart stadiums” so they can use their devices during games to respond to offers and other enhancements to the experience. And the younger generation, in particular, expects connectivity. In this report by Cisco, young professionals said that the Internet is as important to them as air, water, food, and shelter. And without connectivity, the younger generation of fans may not purchase tickets, or they may be bored throughout the game if they can’t connect to the Internet or upload photos to social media.

Enter connected stadiums
Until recently, Barclays Center, home to the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, was considered the most connected stadium in the country, but they lost that title upon last year’s opening of Levi’s Stadium, set in the heart of Silicon Valley and home of the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers. During Super Bowl 2016 — hosted at Levi’s Stadium — 27,316 unique Wi-Fi-enabled fans used 10.1TB of data! To put that in perspective, it is equivalent to the estimated size of the print collection of the Library of Congress. The Super Bowl saw 20,300 peak concurrent users, and they were able to maintain average download speeds of 15 to 23 mbps —three times faster than the fastest stadium Wi-Fi last year.

Smart stadiums offer marketers, teams, and brands tremendous opportunities to drastically enhance the fan experience for ticketholders.

The opportunity for brands
Let’s take a look at some of the opportunities for brands:

• Between timeouts, fouls or penalties, halftime, etc., the actual playing time during a game is limited. People want access to content — player and game stats, video highlights, updates on their fantasy-league points, and other media — when live play isn’t taking place. And sometimes, even when it is. It only makes sense to enable fans to watch an instant replay from multiple angles that will not be shown on the Jumbotron. Look at how your brand can capitalize on this: providing messages, in-app advertisements, and other contextual content during different elements of a game experience or even in different environments (ex. watching other games on your phone while you’re at the store, in a train, etc.)
• One thing that can be frustrating at large sporting events is the long lines — for the team stores and kiosks, food and beverages, and let’s not forget the restrooms. This is an opportunity to add value — such as an app that guides fans directly to their seats, helps them find the closest restroom with the shortest wait time, or provides them with a stadium map. Think about what you can offer fans to make their experiences more convenient, and people will thank you for it.
• Beyond improving the fan experience, connected stadiums provide opportunities to increase the team’s bottom line through additional purchases and increasing ticket sales. Offer fans the ability to upgrade their seats from a mobile device, purchase a limited-edition shirt for that game, or to order a sandwich and imported beer to be delivered directly to their seats, for example.

If brands are not taking advantage of these marketing opportunities, money is being left on the field.

Advice for sports organizations looking to capitalize on this opportunity
Honing in on the teams themselves, here’s some advice on how to capitalize on this emerging marketing revolution:

• Stadiums racing to digitize are partnering with companies to provide integral technologies. To become part of that, you will need a robust, integrated platform to manage your content across all channels and touchpoints. Organizations need to leverage a holistic, integrated platform that is easy to use and that relies on common datasets and fully integrated workflows. They can’t rely on piecing together separate and disparate technologies to reach your fan base. What works best is a solid, integrated, digital foundation.
• It’s essential that backend infrastructures be able to scale upward. A cloud-based system provides the necessary level of scalability and elasticity.
• It’s equally important to understand the customer journey of the sports fan, which is a very nonlinear path. For example, the friend of an avid sports fan, when invited to a game, could become a fan through the connected experience. There are opportunities at every touchpoint regardless of screen, channel or device.
• Fans — like nearly every connected user — are demanding highly personalized, contextually relevant, amazing real-time experiences. To accomplish that, teams must have data about their fans — who are more than happy to provide it if they get great experiences in return. You can’t provide those experiences without analytical data and the ability to select the right audience. Analytics can enhance every division of your organization — from creating the optimal user experience to recognizing and addressing potential trends that help boost your business.
• Once you have some experience with the data you select, are you optimizing the fan experience? Are you providing the most ideal and optimal experience to enhance your fan’s experience?
• Don’t forget the global opportunity. A football club in the UK, with a healthy regional market of 5 million, realized it had fans around the world it wasn’t serving. It then increased its reach to 500 million!
• Stay ahead of the wave. The NFL has asked all its stadiums to provide free Wi-Fi to fans by the end of this year. It knows that fan engagement through an immersive mobile experience is the key to improving the fan experience and maximizing revenue.

The number of connected mobile devices has already surpassed the world’s population, and by 2018, it is estimated that there will be more than 10 billion. An average of 60 percent of Americans are sports fans (76 percent are upper-income men), and internationally, the numbers are staggering — 3.5 billion for soccer alone. This is a wave brands definitely want to ride.

This post was originally published on VentureBeat. View the original story here. 

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/marketers-tap-sports-fans-connected-stadiums/