In March, I was pleased to be joined by Mark Kitson, digital marketing director for Hartford Funds, for my Adobe Summit session. Mark explained how his company leverages the Adobe Experience Manager Mobile tools to create and deploy content to the company’s various audiences. Oftentimes, Mark’s team uses existing web content by easily delivering it to Hartford’s apps, which appear on any device or screen size that its internal and external customers may be viewing.
Hartford Funds is a mutual-fund designer and distributor — the sole investment-products arm of Hartford Insurance Company. From a digital-marketing perspective, Hartford Funds focuses on two primary audiences with the content it deploys. Their main audience is a roster of external customers (financial advisors) with the other key audience being its internal customers (a wholesale team that works with external advisors).
The company’s digital-marketing team is a small shop, comprised of only eight people. The digital-strategy and analytics team within its marketing team does everything digital: websites, app content, marketing-automation tool, email, and more. There is an even smaller team within that group that does the actual digital design, content creation, and publishing.
So, this small group must serve its internal and external customers with as much efficiency as possible.
They decided to deploy Adobe Experience Manager Mobile (AEM Mobile) for their mobile-app development and deployment and drive content created in Creative Cloud products and workflows to their apps. Hartford Funds had three primary challenges:
- They needed to deliver sales materials in an engaging format for the wholesale sales team’s audience.
- They sought to deliver value-added content to their roster of financial advisors.
- They needed to accomplish this with a small digital-marketing team.
AEM Mobile Connects the Mobile-App Experience With Website Content
Using Adobe Experience Manager, the small digital team was able to build and test its first app — the sales app for wholesalers — in 90 days. At the time of the Summit presentation, the team was getting ready to launch its advisor app, which took six weeks to develop. AEM Mobile enabled them with three key components:
- AEM (integrated with Creative Cloud and Document Cloud solutions) for asset management, workflows, template-based authoring, and app management;
- AEM Mobile On-Demand Services for app building, navigations, and push notifications;
- AEM Mobile App Runtime for supporting native-app runtime, delivering apps on all major platforms, and integrating services.
The team transitioned the firm’s marketing from handing out boring fact sheets to delivering dynamic, engaging content to all screens. The apps now serve a menu of value-added content such as insights and client conversations. With such a small team, they have limited time to regularly create new content, so they often migrate website articles to the apps and feature them within a collection of articles.
Hartford Funds’ Mark Kitson Walks Us Through Live Demo Using AEM
During our session, Mark walked us through a live demo, sharing the Hartford Funds mobile-app content-management approach in real time. He demonstrated for Summit attendees how Hartford reuses website content by pushing it out to their apps. AEM’s out-of-the-box functionality drove the entire mobile-app initiative.
The workflow looked like this:
1. Locate the desired asset from within the digital-asset library and select it for app publication.
2. Quickly pass the existing metadata into AEM apps.
3. Launch a workflow from a list of user-defined workflows.
4. Publish the selected content to the apps via a publishing workflow that includes an approval process.
They selected a user-defined set of workflows for the approval process, which included an email notification to the approver as well as a notification from within the interface.
That was it! Painless, quick, and ready to go live almost instantly! As the new article was published, it was sent to various collections in the app, giving visitors several opportunities to view the content.
Mark also mentioned that they have had great results from the sales app and are anticipating similar success for their advisor app. These apps represent the first public presence for Hartford Funds in the app store. Exciting!
So, repurposing content across sites and apps enables wider touchpoints and drives a unique mobile-app experience for each app audience. The entire publishing process can be enabled by workflows in Adobe Experience Manager Mobile.
Everything mobile is possible. Even with a small digital-marketing team, brands like Hartford Funds can deliver awesome mobile-app experiences.
If you’d like to check out my session with Mark, visit our Adobe Summit 2016 archive and watch session 704 under the Mobile Engagement track.
The post Hartford Funds Shares Its Path to Successful Mobile-App Deployment appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.
from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/mobile/hartford-funds-shares-path-successful-mobile-mobile-app-deployment/
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