It Takes a Leader To Deliver Great Experiences

Forrester has named Adobe a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Marketing Software Suites, Q2 2016 report. (Download the report here.)

Adobe is the pioneer in marketing clouds, and continues a string of dominance reminiscent of UCLA and the Boston Celtics in the 60s, and Michael Jordan’s Bulls in the 90s. Or, if you prefer something more literary, Adobe is to Marketing Clouds as Robert Frost is to Poetry and Eugene O’Neill is to Drama (4 Pulitzer prizes each).

What’s in a marketing cloud?
According to Forrester, B2C marketers want EMSS vendors to help them with 3 main objectives:

• Assemble an enterprise marketing technology ecosystem
• Align investments with the firm’s business technology agenda
• Integrate technologies to drive enterprise wide customer obsession

We would add that consumers also have some pretty important requirements. To consumers, the experience they have with a brand IS, in fact, the brand. The experience is everything—and so all businesses must become experience businesses.

Today’s consumers demand 4 things from an experience business:

• Know Me and Respect Me—Anticipate, predict, and deliver what the consumers want before they even ask for it. And do all of these things all while considering and respecting privacy.
• Speak In One Voice—Always in context. Marketing, sales, support or product team all sound the same and always deliver a relevant message.
• Make Technology Transparent—The medium is not the message, the experience is.
• Delight Me At Every Turn—Rapidly innovates to meet consumers’ changing expectations, all the time, every time.

Which is exactly what these Adobe customers value so much about Adobe Marketing Cloud’s ability to enable them to deliver continuous, compelling, consistent experiences. And, nice timing, verified, in our opinion, by our position in Forrester’s report.

Just a few customer examples:

MGM Resorts
“As a premiere hospitality and entertainment brand, our mission is to create unforgettable, world-class customer experiences. It’s essential that our guests’ experiences are seamless which is a major challenge when you have 20 resorts that each require separate digital destinations for booking, restaurants, events and more,” said John Bollen, Chief Digital Officer, MGM Resorts. “Adopting Adobe Marketing Cloud helps us manage content and customer information, and deliver a personalized and engaging experience for guests. Adobe is helping us achieve our goals of increasing direct online booking, incremental spend on property, number of annual visits, new guest acquisition and overall market share.”

Comcast
“At Comcast, we’re focused on constantly innovating and delivering value to customers through our bundled Internet, cable television and phone packages. An integral part of our business is ensuring each interaction with our customers is as valuable as possible,” said Rob Roy, senior vice president of digital, Comcast. “With Adobe Marketing Cloud, we benefit from a complete picture of online and offline customer interactions, ranging from service connections to calls to our call center. As a result, conversion for services has improved an astounding 44 percent by testing and optimizing promotions, and we’ve drastically reduced strain and saved costs affiliated with our call center by personalizing messaging based on customer interactions.”

SapientNitro
“Companies operating in today’s global landscape are faced with a very simple, yet critical, dilemma: fundamentally reinvent their business to compete in the digital age or lose ground to those who do,” said Dave Bernstein, vice president and global lead, Technology Practice at SapientNitro. “In Adobe, we have found a partner who shares our mission to not only help our joint clients transform their businesses, but also to overcome the challenges and embrace the opportunities presented in this new landscape.”

Adobe leads the way for companies to become Experience Businesses.
There’s a bigger story here beyond Adobe shining again. Today’s consumer has almost unlimited choice. Marketers have the opportunity to facilitate that choice and create connected, continuous, compelling experiences for their customers. The reward for doing it right is engagement, conversion, and renewal. The penalty for doing it almost right is going out of business. Marketers can no longer get by on outdated technology, disparate point solutions, and disconnected messages. They require a digital transformation anchored to a platform that gives a holistic profile of every customer and enables the kind of action that actually engages them. Adobe can help create an experience that takes customers where they want to go.

Adobe Shines
Ronald Reagan once said “it’s morning in America.” Well, it’s morning (still) at Adobe, for marketers, and for consumers. With the introduction of Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe debuted on the charts with a bullet, and with each advancement stays on the charts like Dark Side of the Moon.

Here are some of our important takeaways from the latest report:

1. The Adobe Marketing Cloud works together.
We stand out in the marketplace for our focus on driving integrations across the Marketing Cloud solutions. And while we tied for the highest score for integration, we recognize that we can and should do better in making our solutions work together. But we scored 5 out of 5 for Native Integration, 4 out of 5 for Partner Integration, and 5 out of 5 for Content.

Of course at Adobe, we are always working on external integrations, and Adobe IO and the Exchange program are great examples of that. But first and foremost we are focused on integration within the Marketing Cloud, between solutions, knitted together with core services.

2. The Adobe Marketing Cloud is comprehensive.
You really need to download and read the report to get a feel for the depth and breadth of the Adobe Marketing Cloud. And you should, because, well, just go download and read the report. From Customer Data Management, to Content and Asset Management, to User Experience, to Vision, to Roadmap . . . Let’s just say Adobe and our customers are happy with the way we came out.

3. Adobe Marketing Cloud UX stands out in the industry.
Here is how Forrester defines its User Experience criteria: How intuitive, easy to use, and customizable is the user interface to meet the needs of different user personas? What capabilities are provided to guide users, facilitate task completion, or enable collaboration between teams? How consistent is the UX across solution modules? Is there a single sign-on for all products or modules included in the solution? Where partner products are incorporated as part of the solution, how is UX consistency addressed?

Adobe scores 5 out of 5. So, yeah.

4. Adobe has unmatched product and market vision.
Highest possible score on Roadmap. Highest possible score on Vision. Highest possible score on Partner Ecosystem. Highest possible score on Market Presence. Highest possible score on customers. Just to name a few of the highest possible scores.

It’s a crowded field, with heavy hitters who have been around for a long time. But we think the choice is clearer than ever.

How does Adobe pull this off? Unlike competitors who merely dabble, Adobe was born in marketing. We have the most comprehensive, integrated marketing cloud in the world. Nobody else comes close. Adobe helps you actually know your customers. Adobe marries data and content to deliver experiences that are relevant and personalized, on any channel, to any customer. Without data, content is merely pretty. Without content, data is merely impressive. We combine data and content to create amazing customer experiences that build loyalty. And in a world where customers identify the experience with the brand, nothing else really matters.

The post It Takes a Leader To Deliver Great Experiences appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/takes-leader-deliver-great-experiences/