by Adobe Experience Cloud Team
Customers are abandoning brands that don’t get personal
Your relationship with your customers is a priceless one. And like any good relationship, both sides want to feel heard, understood, and valued. When it comes to content, this means giving your customer information that’s relevant to their personal needs and interests across every channel and every device at any moment.
But consistently and reliably delivering this level of content at scale, across hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of customers, isn’t a simple task for your team. And despite your best efforts, without the right tools in place, your marketing content could become overrun with outdated messages, irrelevant content, and hard-to-find information. When customers encounter this kind of fractured marketing, it doesn’t take long for them to jump ship and seek out your competitors.
At Adobe, we know firsthand how hard it can be to create content at scale. Here are the three ways we are able to do it.
“At the heart of every great experience is an emotional connection. Great content plays a big part in making that happen.”
— Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe
First, create a workflow that works for everyone
The one thing we can never get more of is time, and when marketing work is created, reviewed,
and tracked through disparate tools, time is exactly what you waste. We’ve all been on a team where assets are manually uploaded, unnecessarily duplicated, and reviewed over email or another static tool. As a result, work is difficult to align, hard to prioritize, and sometimes misses the mark altogether.
On the other hand, when you bring together project and task management with social collaboration, real-time reporting, and strategic planning, your teams can focus on what they do best — creating and delivering the experiences that drive real growth.
Centralize work processes on a single collaborative platform
When Adobe acquired Marketo in 2016 and Magento in 2018, creative teams from these organizations brought their own varying applications and processes with them. We knew we had to centralize those processes, and quickly. By consolidating teams on Workfront as a front-end tool for connecting to Adobe Experience Manager Assets and authoring content, Adobe has made it possible for everyone to work within a single platform.
The result is better collaboration, increased productivity, and less wasted time.
Second, prioritize — but be flexible about it
While demand for content has increased, it hasn’t gotten easier to meet that demand. Creative teams are often overwhelmed with work requests while every stakeholder thinks their request is the most important. All this can make it hard to align the work with the organization’s strategic goals, let alone accommodate the quick market pivots and evolving strategies that are necessary to keep customers engaged.
The world of content moves fast and is always evolving. Which means it’s ever more important to work with tools that clearly connect the work back to the overarching strategy, allow iteration and flexibility, and include real-time dashboards that track and measure progress across all major milestones.
Meet business goals (and customer needs) by delivering content at scale
At Adobe, we know how important it is to work with the best possible assets and deploy personalized campaigns that align to your business goals — fast. Adobe Marketing Hub, our brand portal and single source of truth, makes this not only possible, but easy. Teams are able to:
Develop personalized campaigns faster and better.
Track the status of projects and understand assets in a broader context.
Track performance and solicit feedback that leads to improved service level agreements (SLAs), delivery times, and other key performance indicators (KPIs).
Finally, let humans be creative — standardize the rest
You hired your creative team members for their creativity. So you don’t want to be wasting their time on admin work such as lengthy review cycles, manual project tracking, or delayed project timelines. Doing that not only makes for an unhappy creative team — it can also make it very difficult to meet business goals with the speed and agility that’s required to deliver meaningful experiences to every customer at the right moment.
Instead, let automation do the busywork and then notify your creative team when it’s time to tap into their creative strengths and add their human touch. By focusing your teams on the most important work, you’ll maximize resources, budgets, and speed without exceeding capacity. As a bonus, your creative team will be much happier.
Automatically adding appropriate metadata tags makes finding content much easier and faster.
It results in:
Reduce manual admin work with automation
The Adobe Marketing Hub uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology like smart automation with metadata tags, allowing anyone to find content quickly and easily. This reduces the need for manual efforts when deploying content because the right descriptors and metadata have already been provided by the marketer. When this workflow is not only set up but automated, publishing becomes remarkably seamless.
The result is a framework that takes advantage of digital tools and technologies and frees humans to work in more intuitive and productive ways.
“The Adobe Marketing Hub is not a place for content to go and die. It’s a place to make it available and consumable from within other marketing tools. The goal is to introduce automation and efficiencies that allow people to do their jobs in the most creative and efficient way possible.”
— Creighton McEwen, Group Program Manager, Adobe
We did it — and you can, too
Delivering great content is imperative to creating the personalized, relevant, and entertaining experience your customers want. By fixing your workflows, streamlining your teams, and employing automations, you can meet customer expectations while also giving your teams more room to be truly creative.
Learn more about the three steps to reimagine your marketing to build brand loyalty and clear the way for more personalized customer experiences.