Adobe’s Latest Marketing Cloud Updates Focus on Data Driven Mobile Marketing

Everyone is talking about Adobe today. It announced the latest updates to its Marketing Cloud and they focus on improving mobile marketing.

The focus on mobile isn’t surprising. Adobe has done a lot of work on Experience Manager, particularly website development, management and personalization, so the shift to mobile is a natural one. In my talks with Loni Stark, director of Product and Industry Marketing for Adobe Experience Manager, mobile has always been a key topic.

It should be a focus for marketers. In the Adobe Digital Index 2014 Holiday Shopping Predictions, on Thanksgiving Day alone, 31% of online sales will come via smartphones and tablets (up from 21% in 2013). In Forrester’s U.S. Digital marketing Forecast, 2014 to 2019, mobile is now listed as a deployment, the same as the desktop, and it accounts for 66% of the expected growth in interactive spend. Forrester predicts that investment in mobile for search, display and social media will hit $46 billion by 2019.

Marketers Prepare to Take on Mobile

Here’s the big challenge, marketers aren’t ready to take on the mobile marketing challenge. They don’t fully understand how to approach this channel, how to collect data from it or how to effectively market to it. Add to this much of the digital marketing technology out there is still playing catch up to this channel in many ways. It is simply, challenging.

This is where Adobe’s latest updates can help. Let’s look at what’s new:

Intelligent Location Marketing

Adobe has integrated iBeacon technology into the Marketing Cloud. This enables marketing to send in-app messages to customers based on their proximity to iBeacons for users of mobile apps. Capturing data from these interactions, including user behaviors, location data and lifecycle metrics, also allows marketers to later send more personalized, contextual communications, like email.

Mobile Search Advertising

Adobe calls this an ‘industry-first’ – multidimensional portfolio monitoring. With Adobe Media Optimizer, marketers can adjust bids for search ads based on attributes such as targeted device, audience, time of day, and location. Media Optimizer also considers the different conversion rates for ads on tablets and desktops versus smartphones, ensuring that the best keywords used.

Mobile App Management

Another key ability for the Marketing Cloud is the ability to view the performance of multiple mobile apps in a single place using the Mobile App Dashboard. The dashboard is a real-time view of what’s happening with each app (and many companies have more than one app to manage).

Marketers will also appreciate the ability to preview mobile apps as they are developed. Similar to how they can preview website pages and templates, marketers and developers can preview and test the performance of mobile apps before they go into production. Stark said that mobile preview has been a challenge for developers, and with the cycles of updates to mobile apps increasing, this capability is appreciated by many.

Also new in the Marketing Cloud is the ability to create responsive design emails and a new Adobe Social App that allows marketers to manage their social activities on the go.

How Many Mobile Apps Do You Need?

This is a good question considering the companies that are coming out with more and more mobile apps. It’s one that Stark said is not simple to answer. She said companies need to know what is really required and if they have the ability to support them effectively. The purpose of mobile apps is to reach out and engage with customers, but it’s also about effective conversations, not just putting out apps for the sake of putting out apps. Mobile apps need to serve a purpose.

It’s not just consumer facing companies that need and have mobile apps though. Companies have to them to support employees, and they are useful in B2B focused companies. The key is to figure out what’s needed and how to offer that capability via mobile.

Stark’s advice to companies is to figure out the right approach to your mobile app strategy. She believes you need to implement as few as necessary, focusing on quality over quantity. Think about it, how many mobile apps have you downloaded just to see what they do and then uninstall or stop using them?

Adobe’s New VP of Mobile

Did you know Adobe has a new vice president of Mobile? Open source veteran to take on the role of mobile. Asay’s latest position was VP of Community at MongoDB and he is a huge proponent of open source technology. But his reasons for joining Adobe are no open source exactly. They are instead related to big data and mobile.

Few companies I know can credibly claim to be as devoted to data as Adobe’s digital marketing business is. The business revolves around enabling companies to build content-rich and data-rich web and mobile applications, and then parse that data to give companies meaningful insight to their customers….My job as vice president of mobile for the digital marketing business is to help channel existing energy around mobile and help figure out new mobile strategies for driving additional growth.”

Looking forward to seeing what Asay does with mobile at Adobe.

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