More than at any other time in history, today’s CMO has a multitude of channels to reach. Forrester has gone as far as to say that the role of a CMO has evolved to “Chief Collaborator.” CMOs are now responsible for balancing the goals and processes of the product team, sales team, marketing team and the customer success team, to deliver a seamless, consistent experience for customers — and that’s just the internal channels they reach. Additionally, one of the main goals for the modern CMO is to seek new channels to engage new buyers.
As the clear leader in the market, most CMOs are using Adobe as the backbone for creating and managing experiences that are being deployed across these channels. This year’s summit served to further showcase Adobe’s support of marketers to extend the value of their existing investments and bring sales and marketing into tighter alignment.
Read More: Adobe Target and Adobe Sensei Add New Dimensions to Personalization in Omnichannel Marketing
Specifically, Adobe focused on a few key areas that were articulated throughout the summit:
- Providing a richer ecosystem. Adobe has clearly been watching Salesforce and is taking steps that both borrow from, and directly compete with, the company. The Adobe Experience Platform is an attempt to create a richer ecosystem that software developers can use to build solutions by providing independent software vendors (ISV) with an attractive location to build data-driven applications for marketers. Shantanu Narayer, President and CEO of Adobe, indicated the need for cross-channel intelligence to inform the entire customer and buying cycle, by stating “Customer Experience Management unlocks digital transformation and Adobe is leading the way.”
- More deeply integrating Adobe software solutions, such as Marketo and Magento, with more applications. Adobe also announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft and LinkedIn — a critical pillar at the Adobe Summit — to create account-based experiences aligning marketing and sales to create great personalization. The partnerships with Microsoft/LinkedIn will bring the power of the social network generated data directly into key solutions such as Marketo, Dynamics 365. Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President of Business Applications and Global Industry at Microsoft, said, “Together with Adobe and LinkedIn, Microsoft can help to deliver an end-to-end solution that ultimately accelerates lead conversion and can create opportunities for improved servicing and better cross sell, resulting in a higher lifetime value of the account.”
- Create powerful experiences that create strong digital journeys for buyers and customers. With the introduction of Adobe Commerce Cloud and Marketo Engage along with new versions of Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe is extending its marketing cloud to B2B sales by creating experiences to make transform engagements with clients. Adobe Analytics is also key focus for Adobe in order to measure and provide cross-channel data on consumer behavior. Furthermore, with their new partnership with ServiceNow that merges customer experience data and customer data to target the right customers at the right time, Adobe is creating a comprehensive view of the customer across the entire digital journey.
- Enhancing AI and Machine Learning to leverage data to feedback into these experiences and journeys. AI and Machine Learning were well represented at the event with the introduction of Adobe Sensei, which will use these technological frameworks to power intelligent features across all Adobe products to dramatically improve the design and delivery of digital experiences. To create rich experiences with clients, Adobe also announced the launch of a commerce cloud to provide full integrated, managed storefronts, using AI to inform decisions. Combining AI and data from other sources will allow companies to have solutions that will provide insights on buyers and customers alike.
Read More: How Can Companies Deliver Amazing Customer Experience: Four Big Ideas from Adobe Summit 2018
Through the numerous product and partnership announcements during the 2019 Summit, Adobe proved the path forward is one that’s able to deeply align sales and marketing by integrating all digital channels, with full intelligence and analytics, and help marketers create experiences for customers that endear their brands and create short- and long-term relationships that can deliver sustainable revenue growth and strong brand equity.
With the emphasis on creating transformative customer experiences, Bigtincan was also excited to announce the launch of Bigtincan for Adobe, which extends the Adobe marketing platforms to sales and revenue producers. If marketers can understand all phases of engagement — including sales, channel, customer success as well as websites and social campaigns — they can finally have a 360-degree view of the buyer and customer journeys.
Read More: How Adobe is Fighting the Customer Experience Fatigue Using Marketing Technology
