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Making it RelevantOptimizing the Digital Marketing Experience

Making it Relevant Optimizing the Digital Marketing Experience

1 GSMA, Nilson Report, United Nation Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Accenture analysis, May 2012.

2 Baiju Shah and Nandini Nayak, “Got the R Factor: Driving breakthrough performance in the Era of Relevance,” Accenture, 2012.

Digital is no longer a channel. It is the modus operandi for consumers, marketers and successful corporations. Consider these comparisons: There are one billion cars and trucks in the world and three billion credit cards. But, there are six billion mobile phones, of which one billion are smartphones. And, while the world population is roughly seven billion, there are more than nine billion connected devices in use globally.1

There are 1,000,000,000 cars and trucks in the world

3,000,000,000 credit cards

And, while the world population is roughly 7,000,000,000

there are more than 9,000,000,000 connected devices in use globally.

In today’s digital world, as customers make their way from anonymous browser to engaged buyer they may interact with a company multiple times in different ways. At any one touch point 30 to 300 milliseconds may be all the time there is to make a connection and secure customers intent to purchase before they click away. Presenting the right content at the right time and right place is critical to driving relevancy and delivering the most personalized experience possible.2

Efficient production, personalized delivery and reuse of content across platforms, countries, languages and agencies are required to drive superior marketing performance. Many companies are finding that cloud-based digital marketing platforms provide the foundation to deliver the most relevant customer experiences at scale and optimize marketing performance.

There are 6,000,000,000 mobile phones

of which 1,000,000,000 are smartphones

Digital Platform Building Blocks

Contemporary digital marketing platforms are highly flexible and facilitate a seamless and relevant end-to-end customer experience across continually evolving digital channels.3 At their core, integrated digital platforms consist of four building blocks: data, content, analytics, and optimization (Figure 1). Each of these components play a significant role in helping companies create greater relevance and a superior customer experience.

Optimization

Media/Marketing

ROI

MultichannelExecution

PersonalizedExperience/Engagement

Analytics & Reporting

Platforms

Content

Data

Figure 1: The Building Blocks of Integrated Digital Marketing

3 Integrated Digital Platforms, Accenture 2012.

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Data: The Foundation of the Integrated Platform

Enterprises have an abundance of data on prospects and customers but it is often locked in a variety of function-specific applications and channel-specific databases, or stored in third party systems. In order to drive a seamless and relevant customer experience, the data needs to be brought together, in a way that complies with relevant laws and regulations, to form actionable insights that will drive desired outcomes. Integrated platforms should be able to collect, manage, and execute on the data that is captured through the dialogue with the customer. This includes Web clickstream data, social media, mobile, video, customer relationship management, call centers, point of sale, and third-party marketing systems such as email or ad serving. By bringing all this data onto one common platform, marketers can analyze their entire digital marketing investment and drive optimization.

that is captured through the dialogue with the customer across multiple channels. Content: The Substance

of the Conversation

Content is what drives meaningful, relevant connections with customers and, as such, is a mission critical asset. Think of the different features and options to consider when buying a TV, or how each new release of a smartphone brings new features and uses the customer needs to understand. Or think of a car with its sophisticated entertainment platform and intelligent dashboard that transmits details about care maintenance, driver needs and location services. All of these complex products require detailed description, promotion and terms of services, driving the need for extensive content management capabilities.

To support this complex environment and deliver the experiences demanded by today’s consumers, the digital platform should provide the capability and flexibility to manage content in a multitude of ways.

Slate, a daily online magazine, is considered one of Web publishing’s pioneers and remains one of the most popular online news and commentary sites. However, Slate.com had never been managed or published using a modern web content management system. This made administering the site cumbersome and put constraints on what could be achieved with the website. The company chose to implement comprehensive enterprise-class Web content management capabilities delivered as a cloud-based implementation. This enabled Slate to easily add capacity and improve stability and performance, keeping the site consistently available to the public without administrative overhead. This solution reduced the time to publish content by as much as 50 percent and streamlined content syndication and mobile publishing across platforms. Perhaps most important, Slate can now respond quickly to emerging content and monetization opportunities, and count on a stable, flexible foundation to meet new Web content publishing needs moving forward.

Analytics & Reporting: Insight to Deliver Relevant Experiences

Within integrated digital platforms, analytics builds on the data and content foundation. Interactive channels generate an enormous amount of statistical information. Being able to interpret this information and direct content to satisfy consumer intent is essential for companies wanting to compete in today’s digital marketplace. An integrated analytics infrastructure provides the insight critical to deliver relevant experiences, monetizing content value and maximizing return on marketing investment.

Gaming and entertainment company Caesars Entertainment Corporation owns, operates, or manages 53 casino resorts in seven countries, as well as several golf courses. The company leveraged an integrated digital marketing platform

to assist and automate analytics for 36 properties supported by more than 60 websites under the Caesars umbrella. The platform collects anonymous visitor information about where visitors go on the Web properties and how they reached the Web pages. The data can also be segmented by property, market, or across the enterprise to give marketers a clearer view of who its customers are in aggregate and how they respond to site content. As a result of this analytics-based approach the company is successfully optimizing the Web experience and increasing conversion rates by as much as 70 percent for dozens of online properties.

Optimization: Taking Action to Maximize Return

The final building block of the integrated platform, optimization is about taking action on rich data and content to deliver the highest return on marketing spend and efforts. That action may be delivering personalized experiences in real time that engage and ultimately convert customers in ways not otherwise possible. Alternatively, it could be effectively executing multichannel campaigns—be it search, display, social media, mobile, video, or games—that optimize ad dollars to deliver the highest return possible.

For a global life sciences company, optimization meant establishing a digital production and content management service that enables low cost content creation, as well as efficient reuse and approval of content across 12 major global markets and in seven different languages—English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese and Japanese. Over the first two and a half years of service, the company has realized tens of millions in cost savings, including a more than 30 percent reduction in content production costs, a signficant increase in digital content availability and asset reuse.

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Engineering SuccessTo truly give the customer center stage in the organization of tomorrow, it is imperative that executives embrace a technology strategy driven by customer-centric digital platforms. This is a significant change of mindset from how enterprises have functioned for decades. Executives should challenge their current thinking that limits their world of possibilities and prevents them from taking a leap in new directions. A first step toward mindset change and organizational readiness is to educate the organization on the full capabilities and benefits

integrated digital platforms can provide.

The customer lifecycle spans a wide organizational berth from the time the customer is first introduced to the business, to a sales transaction to post-sales experience. This can pose both skills and governance challenges for using integrated platforms. In many organizations there is no single entity responsible for the full customer experience as it spans marketing, sales, service, IT and more. While there is no one “right” organizational approach to govern the customer experience,

many companies are finding that CMOs are naturally positioned to evolve into the chief customer experience officer, or “CXO”, because the data that is necessary to understand the customer, typically resides in the marketing organization. The integrated platform approach also demands a complex mix of skills across product groups, geographies and functional areas that may be hard to come by.

Some companies are using a Center of Excellence structure to leverage valuable skills most effectively and efficiently across the organization and optimally engineer the customer experience.

Outsourcing the management of integrated digital platforms to an external provider is another organizational option; helping to work across functional silos, provide hard to find skills, and manage the complexity of the rapidly evolving digital world. Choosing a cloud environment managed by a technology and services provider may be the most direct path to delivering results. But it is important to consider a technology solution that isintegrated, flexible and available in the cloud or on an as-a-service basis.

Optimized Experiences, Optimized InvestmentCompanies are discovering that through integrated digital marketing platforms they can increase the signup rate for a loyalty program by 10 percent, increase website lead conversion by more than 100 percent, improve conversion on a major brand campaign by 33 percent, or simply reduce the time it takes to generate reports by a factor of 20.

By outsourcing content creation and management of technology and operations, companies can focus on content quality while the outsourcing partner focuses on optimizing operations. For example, one large global consumer electronics enterprise outsourced its digital marketing platform, content creation and content management function. Rather than focusing on operations, this enabled the global Web team to focus on the needs of the core business and monitor the actual quality of the content, particularly localized content for each region. As the outsourcer focused on managing the central content management it was able to create consistency in operations, content and branding. In addition to optimizing operations, this process resulted in cost savings of as much as 30 percent in the first year.

Most important, the integrated digital marketing platform enables organizations to offer highly relevant experiences to customers who are constantly adapting, taking on new devices, and evolving their needs. When structured and managed effectively these platforms provide a flexible, seamless foundation to present the most compelling content at each customer interaction, drive greater engagement and higher conversion rates, to generate significant business results.

To learn more about optimizing the digital marketing experience, contact: Anatoly RoytmanAccenture InteractiveManaging Director, Europeanatoly.roytman@accenture.com

Aseem ChandraAdobe, Vice President, Product & Industry MarketingDigital Marketing Business Unitachandra@adobe.com

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About Adobe Systems Incorporated Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

About Adobe Marketing CloudNow there’s a place that puts everything digital marketers need in one spot. It’s called the Adobe Marketing Cloud. It includes a complete set of analytics, social, advertising, targeting and web experience management solutions and a real-time dashboard that brings together everything marketers need to know about their campaigns. So marketers can get from data to insights to action, faster and smarter than ever.