Millennials approach information sources differently than previous generations. This, coupled with their increased customer experience expectations presents a challenge for B2B companies.

Rise of the Millennials

As shown in the illustration below, there are over 53 million millennials are in the workforce, making up 28.5% of the overall total. With Millennials focused on promotions and Baby Boomers retiring, soon Millennials will hold many purchasing positions.

Millennials, having grown up exposed to technology, no longer see technology as an add-on or gimmick. Instead, they expect technology to complement all experiences whether digital or analog. At the same time, Millennials emphasize the human factor. In an era of digitization, providing a humanized, personal experience sets a company apart.

Because Millennials view technology as a part of the human experience, they also expect technology to adapt to them. These expectations will especially challenge B2B companies, which already struggle with digital marketing.

B2B: Laggards in Digital Marketing

While many B2B companies have made tremendous strides in their digital marketing, many still struggle. The industry lags far behind their consumer-facing peers. In a recent survey, 70% of digital marketers from B2B companies said: “their organization’s digital advertising strategy fails to meet expectations”. This is due to the difficulty in gathering quality leads and in measuring the return on digital marketing spend.

This challenge is especially acute in personalizing experiences. B2B companies are struggling to deliver personalized experiences, often citing technical challenges. Another major challenge is the inherent differences in how B2B and B2C companies go to market.

B2B companies personalize based on company and role, rather than individuals. By personalizing too much to individuals, B2B companies can actually hurt sales cycles. This reduces the number of data-points available and requires a judicious approach to personalization.

Another challenge for B2B companies is the disconnect between digital experiences and the actual sale. While B2B buyers research online, most do not buy through digital platforms. Without direct conversions, companies struggle to attribute leads and personalize experiences.

Millennials: New Challenges for B2B Marketers

The rise of millennials poses another digital marketing challenge to B2B companies. According to a recent survey by the Arketi Group, Millennials expect more of digital experiences than other generations. This is especially true at the top of the buying funnel, Millennials’ favored channels include:

• Blogs
• eBooks
• Infographics
• Online Ads
• Vendor Texts
• Social Media

Millennials find traditional B2B sales and marketing channels less effective throughout the buying process, and view the following channels significantly less engaging than other generations:

• Analyst Reports
• Vendor Websites
• In-Person Demos and Meetings
• Phone Calls
• Product brochures, datasheets, sales literature
• Trade shows and conferences
• Whitepapers

A few patterns emerge when looking at different methods millennials prefer for B2B marketing. Millennials favor channels that are digital, interactive, and social. In-person, print, and traditional channels are far less popular than for previous generations.

Contrast these channel preferences to these indicated by B2B marketers as the most effective in reaching their goals:

• Events (exhibitions, conferences, trade shows etc) 84%
• Print Media 13%
• Direct Mail 22%
• Outdoor Ads 6%
• Television 4%
• Radio 4%

This poses a challenge, as the channels preferred by B2B marketers are the ones millennials find less engaging. If B2B companies do not evolve their marketing to better serve millennial workers’ desires and expectations, millennials will leave for competitors.

B2B Digital Marketing for Millennials

So how do B2B marketers market to millennials?

First, B2B marketers need to lay a foundation for excellent digital marketing experiences. This means eliminating data silos, developing customer 360 profiles and building a strong platform. This requires an effective implementation team and modern technical platform.

With this solid platform, marketers can build technology-enabled solutions to market to every generation. This includes omni-channel marketing, to message consistently across all forms of media, and building personalized experiences across all digital platforms to deliver the correct message. Finally, sales and knowledge enablement platforms help deliver the best content.

Finally, Digital marketers need to market specifically to millennials. Marketers should include mobile, social, and interactive media to capture and hold the attention of millennial buyers. These new forms of media also offer the benefits of increased conversion points and data. These grant marketers a richer data source to inform their marketing efforts.

The rise of the millennial generation poses significant challenges to B2B marketing strategies. They are less likely to be persuaded by traditional B2B marketing approaches. Yet, this presents an opportunity to companies that choose to implement technology-enabled digital marketing. Companies that embrace this opportunity will win Millennials’ business from their less-agile competition.

Click on the map below to see when the AEM Mobile tour will be coming to a city near you!

AEM Mobile Tour Dates

Los Angeles, CA — June 2nd

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Yes! I would like a demo of AEM Mobile!

San Francisco, CA — June 9th

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Yes! I would like a demo of AEM Mobile!

New York, NY — June 14th

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Yes! I would like a demo of AEM Mobile!

Boston, MA — June 16th

Time

Thursday, June 16 2:00–8:00pm

Location

100 Stuart Street
Great Room A, B
Boston, MA 02116

Featured Speaker

Adam Smith – Partner, Blink Worldwide

Register to Attend More Information

Dallas, TX — June 21st

Time

Tuesday, June 21 2:00–8:00pm

Location

1530 Main Street
Praetorian Ballroom
Dallas, TX 75201

Featured Speaker

Lahary Ravuri – Head of Marketing, Adobe Experience Manager Mobile

Register to Attend More Information

In the latest release of Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe has simplified authoring personalized content. In addition to some exciting new features, this release includes a new integration with Adobe Target. The new integration allows authors to edit personalized content directly within AEM.

Given the strong ROI of personalization, the improved AEM / Target integration will be a big win for Adobe customers.

Authoring Personalized Experiences with AEM & Target

While at Adobe Summit, I attended the lab “Integrating Experience Manager with Adobe Analytics, Target and DTM”, which showcased the new AEM / Target integration. In only one hour, we were able to set up the integration and personalize content.

In this post, I’ll show the process for authoring personalized content in AEM with Adobe Target. For more information on setting up the integration, please see the Summit Session documents. The images below are credits the authors of the lab.

1. Configure an Activity in AEM

The first step to using Adobe Target in AEM is to configure your Activity. An activity is an instance of targeting on a page. Each activity gets a name and you can configure which targeting engine, configuration and targeting type to use.

To create a new Activity, first, select the Brand (which is a container of activities for a particular brand or site) and then click the + button. If you wanted to modify an existing activity, you would select the name of activity from the drop-down.

2. Define Targets

Next, define the components to be targeted. You can define any number of components to be targeted on the page. To do so, simply select the Targeting icon on the component’s edit bar while in targeting mode.

When you target a component, AEM replaces the existing component with a targeting container and makes the existing content the default.

3. Create Experiences

Once you have your components selected for the Activity, you need to create the experiences. Experiences are content variants shown to a particular audience or are groups of users based on criteria. By default, only the DEFAULT experience will be displayed when the Activity is first created.

To add an experience, select “+ Add Experience Targeting”. This will allow you to choose from among the pre-defined audiences or create a new audience to target.

You can create any number of audiences and order them in order in which they will be selected by Target.

4. Create the Experience Content

Once you’ve defined the experiences, select each one and update the content in the targeted components. You can change content, images or anything else you can edit within an AEM component.

You can quickly switch between experiences in authoring mode by selecting the experience name on the right. This allows you to see how the content appears in each experience.

5. Finish and Publish

Once you have created the content for the experiences, review and finish the setup of the Activity.

From this screen, you can define how reporting will be tracked for the Activity as well as the goals for the Activity. This will allow marketers to see reports on the success of the personalization activity.

Once you have verified and finished the Activity, publish the page to push the changes to the live website. AEM will publish all the content to the live site simultaneously to ensure website consistency.

Bonus: Testing Experiences

To ensure your targeting is working correctly, AEM includes the ability to view and modify the Client Context. The Client Context stores data on the current user and can / should be used for configuring segments inside AEM and Target. To view the Client Context, switch to Preview mode in AEM and then select the Client Context Hub icon. This will allow you to modify the variables in the client context and switch between segments to see the different experiences.

Personalization Unleashed

With AEM and Target, brands can delight their customers by providing rich, personalized experiences. At the same time, the new integration means authors have less overhead maintaining content.

Brands understand the need of personalization and the new AEM / Target integration allows them to make it happen.

Need help with understanding personalization with AEM & Target? Leave a comment below and I’d be happy to help!

I recently attended a webinar on the new translation features coming as a part of the AEM 6.2 beta program and am very excited for the following four features:

Search for Translation Content

In the initial version of the Translation API, available in AEM 6.1, adding translated content was a very broad activity. Essentially, the process was adding an entire content tree to be translated then if you wanted to limit the content being translated removing it item by item.

Now in AEM 6.2, you can leverage the powerful search features available in AEM to find content to be translated by last modification, page metadata or analytics information. This allows you to quickly refine down to the most important or most recently edited content and send it to translation.

Do Not Translate Configurations

Sometimes you want to be able to exclude certain portions of a website from being translated. To handle this in AEM 6.2, Adobe added the ability to create Do Not Translate configurations. These can then be associated with content by overriding the Cloud Configurations for a portion of a website. When the translation feature encounters a Do Not Translate configuration it will exclude that page and subpages from the translation process.

This allows authors to easily exclude website content from translation without having to involve developers or modifying the translation rules.

Override Source Language Warning

When I implemented the AEM – Lingotek translation integration, one of the biggest complaints we had was that the warning for when you were going to override the source language copy was not obvious enough. This dialog would appear if you say attempted to translate the English copy of a website to French. In AEM 6.1 this opened a fairly bland dialog, where as in AEM 6.2 this opens a clear warning and now allows you to create a Language Copy directly from the warning dialog.

i18n Translation

One of the big misses in the original translation feature in AEM 6.1 was translating i18n dictionaries. Now in AEM 6.2, the translation feature will automatically queue i18n dictionaries into the translation job when you translate a page.

Bonus (Existing) Feature: Translation Rules

If you were wondering how to manage component or attribute translation rules, AEM includes a Translation Rules configuration. This offers you very fine grained control over what is sent to translation, but unfortunately there is currently no UI for managing the rules. This is expected in either a 6.2 feature pack or 6.3.

To update the Translation Rules, edit the file stored in AEM at /etc/workflow/models/translation/translation_rules.xml

I am very excited to show Perficient’s demo for Adobe Summit. We have created a mobile app based on the Adobe Digital Marketing technologies outlined in my AEM Mobile blog post. This app brings together many parts of Adobe Experience Manager and the Adobe Marketing Cloud to produce a mobile app that can be easily authored by non-technical users. So how did we pull this off?

Step 1: Perficient Digital’s Design and Front End Coding

Our process started by leveraging Perficient’s strong design capabiities to create the experience based on our branding at Adobe Summit. Olivia, one of our designers created the designs, iterated on the designs with our digital marketing team and then delivered the finished designs within a single week.

Next, one of our skilled Multi-Shoring Solution Architects, Scott, picked up these design comps and translated them into workable HTML wireframes.

Step 2: Perficient Digital’s AEM Implementation

Once we had the design created, we implemented the app inside of AEM Mobile. Our developers and architects, including Anton, Harini and Eddie, implemented this application inside of AEM using the Angular framework.

From the AEM interface, authors can easily maintain content, publish content and release the app.

Step 3: Perficient Digital’s Analytics Implementation

As the AEM team was completing the app code, Ryan, one of our analytics experts, analyzed the application’s interactions, created an analytics tracking plan and implemented the tracking using Adobe Analytics and Adobe Digital Tag Manager. Using the powerful reporting features in Adobe Analytics, we are able to visualize user interactions in real time at the booth.

Step 4: Success!

After weeks of development, we are excited to show the new app at Adobe Summit. We will have laptops and Kindle Fires available to show the authoring interface and the app. Stop by our booth at Adobe Summit to see it in person!

Are you excited for Adobe Summit? I know I am!

We’re now down to the last few days before Adobe Summit starts on March 22^nd and I’m getting my bags packed.

This year, I’m bringing something new: a video camera! Every day, I’ll be sharing a video of my thoughts, insights and views on what I’ve learned at Adobe Summit. Joining me will be a collection of my colleagues, comerades and partners.

I’ll be posting at least one video a day for the duration of Adobe Summit, so make sure to stay tuned in to get the freshest scoop of industry insights, reactions and the latest news from Adobe Summit.

Don’t Miss Out!

To ensure you don’t miss an update, follow myself and Perficient Digital Tech on Twitter, where I’ll be posting updates:

Follow @KlcoDanR

Follow @PRFTDigitalTech

You can also subscribe to the Perficient Digital Tech Blog for a weekly digest update after Adobe Summit to enjoy all of the Digital Marketing goodness at once:
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Recently, Adobe introduced AEM Mobile, a new way to build, maintain and deploy mobile apps. AEM Mobile makes it vastly easier to manage mobile apps by enabling marketers to maintain mobile app content, which has traditionally been done by developers. AEM Mobile is the centerpiece of a new platform Adobe has built around enabling marketing to maintain mobile apps and market to mobile app users.

As one of Adobe’s top partners, Perficient had a chance to preview AEM Mobile and get a glimpse into the technology underlying this new platform.

The Tech Behind the Scenes

This new platform is composed of several different technologies, each of which has been deeply integrated, to build a seamless mobile app publishing experience.

Bringing it all Together

By combining all of these technologies into a single platform, Adobe has created a mobile app platform with unparalleled features, flexibility and ease of use. No longer should mobile apps be separate from the rest of your digital marketing technology or should they be unmeasured or un-marketed. By leveraging, AEM Mobile you can build and maintain more apps and derive more value out of every dollar you put into mobile.

Perficient is extremely excited by the possibilities offered by AEM Mobile and for Adobe Summit, we have some very special demos planned to demonstrate the potential of the platform. Stay tuned for the second part of this blog series for more information!

What is Live Copy?

Live Copy is a feature in Adobe Experience Manager where the content and structure of a source site is copied to target sites via a configurable process. This can either be automatic or manual, and can even invoke other processes like automatic publication workflows upon changes to the source site.

As shown in the illustration above, a source site (or blueprint) contains the base content and structure. The Live Copied sites (Local Branch 1 and Local Branch 2) will receive updates with the shared content, which is shown in red. The blue content is created for each individual local site and will not be shared with the blueprint site or the other local sites. This same process can act within a page, allowing authors to add, change or remove pieces of content on a page while preserving the live copy link for the rest of the page content. Live Copies can also be Live Copied allowing the creation of multiple blueprints, for example, creating a region or service focused blueprint versus the default generic blueprint.

Live Copy Process

The process for creating a live copy is simple. First, an author would log into Adobe Experience Manager and select + Create >> Create Live Copy from the Sites Manager.

Next, the author will select the source or blueprint site:

Then select the destination path, which is the path under which the live copy target site will be created:

Finally, the author enters the site title, name and rollout configurations. The rollout configurations are hooks which are executed by Live Copy on certain event triggers to perform updates to the target site or other actions. For more information, check out this article on creating Rollout Configurations. The two rollout configurations I have selected below will update the content of the Live Copy target when the Live Copy is first executed (Standard rollout config) and update the target whenever there is a modification to the source (Push on modify).

When the author clicks create, the new site will be created and linked back to the source site via Live Copy. From there the content can be managed similarly to any other AEM content and the authors can choose to override any Live Copied page content via canceling inheritance.

You can find more documentation about Live Copy on the Adobe documentation website. If you are facing the problem of managing a large number of similar, but not quite the same websites in Adobe Experience Manager, Live Copy can be the solution to your challenges.

I recently attended an excellent webinar “Ask the Experts – Adobe Target New Features” presented by Adobe’s @kimenwarner. During the webinar, Kimen mentioned a very exciting new feature coming to Adobe Target in February 2016: AT.js.

AT.js is the new client library for Adobe Target, replacing the legacy mbox.js. This new client library is currently in beta testing and promises to be more flexible, faster and safer than the current library. Specifically, AT.js offers:

• Flexibility: Supports standard websites and single page apps
• Flexibility: Customize error handling and timeouts
• Modern Coding: Uses XMLHttpRequest method for all AJAX loading
• Speed: Doesn’t require blocking calls — can be loaded asynchronously
• Speed: Avoids document.write() calls
• Safety: Doesn’t immediately execute JavaScript on errors and timeouts
• Safety: No longer reloads on timeouts

These new features are especially exciting for those developing single page applications, as it allows marketers to no longer rely on developers to implement personalization and optimization strategies when supporting single page applications, such as those built in AngularJS or ember.js. Single page applications are becoming the new standard for complex, user-friendly application development and are becoming more and more common as companies modernize their legacy applications and migrate desktop apps to web applications.

Additionally, the speed and safety improvements will make Adobe Target more enticing for anyone looking to do personalization; users increasingly expect near-instant page loads, while also expecting a personalized experience.

Of course, all of these new features require some deprecation of some legacy integrations and support. With AT.js, the following will be deprecated:

• IE7 or older support
• Legacy SiteCatalyst -> Test&Target Integration
• Legacy Test&Target -> SiteCatalyst Integration
• Legacy Adobe Audience Manager -> Test&Target Integration
• Direct access to internal mbox.js functions

If you are using these integrations, you will need to upgrade to the latest product versions to leverage the new integrations and when migrating you will need to ensure that you are not invoking internal methods. The migration process is a great time to evaluate your current personalization and optimization implementation as well, especially given the speed and platform improvements in AT.js.

Are you ready for AT.JS? I know I am!

To make starting, stopping and resetting AEM instances on my computer quick and easy, I created a small script and a structure to support easily managing multiple AEM instances on the same computer.

“Yücelzorlu” by SepiNs is licensed under CC SA 2.0

Folder Structure

First, from a structure perspective, create the following folders:

/[user-home]
    /dev
        /aem
            /instance1
            /instance2
        ...

This structure is pretty simple, but it does help a lot to be consistent and makes it pretty quick to navigate folders via terminal or finder; cd ~/dev/aem/6.1 is pretty darn easy to type, easy to remember and makes sense from a taxonomy perspective. This structure also allows me to add other applications in parallel, such as MongoDB, Tomcat or anything else with which I may need to integrate as sibling folders to the aem folder.

AEM Manager Script

Next, I created a shell script to manage the individual AEM instances under this structure. The script allows you to start, stop and clear the repositories of instances. When starting, the script clears the AEM logs before starting, can start the instance in debug mode, start multiple publisher instances, can run without the GUI and allows you to configure the JVM settings for the AEM instances.

This script also allows you to clear the repository, removing everything under the crx-quickstart folder to quickly restore the repository to the starting state. This can be especially useful if you are trying to save space or need to install two incompatible codebases.

Examples

The commands for the script are relatively straightforward:

Starting an AEM Instance

aem-mgr start -i 6.1.0

Starting an AEM Author and Publishers

aem-mgr start -i 6.1.0 -p

It’s probably worth mentioning that what this will do is start the author instance found in the folder ~/dev/aem/6.1.0 and all of the instances in folders which look like ~/dev/aem/6.1.0-publish-[N].

Stopping an AEM Instance

aem-mgr stop -i 6.1.0

Clearing an AEM Instance

aem-mgr clear -i 6.1.0

A quick note, if you want to run multiple instances in parallel, you will need to pass in the -nd flag to disable debugging on the non-primary instances. The script handles this automatically for publish instances by incrementing all of the port numbers.

Defaults

By default, the script will look for AEM instances under the ~/dev/aem folder I described above. Each instance is assumed to be in a sub-folder with a JAR inside with a name matching ^.*aem.*.jar$ or ^.*cq.*.jar$.

Each instance with debug enabled will start by default with the Java debug port set to 30303 and the JMX port to 9999. Additionally, by default the JVM is granted a maximum of 1GB heap and 256MB of Permanent Generation. These values can be configured in the “Default Settings” section of the script.

Installation

To install the script either download it directly from GitHub or clone the git repository and add it into your computer’s PATH variable. It has been tested in Linux and Mac and I would suspect it would work on windows with GNUTools or Cygwin installed.

Hopefully you find the script and structure useful!