Customer centricity is no longer just a loaded buzzword used by marketers preaching tactics such as personalization and customer experience. Customer centricity is now a mind-set that companies need to adopt throughout the entire organization—not just marketing—to thrive in the digital world.

This quote from CMO.com’s article The ‘Age of The Customer’ Is Here. What Are You Doing About It? sums up nicely how we have evolved (or maybe suddenly transformed) into the customer-centric epoch.  The term “Age of the Customer” was coined by Forrester and aptly describes how access to information and the customer experience has shifted from companies to customers. This is why we keep seeing trends toward enhancing customer experience (see: Is Customer Experience the Top Digital Trend for 2015?).

Michael Hinshaw, CEO of McorpCX describes this the “Era of Smart Customers”.  He says, “Smart customers are customers that leverage digital devices to access information, anywhere and anytime. What that means is the power in the relationship between companies and customers is in the process of shifting.”

Customer-centricity is one of the driving factors for Digital Transformation.  To be customer-centric, companies need to bring together people, processes and systems from across the company, especially sales, marketing, customer service. If your company is acting in silos across these areas, customers will see it and move on if they can.

The article, linked below, provides a good overall description of the challenges in becoming customer-centric. Some key steps to take to overcome these challenges include the following:

• Define ownership for becoming customer-centric.  This could mean appointing a Chief Customer Officer, setting up a steering committee, or some other organizational technique.
• Define metrics and continually measure how you are doing.  Start with a baseline, set targets and hold people accountable to meet the targets.
• Refine and coordinate across the business where it affects the customer.  We might call this Digital Transformation, but it goes beyond the ‘digital’ part.  It is really about transforming culture and operations as well as the systems.
• Connect with your customer.  Get feedback, encourage honest dialog about what you do and don’t do right.

Source: The ‘Age Of The Customer’ Is Here. What Are You Doing About It?

In addition to AEM Sites, Adobe is making their digital asset management system into software as a service, so these same customers can manage images and video as well.  AEM Sites integrates with the digital asset management system, which also allows customers to deliver video and images directly to their marketing sites.

Source: Adobe unveils web management service for mid-sized businesses | VentureBeat | Marketing | by Barry Levine

Adobe wanted to streamline content creation within the campaign process, eliminate technology silos and complex data flows and accelerate campaign time to market. In the Marketing Cloud, Campaign orchestrates the campaign workflow, manages targeted segments and provides measurement and reporting. Experience Manager provides the tools to create and manage content that would be delivered through a campaign.

Here are the benefits from integrating these products:

• Integrated cross-channel content authoring. Messages are created in AEM and then delivered by Campaign.  This gives you access to existing assets, and great tools to compose a personalized email message through pre-built templates. One company cited a 50% reduction in the time to publish content.
• Extend collaboration with AEM Assets that come from the Creative Cloud can be reused easily in each campaign without copying files from one system to the other.  This makes both creative and marketing teams more agile, effective and efficient. Also workflows in AEM can be used to make sure content is approved before it gets pushed out to customers.
• User data can be shared between both systems.  This unified data can be used to personalize email as well as the web site.  Segments created in AEM can be used within Campaign. You can also create forms in AEM that can be used in the email.  Further, user data can be pre-populated to make it easier for the user to submit the form.

All of these capabilities are available across channels. 

Where to start with this integration?  First understand your organization and who has what content and assets.  Next centralize your content and assets into Creative Cloud and AEM.  Finally reimagine your workflows and how you can improve the process.  

Michael Krypel from Adobe talked about using optimization techniques to improve the customer experience. Optimization means testing different concepts, measuring their effectiveness and then adjusting the experience to make it better.

Businesses must translate their ideas into something that the customer can see, touch, feel, talk to, or listen to. This is the definition of customer-centric design.

Three tenets for customer-centric design:

1. Qualitatively and quantitatively understand customer goals. Quantitave aggregates the What, while the Why is discovered qualitatively.
2. Continually realign the business  and customer goals. Only the most customer-centric business survive.
3. Experiment with new products and services is the only reliable way to determine if a product or service is useful for customers.

Strategically, optimization requires a program maturity model to evolve the culture of optimization.   Organizations have to be organized for optimization because there are a lot of roles involved in testing and learning cultures. A key skill set of the future is the ability to solve visual and auditory problems at the intersection of design, data, marketing, and technology.

T-Mobile’s Ryan Pizzuto spoke about tests that T-Mobile has run to optimize their customer experiences. They start with a control experience. They first removed a central link on the page and tested the experience.  The resulting data showed that removing that link on the page resulted in a 24% lift in conversion rate.

In another test, T-Mobile started selling phones independent of the plan, which exposed the full price of the phone to the consumer.  So instead of getting a free phone and paying for the true cost in the monthly services fees, T-Mobile wanted to lower the price of the plan.  In the first try at this on their site, they made the full price not so apparent of the site, and it apparently caused confusion among the consumers and orders dropped off.  They decided to test the way the prices was displayed, and created a better version of the price section on the site.  In the new version they saw a 16% improvement in conversion and 56% improvement in average order value.

T-Mobile’s examples really showed true wins for the optimization of the content on the site.

Everybody is in content marketing, whether you are a producer or consumer.  Consumers have a choice of where to go for content so content marketers have to work hard to attract, nurture and retain audiences.  Content saturation is a real problem today.  There is so much content available in text, images and video that it’s hard to attract attention to your content.  “More content is being created every 2 days in 2015 than has ever been created from the beginning of time”, says Google’s Eric Schmidt.

Here are some stats:

• 35% of businesses have a documented content strategy.
• 42% of business create content weekly.
• 55% will increase their content marketing spend this year.

In B2B:

• 70% of companies are creating content at a faster pace than even last year.
• 77% of companies create content at least monthly.

How to get better at content marketing?  Having a content strategy is key. Here are top 5 best practices to follow:

1. Focus on your audience.  Instead of starting with the product or brand, start with the audience.
2. Map content to sales cycle.  If you focus on your product, you develop content for the top of the sales funnel.  As you look at your audience, you will understand that as customers travel through the sales process, they want content specific to their needs at that time.
3. Create personalized content.  Personalization is not just adding the customer name at the top of an email or letter.  A challenge to personalized content is to create the right structure of the content to make it personalizable.
4. Promote content.  We used to just create content like a white paper and maybe send an email to drive customers to that content.  Now you want to create that content and then proliferate that content into different channels.  For example, turn the content into an infographic that can be added to a blog.  Tweet segments of the content with links back tot he original.  Provide contests to access the content.
5. Measure, Analyze and Optimize content.  70% of organizations still struggle with content measurement.  They struggle with tying(attribute) content reading back to sales goals or other KPIs. However, to optimize your content, you must measure it and analyze what’s good, what’s bad,e tc.

One aspect of a content strategy is to have content governance.  This should be a formal set of rules and processes to make sure content is produced and delivered appropriately. However, don’t make these governance rules into roadblocks, but rather provide guard rails.  Governance requires participation by everyone in the organization.  Content should be part of the culture and subject matter experts should be called upon to be key content contributors.

How to enable better content marketing using Adobe Experience Manager:

• Annotations in Adobe Experience Manager is a good way to enhance content.  Peers can review the content and make comments right in the content using Annotations.
• Structure content so it can be reused easily
• Tag content for the audiences that would be interested in the content
• Data quality rules enable the rest of the organization.  We usually think of data quality in relation to enterprise databases. This same quality should apply to content.  Meta data on content increase search ability and decrease duplication. Within AEM you can automate Data Checks in the approval workflow to make sure meta data is getting filled in appropriately.

How to create engaging content:

1. First, make the content relevant. Check to see if your content answers a key question that keeps a customer up at night.
2. Have a new or unexpected perspective.  What are you saying different from everyone else.
3. Tell a story and connect your content to that story. This helps create an emotional connection with you.
4. Make sure the content is useful. Can the customer do something new or think differently.

What makes content Intelligent?

• Semantic organization helps the customer understand where the content fits in the overall picture
• Rich Structure
• Findability
• Reusability across channels, screens and devices
• Deliverability

You typically judge intelligence by metrics.  So intelligent content requires good data so measurements can be made. This data is also tremendously useful for personalization.

At the Adobe Summit, I’m attending a session called Adobe on Adobe:Implementing a next generation cross-channel marketing solution where we get to hear how Adobe replaced two incumbent enterprise marketing solutions with Adobe Campaign.

The Challenge

Adobe has acquired several companies who each had their own marketing tools. After the acquisitions, Adobe struggled to be consistent in their marketing efforts across all these other legacy systems. They had trouble sharing marketing data.  Platforms had trouble scaling and performance issues. The need for reinvention became apparent as Adobe grew faster.

The Plan

After Adobe acquired Neolane which became Adobe Campaign, they decided to move all the cross-channel marketing to Campaign. They were asked to move all of there programs in a few months which was really impossible.  So they decided to create a thoughtful plan that included a current state assessment, requirements gathering, and user research to figure out exactly how to move over to Campaign.

They focused on change management because of the move from a variety of old systems to this new platform.

In addition to using the Adobe system, they also managed the project following their best practices for deploying the solution to Adobe customers. They developed a roadmap along with requirements that included must haves and nice to haves.

The Results (so far)

Within 6 months they started migrating lead management and within 9 months they moved all of their high-volume emails over to Adobe Campaign.

Now Adobe has 130M recipients in their database.  They deployed 1.1B personalized emails in 2014. They had 130+ lead nurturing programs in 2014.

In lead scoring across several dimensions, they had 11x performance increase for the automated platform and 3x performance increase in the end-to-end, CRM to automated platform.  This has lead to dramatic increase on contact rate for those leads.

Lessons Learned

• The migration was hard because Adobe had built up a lot of assets, knowledge and practices across all the acquisitions over the years.
• Build an inventory of what content / programs will move and which will be left behind.  This helps identify how long the migration will actually take.
• Don’t design for perfection, but get going fast and make updates as you go along.
• The most challenging part of the implementation was not the technology side, but change management, business process change, and skills changes.

Tips and Tricks

1. When doing an implementation like this, make sure you have a good time with authority to make decisions.
2. Campaign is very flexible, so you should spend time planning out what you want to do before diving into it.
3. From a technical perspective, Campaign is very transactional.  So you have to make sure the database is tuned, decide what data is going to reside in the database versus what can be referenced.
4. Need a well defined process for on-boarding users.  Adobe created scenario-based user guides rather than feature-based.  Templates are a must to get the users up and running quickly.  Checklists are very handy to remind occasional users what to do when they use the system.
5. For training, they did a hub and spoke model to train a hub person in each region.  They also held specific office hours for each region so they could call when they were first starting out.
6. They used to use Batch and Blast for campaigns. Now they are starting to use workflows to plan out the experience better.

Adobe hasn’t finished the migration just yet.  They will continue to migrate everyone over to Campaign and will be optimizing their programs this year.  They are also integrating with their other Marketing Cloud tools.

Here are the steps in Jeff’s model:

Learn the landscape

Understand the analytics buying team. Often its a CxO teaming with a CIO.  Below the CxO is the budget approver, the decision maker and the feature evaluator.  On the IT side, there is also a feature evaluator and typically a VP/Senior leader involved.

When looking at the Technology Purchaser Messaging Matrix, address the individual contributor who is a technical purchaser like an analyst, IT manager, etc. These people are the evaluators. They don’t want to hear from their peers that what they bought stinks. The IT evaluator has to make sure the product meets the IT standards.

On the business side, you want to address the CMO, VP Marketing, etc.  These are the approvers. They usually approve the budget but don’t make purchase decisions.  Typically they are interested in consensus among the buying team.  They are interested in stability and reputation of the vendor.

Somewhere in the middle are the decision makers who would be directors, sr directors, etc.  They look at how to make or save money, not features or experience. Their job is to build the business case for anything they buy.

In other words, decisions are made in the middle!

Learn the Language

Schedule a meeting to discuss how this will address a specific business needs. Bring a perspective on business justification.  For analytics, dashboards are a good area.

There is a fallacy that if you can get to the right executive who can single handedly approve a deal. Executives are really looking for consensus from their team to approve a purchase.

When an executive gets excited about a product, they are good at handing out assignments that hold the decision makers feet to the fire. Adobe has myanalyticsscore.com that can help you figure out your maturity.

Weigh the Value

Instead of bludgeoning people with endless fact and features, bring unique insights about how the business can make or save money.  (See the book The Challenger Sale). Here are some values you can weigh in your justification:

• Multi-/Cross-Channel Analytics Views
• More Advanced Analytics
• Real time data
• Replacing an outdated product
• Overcome data limitations
• More functionality to support strategy change
• Easier to use tools

Qualify the Value

Here is how organizations qualified the value:

Saving money

• Time Savings / Efficiencies from fewer better tools
• Smarter investments, Higher MROI
• Better Targeting
• Fewer Resources
• More useful info
• Ability to monetize to offset cost

Make Money

• Identify cross selling
• Increased revenue

Here are some other ways:

• Standardize on a single vendor
• Bringing new insights

Quantify the Value

You need to separate hard and soft ROI.  For hard ROI, it has to be cleaHard ROI

• Clearly quantifiable cost savings or sales/revenue increases.  For example, a 50% reduction in time required to prepare weekly scorecards

Soft ROI

• Loosely quantifiable cost savings or sales/revenue increase.  For example, better targeting will lead to higher conversion rates.

Jeff provided a series of equations to calculate various savings and revenue numbers for the ROI estimates.

Patrick Tripp (@ptripp), Sr Product Marketing Manager, introduced Adobe Campaign at Adobe Summit. He started with a poll of the audience. Most people use a variety of channels with eMail being the most popular.

Kelly Reilly (@KerryReilly1), Director Product Marketing talked about the details of Campaign. Campaign is intended to redefine how brands engage with consumers. Kelly introduced the following core:

• Integrated Customer Profile brings together information you about the customers.
• Targeted Segmentation using the data from the customer profiles.
• Visual Campaign Orchestration or workflow for the campaign.  Visual is the key here as the tool is very visual to build the workflow making it easier for marketing professionals.
• Cross Channel Execution to deliver the campaign
• Real time interaction management to target a customer as soon as they visit the web site or call the contact center.
• Operational Reporting is a must have to identify which programs are working and why.

Best practices for campaign management:

• LA Kings wanted to increase customer knowledge and deliver personalized fan experiences.  They saw a 10% uplift in online renewals.  They identified positive ROI and increased revenue through these personalized experiences. Below is a video that talks about how the Kings did this.

• Sephora used campaigns for both instore and online experiences.  They saw a 70% productivity jump in creating campaigns
• Elsevier wanted to enhance customer communications, increase engagement, and implement best practices. They saw 30% increase in open rates and cost savings across their marketing efforts.

Campaign is now integrated across the Marketing Cloud to address these three challenges:

• Big Data to integrate customer data from a variety of sources
• Delivery of Campaigns offline and online, different devices, etc.
• Content personalization and streamlining content across channels

Here are the integrations

• Campaign and Analytics – Real Time analytics connected to targeted segments. Analytics can tell you about abandoned carts and those customers can then be targeted via Campaign.  If you can target those customers within an hour, you can increase conversions.
• Campaign and Core Services – Can share audiences to the marketing cloud and push marketing cloud audiences back to Campaign.  The shared data can be used to enhance personalization.
• Campaign and Target – Target is the testing and optimization tool.  Target has been extended to include eMail content.  Campaign can target content in the email using personalized and contextual content.
• Campaign and Experience Manager – connects the Marketing Cloud with the Creative Cloud. Assets loaded into the cloud are reflected in the content used by Campaign.  This creates a consistent brand experience.

Ben Tepfer (@bentepfer), Product Marketing Manager demo’d Campaign.  He showed how a campaign workflow can integrate content from Adobe Experience Manager to create highly personalized content when a user opens a web site from a push notification generated by Campaign.

Brad Rencher, Adobe’s SVP for Marketing Cloud, made the argument to more than 7,000 people attending this year’s conference that customer experience is now the key part of your brand.

Brad Rencher

This makes Digital Marketing the epicenter of your digital transformation efforts. Of course, Adobe is at the epicenter for many brands and wants to be the epicenter of more customers.

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s CEO, talked about Changing the World Through Digital Experiences. Marketing is on a reinvention journey but fundamentals of marketing are not changing. The art of marketing creative is still a key pat of the equation. Science in the form of data analysis, behavior analytics, etc have contributed to elevating marketing to a new level. Real-time has impacted the enterprise is completely new and different ways.  

This has led to the era of “Your Product is Marketing”, according to Shantanu.  So now, you have to ask broader questions about your products and look at new ways to enhance the customer experience. This has impacted Adobe too and they are looking at how to enhance their own products into a unified experience through the Marketing Cloud. 

Brad came back onstage to talk about consumer expectations around being consistency and continuous. The customer experience is the brand and marketing has to move beyond just marketing. Marketing has to take on the many customer experiences your brand has and make them consistent and continuous.

Coca Cola talked about their mission is to create happiness experiences for their customers. Their marketing efforts are not just about the logo, the colors, or even the product. By creating these happiness experiences they keep consumers connected to the brand.  As an example, they created a “hug machine” for finals week at a college campus.  When a student hugged the machine, they received a Coke in return. It was a fun and creative way to help students relieve stress and connect to the Coca Cola brand.

One way Adobe is developing a unified experience is through the Marketing Cloud. Adobe follows these these principles when looking at the Marketing Cloud:

• Comprehensive
• Integrated across channels both online and offline
• Actionable for both data and content

Brad fired off a bunch of announcements that will detailed out throughout the week at Adobe Summit. Briefly, here are some of those announcements that I could capture as Brad talked:

• Adobe Analytics announced Customer Intelligence (integrate customer data) and Predictive Analytics.
• Experience Manager is the backbone of content in the Marketing Cloud.  AEM Assets provides asset management in a Saas environment. Adobe is also delivering a pre-built AEM to get smaller companies and departments running quickly.
• Campaign has been integrated across all the Marketing Cloud solutions.  They also greatly enhanced the email marketing components of Campaign
• Target will deliver personalization beyond just web and mobile and into IoT.
• Social is mobile enabled so you can publish on the go.
• Media Optimizer has been rebuilt to be more programmatic.

Brad announced two new solutions:

• Adobe Prime Time – this puts the TV experience on any screen.  Marketers can track usage.  There is also continuous delivery from mobile to desktop to TV.
• Adobe Audience Manager connects audiences to programmatic features of the cloud and integrates across the Adobe Core Services.

Connect with Perficient on LinkedIn here.