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.

According to Gartner, 89% of companies expect to compete on customer experience in 2016. And in just four years, it’s estimated that 85% of a customer’s relationship with a brand won’t include face-to-face interactions. (Got your attention?)

Personalization is key not only for customer acquisition but also for customer retention. In the 2016 Annual Digital Trends Survey, companies that want to meet (or exceed) customer expectations need to deliver experiences that are: 

• Personalized and relevant (25%)
• Valuable (25%)
• Easy to understand (17%)

To create personalized experiences, marketing organizations need a solid digital marketing platform that supports their well-defined personalization strategies.

Many marketing departments choose to standardize on a single platform, easing the support and integration required for disparate, existing tools. Adobe Experience Manager, the content management pillar within the Adobe Marketing Cloud, is one such example.

Updates included in the recent release of Adobe Experience Manager 6.2 include features that make it easier for marketers to:

• Personalize and target offers
• Understand which assets are performing well (or not so well)
• Create connected experiences across mobile apps, forms, and in-person (or in-store)

Want to learn more about exceeding customer expectations and solving other common digital marketing challenges? Download our latest guide below.

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 can’t live without my… [fill in the blank].”

Many of us might answer smartphone, tablet, eReader, or wearable device (like our smartwatches or FitBits). This rampant proliferation of technology has opened our eyes to the possibilities of customer engagement.

It’s no wonder that capitalizing on analytics is a top priority for marketers. According to a recent Forbes article:

• 89% of marketers have predictive analytics on their roadmap for 2016
• 49% use predictive analytics today
• 40% plan to implement analytics in the next 12 months

In our interview series with Robert Sumner, principal of Perficient’s Adobe practice, we talked about the path to personalization and the challenges of implementing a personalization strategy.

However, the insights gained from analytics make it possible to create engaging, personalized experiences. Sumner shares his perspective on analytics:

No matter where you are on your digital marketing journey, we’re ready to help you navigate your transformation. Come chat with our team in booth #530 at Adobe Summit, March 20-24, 2016. You can also follow members of the Perficient team on Twitter during the event, @PRFTDigitalTech.

In our discussion, we also talked about creating personalization scenarios and the implications of this at time of deployment. One of the challenges many companies face is that they tend to have multiple target audience segments which then requires multiple personalization scenarios.

Sumner expands on this thought here:

Additionally, a report from Webtrends reveals that digital marketers face other challenges when it comes to implementing a personalization strategy:

• Lack of organizational alignment and unclear priorities – 76% of marketers stated this is the biggest hurdle preventing them from achieving digital marketing objectives.

• Limited marketing budgets – 68% of companies stated lack of funds is an issue, even though an increasing proportion of their marketing budgets are slated for digital strategy.

• Scarce skills and resources – 66% of companies believe they don’t have enough people to meet their digital marketing goals, and 57% stated that lack of digital marketing expertise of their current staff stands in their way.

• Available technology – 62% of marketers said that not having the right technology in place prevents them from delivering a personalized experience.

With the evolution of social media platforms and the explosion of mobile technology use, you’re well aware that creating personalized, 1 to 1 interactions with the customer is essential to remain competitive.

You don’t have to go it alone on your digital marketing journey. We’re ready to help you navigate your transformation. If you’re headed to Adobe Summit next week, stop by and talk to our team in booth #530. You can also follow Perficient team members on Twitter during the event, @PRFTDigitalTech.

Remember the time when it was enough to just put your content out there and gain customer attention? These times are long gone, and today’s customers expect personalized and relevant content across all touchpoints. To amaze customers and gain their loyalty, marketers need multiple content optimization point products that work seamlessly together out of the box. Along with cross-channel content analytics, every modern digital strategy needs real-time customer segmentation as well as actionable content insights and the ability to deliver dynamic creative content at scale. This session provides tips on how to pair Adobe Experience Manager best-in-class experience delivery with industry-leading content personalization and optimization tools.

They started out with the idea that not all interaction are the same. Those interaction that build trust and fulfill your needs are the ones that will make an impact.

Key Goal: Become an organization your customers trust

Key Takeaways

1. Shorten the cycle for iterations
2. Close the feedback loop
3. Empower people with great technology

Personalization

It’s now a necessity.  you don’t want to serve the Seahawks jersey to the Patriots fan.

Many today look like this:

• Slow time to market for personalization
• Disparate teams owning content authoring, delivery and personalization

What you need

1. Deliver relevant content
2. Streamline cooperation between content authoring and delivery
3. Leverages personalization capabilities when authoring content

Demo:

• Start with the Adobe Marketing Cloud screen. Yes, it’s not AEM but highlights the ever increasing integration of the entire Marketing Cloud
  • Includes an add button for additional services like analytics and Test / Target
• Showed the admin interface (similar interface styles for all Marketing Cloud)
• Found a site to edit and go to a specific page to edit.
• Note: All functionality lies within AEM
• Changed from edit to targeting mode
  • Changed the options in the top bar of the page
  • Created an activity (way to create several experiences across pages)
  • select a component to test by clicking on that section of the page.
  • Chose a few experiences.  (e.g. A/B)
    • an offer is an html fragment you will put in the personalized area
  • New feature in AEM 6.1 – the offer library. Makes it easier to store all your offers.
  • Approve the content and voila, experience B is ready
• He repeated by creating an experience C using the same set of tasks.
• Hit step two in the activity: Diagram the activity
  • This is the step where you map all your segments to the experiences
  • This could be segments from profiles and audiences or from Adobe Target
• Step three is the settings like start date, duration, etc.
  • This is the final step
• Overview of the offer library (again, new in 6.1)
  • Accessible from the personalization menu

Adobe thinks of AEM as the hub of all personalization and content delivery. This includes facebook, video streams, crm, twitter, etc. Can include some competitors to the Marketing Cloud.

Demo of integration to Bright Edge – SaaS marketing platform

• Edit the page as before
• Switch to Target mode
• Integration with BrightEdge works like this
  • Think, wouldn’t it be good to see what your competition is doing
  • Click on the Bright Edge Icon
  • Pop up the BE interface
  • it shows the top 10 competing pages for that specific page
  • Will let you quickly browse those pages
  • Can switch between desktop and mobile versions of these pages
• Test Now feature of BE integration
  • This to the presenter is the coolest feature
  • You choose the # of experiences and BrightEdge will create that first part.
  • Then BE creates experience A, B, and C in AEM. (tight integration)
    • it actually created the text of the message
    • You review the message and can make the changes you want.

Content Optimization

People may have great content but not all content is consumed equally by your audience.

Now

• Slow time to market to identify best content

What it should be

• Server the most relevant content first
• proactively author content based on trend
• Leverage analytics to author content

Demo

This is an analytics and AEM Demo.

• Note: the integration now is much closer and much more out of the box
• Adobe Analytics: the best tool in the analytics space.  (True, viewed as the Cadillac by the industry)
• In site admin, you can see analytics APIs now when you have added Adobe Analytics
  • Better than going to the tool to find the high level KPI’s
  • You can configure this to define which KPI’s you want to see.
  • Search is integrated.
    • e.g. give me those pages that meet these analytics criteria

Third parties can also be integrated here as well.

• This is integration with a company called Skyward
  • They help you crowd source content integration
  • From within AEM, the presenter presented a blank page
  • Clicked the Skyword content button
    • filled out the assignment summary, gave a deadline, and submitted
  • Received proposals for the assignment and choose
  • Choose the one you like best
  • Automatically integrate that content straight to your CMS

 Wrap-up

All the features previewed come in May.

A testing solution and personalization engine are only as effective as the quality of data fed to them. Combine the powerful data aggregation and audience mining capabilities of Adobe AudienceManager and Adobe Analytics with Adobe Target real-time testing and automation, and quickly validate the best strategies for personalizing content to your most profitable audiences. In this session, Conde Nast shares how it uses Adobe Analytics Premium and Adobe Target Premium with Adobe AudienceManager to test and deploy propensity models, look-alike modeling, and machine learning for personalization across 20 properties.

The Pre-Adobe State is the human driven approach to marketing.  It’s very manual and personalization is limited to the relationship.

The modern state is to automate personalization based on up to date data.

Note: You should at least peruse the key examples here.  They had some great content.

Key takeways:

1. Start with the data you know. After that you can go buy data.
2. Prioritize your objectives
3. Evolve your automation.  Use the tools you have for that first.

Conde Nast Info

It’s a 100-year-old company with 21 brands from fashion to technology.  It’s more than just a magazine company. The Scene, for examples, is a video hub.  Conde Nast has a strong editorial culture.  Their role is understanding people and what they want.

When first developing their digital practice, the editor in chiefs and digital editors pushed back.  They were thinking it was only about telling them what to say.  It took some time to overcome the challenge. Daniel positioned his team as the voice of the consumer to give the editors key information on channels, devices, what’s being read, etc.  Daniels team is about analytics and audience development.

Conde Nast’s relationship with Adobe extends back to 2012 with Creative cloud and web analytics.  Then bought Audience Manager, Target, Dynamic Tag Manager, Data Work Bench, Adobe Target Creative, and Automated Personalization.  Adobe’s stack helps Conde Nast better understand their users and bring value to their users.

Just a few years ago, the primary interaction was through a magazine. It’s a good business.  Everyone pays for the content. The advertisers pay as well.   But then…… the web took off and advertising moved towards digital channels.  In order to maintain ad revenue, they had to shift towards the digital channel.

Big question: what to put on the web site?  All magazine articles, some, paywall?  No login?

Then everything changed again with smartphones and tablets being 50% of all interactions.  Conde Nast’s biggest challenge isn’t the mobile phone interface, it’s the fact that facebook, and others were the channel. It’s a part of the facebook or twitter experience.   That’s the big challenge.

The good: reaching more people every day than ever before.  Personalization is an opportunity now with many different reader segments.

Example:

Abigail is a reader on the site via “Side door traffic”  There are a number of goals

• Comment
• Sign up for newsletter
• Buy the magazine
• Follow on social
• View and click the ad
• Buy the product
• Read a second story

Abigail wants very different things:

• email her bos
• call a friend
• make a reservation
• read her facebook read

She’ll give you 15 seconds to make an impact.

Hence the personalization problem.  What to prioritize given everything you can do and everything different people at the company want?

Insight: Loyalty matters. It’s the top metric.  Loyal users give you 20x more pages than average. They are 50% more likely to engage with ads. They are 8x more likely to convert to a subscription

Loyalty lends itself to a customer journey approach.  You can’t create a loyal user out of thin air:  You follow key steps:

1. Acquisition
   1. Edit / Audience Development are the internal stakeholders
2. Engagement – enjoy the experience. Share and comment on an article
   1. Edit and product management are the internal stakeholders
3. Loyalty or repeat visitations
   1. Edit / Subscription Marketing
4. Covnersion – paid subscriber
5. Monetization – target ad experience. We know things about you so we can create a better more relevant experience.

Case Studies

1. What type of headline attracts people?  (headline testing using Adobe Target)

Vogue.com: Headline A: This is all you need for valentines day.  B: Llama, Pajamas, Male models, What more do you need for a snow day.    B won by a mile. They learned that alliteration works.

2. Engagement: personalizing content.  compile a list of similar articles.  It used to be a manually curated list.  Adobe used Adobe Recommendations (part of Adobe Target premium suite)  It makes recommendations based on user behavior.

Result: The machine won.  With testing they found a 26.28% lift in monetizable inventory.

Note: this is data Conde Nast already had.

3. Loyalty: does a targeted newsletter interstitial increase email acquisition?

Started with channel analysis. facebook vs twitter vs email vs direct.  Found that email groups were very small but highly engaged.  They spoke to the editors and found that they didn’t really care about email.  It was managed by interns and didn’t get much attention.

Solution: move the signup module out of the bottom of the page to front and center. This got more sign ups but while angering people.

Second solution: Look at who signed up.  Use that data to create a segment of the type of user and then target the interstitial .

Result: 300-400 new sign-ups (a 10X increase)

4. Conversion: How do we personalize magazine cross sells

How do you pair the right impulse offer to the right consumer?  The past method used a direct mail method.  They tested the impulse offer from the direct mail and found that impulse changed when moving online.  this increased impulse buy by 11%

Audience Manager

How does Conde Nast get info:

1. Browsing data from Adobe Analytics
2. Subscriber data
3. Third party data

Adobe Audience Manager takes that info to create a unified user profile and setup the segment for additional personalization.  Conde takes key information like name and address to get more info on subscribers visiting the site. Live Ramp does this and then sends it to Audience Manager.  (really cool and really scary….)

This really helps when you don’t have a registration wall.

Goal: create a persona for glamour addicts to inform test copy and creative design

How: Used Audience Manager to define the segments and then test it out on what worked for those types of users  (A/B testing)  They also found which types of user the testing worked least well (mobile was one segment)

Another example: used a propensity model to help New Yorker define their paywall.  they found that while conversion was low. the 5 articles for free model still gave 250,000 subscribers.

Future

Want to dynamically assemble pages based on what they know about you. This includes;

• Headline
• The banner on most shared – don’t show what’s already been read
• subscription marketing offers – stop targeting the current subscribers for example
• Advertising: help Cadillac understand who in the subscriber based is likely to buy a car so they can get better ROI