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Tag: Adobe

  • Digital Marketing Platforms – Cut Through The Provider Hype

     

    The 2015–16 report, Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting a Digital Marketing Platform, 2015–16, has crowned Adobe the King of Digital Marketing Platforms. IBM, Oracle and Salesforce rounded out the top four.

    According to Gartner, “Digital marketing platforms are designed to support an extensible set of requirements within a single neighborhood or two. A digital marketing platform exposes key elements as standardized services via a programmatic application programming interface for building custom applications, extensions and integrations with other custom and commercial applications and data sources.”

    A Word Of Caution

    • When it comes to marketing technology or tools, there’s an abundance of choices. According to this chart, those choices doubled in the last year from 947 in Jan 2014 to 1846 in Jan 2015.

    marketing technology landscape

    Image Source

    • Understand your requirements and evaluate multiple value propositions. Some providers may have inflated their value propositions by claiming to be a “digital marketing platform” or a “marketing cloud” when in fact they aren’t. Inflated claims may lead to loss and disappointment in terms of your dollars spent, your time wasted and your expectations not met.
    • Digital marketing platforms are complex inter-disciplinary systems, and work best when the CMO and CIO have a unified technology strategy to guide the organization’s digital marketing transformation.
    • Unicorns are awesome – but we have not yet found one. Have realistic expectations of the tools and technology you choose to implement. Your expectations will be met if and only if the tools are used by people who leverage the correct processes to extract value from your marketing technology stack.

    There are a lot of tools and software that can help make a digital marketer’s job a success. The trick is to choose the right tools and technology that cater to your specific needs at any given point of time.

    Let us know if marketing technology has increased the efficiency and responsiveness of your marketing organization?

  • Deconstructing the Value of LinkedIn Sponsored Updates

    Linkedin Sponsored UpdatesLinkedIn is arguably the most popular networking site, in the social world, for professionals.

    The site has a really attractive ad products’ suite to which it added Sponsored Updates in July last year.

    So what is it all about?

    Sponsored Updates are very much like regular LinkedIn updates, the only distinction being that they are marked as ‘Sponsored’. LinkedIn users can like, comment, share and follow sponsored updates posted by brands.

    Sponsored updates can be viewed on desktops, smartphones and tablets.

    With every increase in the amount of content generated on the web, the chances of your content getting missed in the virtual ocean of content are higher than before. At the same time, marketers can’t do too much to make their content stand out because readers don’t appreciate content presentation that is at odds with the rest of the page that they are reading.

    Effectively, brands need to do some amount of tight rope walking to get noticed by customers without alienating them.

    The future of Sponsored Updates and how it’s helping B2B marketers

    Sponsored Updates cater to two important requisites in digital marketing today: native advertising and targeted marketing.

    Sponsored Updates is a good example of native advertising where the ad takes the form of regular content.

    Using Sponsored Updates, B2B brands can target the right people with the right content. LinkedIn’s competence in targeting combined with the subtle nature of Sponsored Updates makes it a powerful tool in the hands of canny marketers.

    One of the common problems these days is the quality of leads that marketers get but this may soon be a thing of the past.

    The combination of the right audience, subtle and well-targeted content is resulting in Sponsored Updates delivering high quality leads. It is expected that as more marketers start using these updates and best practices evolve, Sponsored Updates will become a large source of high quality leads for B2B businesses on LinkedIn.

    Another aspect that will be observed in the coming days is that as marketers develop greater familiarity with this tool, more of them will use images and different content types including rich media. This will increase the types of brand messages that marketers can communicate using Sponsored Updates.

    For example, Sponsored Updates can be used to not only make company announcements and gain new customers, but also to deliver communication to their current customers about upgrades to products/ services they are using.

    Success Story – Adobe

    Adobe Success StoryAdobe, a top B2B brand on LinkedIn, was a part of LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates testing phase. The brand has continued using Sponsored Updates with impressive results after testing. Research indicated that after Adobe used Sponsored Updates, targeted decision makers were:

    • 50% more likely to agree that Adobe is shaping the future of digital marketing
    • 2.5x more likely to agree that Adobe’s Sponsored Updates captured their attention
    • 79% more likely to agree that Adobe can help them optimize their media spend

    Have LinkedIn Sponsored Updates been useful for your B2B brand in any other way? Tell us in your comments!

    Image Source: Tech Marketing Buffalo