Automate to Survive: a Celerity and Adobe event

At Celerity, we believe in the power of sharing knowledge and networking with others in the industry. In partnership with Adobe, we held a private event for CRM and digital marketers called ‘Automate to Survive’.

At the event, Colin McEvily, Global Presales & Marketing Automation Consultant at Celerity delivered the keynote session on ‘Nailing the Moments That Matter’.

Let’s take a look at the main takeaways from the session.

Brand survival relies on your ability to compete, and marketing automation is key

To compete in today’s digital age, you need to be able to win more new customers whilst retaining, and most importantly, maximizing your existing customer base. However, brands no longer own those customer journeys; customers are empowered to own that brand relationship. Therefore, in order to win or keep their attention you need to be able to have a conversation when they desire it. Automating your contact strategy becomes key to achieving this, some branding it the ‘holy grail’ of CRM marketing: right person, right time, right message.

Brands need the right technology, people and processes in place to compete effectively at this level. Once you have those in place, having the right data and sufficient customer interaction is also important.

To start with, you need to pick the right marketing automation platform. With a plethora of options available, it’s all too easy to choose a solution that doesn’t actually match company objectives. To help with this, Colin explained that there is a six-step process that companies should follow to make sure that they choose the right technology:

1. Establish your goals – Decide exactly which end-goals you want to fulfil by using your marketing technology.
2. Develop requirements before reviewing product features – Outline exactly what you need to avoid getting distracted by technology that won’t cater to your end goals.
3. Consider cross-department benefits – Speak to other departments about the data that they are interested in utilizing, to make sure your technology benefits more than one department.
4. Select finalists – Now that you have your list of requirements, you can create a shortlist of technology you’re interested in adopting.
5. Conduct a live demo and consolidate scoring metrics – A live demo with relevant stakeholders will help to rule out any solutions that don’t meet your needs. In addition, creating score sheets for each solution will help when comparing them with each other.
6. Compare quotes and read the fine print – It should go without saying, but it’s really important that more than one person is responsible for reading the fine print to make sure you don’t adopt a solution that doesn’t work for the organization now and in the future.

Spotlight on Adobe Campaign

Many brands, such as Sky, LVMH, Shell & William Hill have chosen to adopt Adobe Campaign, part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, as their preferred marketing automation platform. Adobe now have two versions of the platform: Adobe Campaign Classic and Adobe Campaign Standard – providing two options depending on whether your company needs a data-driven, highly customizable enterprise tool or a robust but quicker, easier to execute version. Between both versions, Adobe Campaign Classic is chosen primarily because:

• It can be highly customizable with few constraints
• It provides a 360 degree view of customers across channels and systems
• It’s built to scale
• It has easy to use integration capabilities
• You can store customer data tables
• It can be implemented regardless of maturity level

Adobe Campaign is known as one of the best for marketing automation and gets results. Still, there are some common mistakes that some companies make when rolling it out.

In order to use Adobe Campaign to its full potential, marketing strategies and success metrics need to be defined, otherwise there are no set goals to work towards and ROI is difficult to measure. In addition, company data sets need to be clean (i.e. not cluttered with old or out of date information that is unusable), and this is something a lot of companies struggle with.

Moreover, some struggle if they’re trying to roll out more than one technology solution at a time, rather than focusing on one.

In his presentation, Colin outlined the following tips for implementing Adobe Campaign:

1. Assign a strong project lead – The project lead should take responsibility for guiding the implementation process.
2. Clearly define what a successful implementation looks like – Before implementing, outline your ideal implementation strategy.
3. Get unified buy-in from stakeholders – Prior to implementation, make sure relevant stakeholders are on-side.
4. Clearly identify required data for marketing efforts – In order to avoid over-burdening the system, identify and use only the data that you actually need.
5. Define what systems are required to interact with Campaign – Make sure that those who use systems that interact with Campaign are aware of the integration.
6. Walk before you run – Be prepared for integration and implementation to take some time to produce meaningful results.
7. Define roadmap with smaller scope and scale beyond – Make modest projections and leave room for growth.
8. Clearly define business rules ahead of implementation – Outline your pressure rules and contact rules before implementation, to ensure consistency in how the system is used. 

Do more with customer data

Integrating with Adobe Campaign has many benefits. It’s a substantial time-saver as it minimizes the need for disparate systems by consolidating sources for campaign orchestration and analysis. Users also report an increase in productivity, brand consistency and personalization. Ultimately, it leverages your data to do more.

Understanding the complex customer journey

Customer journeys are complex, so reacting to them in real-time is naturally even more complex. The five stages are largely agreed to be:

1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Action
4. Service
5. Loyalty

Different parts of your digital marketing strategy should address each part of this journey. Adobe Campaign helps to address this complex journey by automating the activities associated with each stage. You can integrate with other solutions within the Adobe Marketing Cloud, such as Adobe Analytics, as well as home-grown solutions and direct mail services. You can also trigger communications from web and email behavior, set up a CRM feed and create geo-targeting. Social listening is also the latest data-driven tactic used to achieve hyper-relevancy.

Data-driven technology allows you to respond to customers in real-time and provide a more relevant experience, but innovative experiences and new ideas that feed into the customer journey is what make them advocates for your brand. This is where automation can really benefit your brand in terms of a competitive advantage, because you can now provide your team with essential thinking time.

Time away from the day to day campaign management, where they can think about ‘what’s next?’, ‘how can we compete better?’, ‘how can we disrupt our industry?’. Automation provides this time to think differently, and in a world where consumers want more than ever before and they want it yesterday, our process for coming up with innovative ideas needs to be better, smarter and considered a priority in the overall CRM marketing strategy.

Interviews and discussions

Following Colin’s talk, we enjoyed an exclusive interview with Xavier Company Soriano (Digital Technology Manager at Puig Group, ex Product Manager at Adidas Group), where he discussed his 12+ years’ experience with marketing automation, plus his predictions for the future. If you would like to connect with Xavier or ask any questions regarding marketing automation, please feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn.

The evening ended with a group discussion on how to overcome the top marketing automation challenges, and identifying ways to maximize the automation opportunities that both technology and data present to us.

Interested in learning more about our expertise in Marketing Automation or Adobe Campaign specifically? Contact a member of our team today