Written by: Sean Burrell, SVP of Business Development & Global Alliances
“78% of companies surveyed who had both Adobe Campaign Classic and Adobe Analytics felt that they were not making the most of the tools.” – Qualitative anonymous survey
Why?
After years in consulting, Celerity has learned that the reason companies are not making the most of these tools is not that the tools combined can’t fulfill the business requirements; it’s that appropriate business cases to leverage the tools together have not been undertaken.
Three Reasons This Often Happens:
1. Knowledge
Adobe Campaign Classic & Adobe Analytics are very different types of tools along with the individuals who support and utilize them. The teams responsible for each system often don’t get the opportunity to learn more about how the other tool operates and functions. As a result, they don’t get the chance to understand and fully leverage what they have working together. It is rare to find people who have skills in both technologies in equal measure, which is an added barrier to integration and full optimization.
2. Time
Many organizations have reduced staff, but the expectation remains to get the same amount of work completed and in similar time requirements. While combining the technologies will save time in the long term, there is often not enough time in the day to complete existing tasks in the short term (never mind trying to tackle something new). Existing staff will be hard-pressed to complete daily activities, let alone researching, ensuring the right capabilities are in place, and beginning to develop a new integrated solution.
3. Life Stage
The two technologies are often purchased together at the start of a MarTech stack implementation. These tools are frequently implemented by separate teams, who have technology-specific knowledge and have both tools active within a similar timeframe. For most people, learning one new technology is hard enough, and oftentimes, there is just not an opportunity or bandwidth to learn two. The most common challenge; however, is that for many organizations who are in the early life stages with newly purchased products, they simply don’t know enough about what the tools are capable of individually, let alone together. This makes complete sense as the focus is traditionally solely on getting each tool implemented correctly.
With this known, how do you make the business case to have the two separate tools work together? Before you work out what the systems can accomplish when combined, it’s important to understand what each can do individually.
Starting the Business Case
You have a rough idea of what the tools can do individually; now, it’s important to see how you can align your business goals to your overall business strategies through better use of Analytics and Campaign. It is important to outline these goals at the onset. The next step is to identify which tool has the capabilities you need to get you to your ultimate goal.
Appoint a Senior Stakeholder as Counsel
As soon as you have compiled a draft of how leveraging Analytics & Campaign will further have a positive impact on your organization’s business goals and strategies, you have something tangible to help start winning buy-in amongst internal teams and individuals. You are going to need this support when it comes to budgeting, coordinating time with other members of the team, and working out the ROI of the Initiatives laid out.
Make Advocates and Prepare to Adapt
If you have not reached out to the individual(s) responsible for both products at this point, now is the time to do so. To ensure you can work on effective business initiatives as a team, those appropriate within your organization will need to review the business goals and strategies you have defined to ensure everything aligns from their perspective as well. Compromise is key. Similar to planning a vacation with friends and family, it will be difficult to make everyone 100% happy, so be prepared to have an open dialogue.
Here Comes the Hardest Part
You have produced your business initiatives, but it is critical that you document on paper what the business value(s) will be. To calculate this, you are going to need to outline which individuals will be doing the work and over what timescale. This will get you the return on investment needed to make this a reality.
An example to get you started:
Conclusion
The good news is that there is probably no better time than now to take a step back and look at what benefits can be gained from learning more about what technology can do to make you, your team, and your company more efficient and productive. It is going to take you and other members of your organization to take this step back momentarily, which can be difficult with so many daily responsibilities already underway. According to McKinsey & Co., “Companies who focused on innovation in the 2008 market downturn were still able to grow by 10% and outperformed their peers by 30% post-crisis.”
If you have Adobe Campaign and Adobe Analytics, please feel free to reach out and contact us. We have Subject Matter Experts who know both tools extensively and can help support any business case you are looking to create. We have also developed integrations between Analytics and Campaign that are out-of-the-box and light on implementation costs that could expedite any initiatives you might be looking to develop.