Adobe’s Marketing Cloud Gets Geo-Location, Other Mobile Features
Marketers are bullish on mobile marketing, and especially on location-based services.
Adobe is hoping to capitalize on this bullishness, with a new set of capabilities in its Marketing Cloud that can help marketers deliver effective promotions to mobile consumers.
As Ray Pun, Strategic Marketing lead for Mobile Solutions across the Adobe Marketing Cloud, writes in a blog post, the new capabilities help companies strengthen in-app communications with their customers. This is especially important, he writes, given recent Adobe research that found app users are more loyal to brands. In addition, according to the research, consumers use mobile apps for longer periods of time – three to four times longer — and interact with them more than twice as often as they interact with mobile websites.
Among the new mobile capabilities Adobe rolled out today:
- New functionality in Adobe Mobile Services, a core service of the Marketing Cloud, that can trigger messages to app users based on user behaviors, specified metrics or geographic data collected by iBeacons. Mobile Services also offers pre-built templates for message types, including banners that can be linked to custom Web content, alerts and notifications.
- A Digital Content Editor in Adobe Campaign that gives marketers the ability to edit, personalize and preview email content across devices to ensure emails will render appropriately.
- A Mobile App Dashboard that enable marketers to brands to refresh app content and better understand how apps are performing. According to Adobe, the dashboard utilizes flexible tiles that display in real time what app experiences have been updated and how often, what path users are taking with the app and how often they’ve launched it, among other information. Developers and marketers can also test app performance during the development, production and staging phases and deliver updates across app versions on all major mobile platforms with a new preview app.
- New features in Adobe Media Optimizer, which enable marketers to forecast expected clicks, cost-per-click and revenue for search ads by specific devices, and also allow them to adjust bids in milliseconds based on factors such as device, audience, time-of-day and location. The goal is to help marketers place search ads across mobile devices for the lowest cost at maximum return.
In addition to the ability to trigger messages to app users based on iBeacons data, Adobe is expanding its iBeacon support through integration with Adobe Campaign. This allows marketers to use the information to tweak audience segmentation for future campaigns and also to send personalized follow-up emails to customers.
Adobe isn't neglecting social channels, which are part of marketers' broader digital marketing strategies. It plans to offer native social capabilities that enable marketers to publish, route and approve social content in real-time, upload assets including photos, capture and share ideas with internal teams, suspend posts in crisis situations and leverage automated campaign tracking to measure social impact on downstream conversions. Available as a beta on iOS for iPhone, the app will support social activities across Facebook and Twitter first. Adobe plans to add support for other mobile platforms over the coming months.
One of Adobe's selling points for its Marketing Cloud is the tight integration among its services. Earlier this year Chris Wareham, senior director of Product Management, Adobe Analytics, told Enterprise Apps Today that Adobe's emphasis on integration was “way ahead of our competitors.”
Suresh Vittal, vice president, Digital Marketing at Adobe, echoed Wareham's comments in today's announcement of the new mobile services. “The tight integration of our six Marketing Cloud solutions gives Adobe the unique advantage to enable consistent, cross-channel experiences that keep the individual interests of customers in mind regardless of the device they are using,” he said in a statement.
Better integration seems to be a feature companies want in their marketing software. Nearly half of senior marketer surveyed by Teradata and the Econsultancy research firm named full integration with current technologies as the top criteria for evaluating new technology. In addition, 60 percent of the marketers named data integration as either a “top” or “highest” priority.
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