How Marketo Fits Into the Adobe Experience Cloud?

The acquisition of Marketo by Adobe in September 2018 made huge news across the marketing technology world. The whopping $4.5 billion deal provides Adobe the much-needed boost to rapidly expand it’s presence in B2B world.

Let’s start our journey with a typical B2B large enterprise. B2B customers are often to left to deal with a CRM provider, a marketing automation platform, CMS platform as a minimum. And then another ton of tools/platforms for personalization, data management (DMP), and the list goes on. With all these heterogeneous systems, B2B customers are forced to work in silos with little integration between these platforms, causing huge gap in customer experience. Often, B2B customers are left with building these integrations on their own in their pursuit of delivering great customer experience.

Salesforce is inarguably the leader in B2B space with more tools geared specifically for B2B success. With Adobe’s industry leading CMS platform, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), B2B companies rely on AEM’s power to deliver the right content at right time to the right audience. CRM and campaign platforms play major role from managing the lead to leadgen to deliver targeted messages. Adobe’s acquisition of Neolane helped Adobe leapfrog into B2C world, however Adobe still lagged behind Salesforce in the B2B world. To better compete with Salesforce in B2B world, Adobe is left with fewer choices – acquire or partner with leaders in CRM space and in B2B marketing automation space. As Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics dominate 98% of CRM market, Adobe strategically partnered with Microsoft to tightly integrate Adobe Experience platform within Dynamics CRM. Now, they are left to partner or acquire a Marketing Automation platform. And when it comes to the independent marketing automation platforms, nothing beats Marketo. Marketo’s acquisition allows Adobe to expand Adobe’s Experience Cloud portfolio of marketing tools to better compete with Salesforce in B2B space. This is certainly good news from B2B customers’ perspective. Bringing in these heterogeneous systems under one roof will force the vendors to deliver tighter integration from within, to avoid these expensive customs, often patchy, integrations customers were forced to build earlier.

Let’s look at how the addition of Marketo to the Adobe Experience Cloud promises to bring the transformation to the entire landscape and widens Adobe’s leadership in customer experience.

With nearly 5,000 customers, Marketo brings together planning, engagement and measurement capabilities into an integrated B2B marketing platform to Adobe Experience Cloud to offer an unrivaled set of solutions for delivering transformative customer experiences across industries and companies of all sizes. Marketo’s lead management and account-based marketing (ABM) technology empowered with the richness of Adobe Experience Cloud like – analytics, content, personalization, advertising, and commerce capabilities are all set to provide B2B & B2C companies with the ability to create, manage and execute marketing engagement at scale.

Some of the great features Marketo brings to Adobe Experience Cloud platform:

1. Advanced And The Unified View Of Customer:

According to Adobe’s research, 82% agree that achieving a single customer view is critical to businesses for long-term success, but only 18% are currently able to merge their customer data into one single profile across all marketing channels. Marketo capabilities in lead management, account-level data, and multi-channel marketing combined with Adobe’s rich behavioral dataset are all powerful to bring the unified singular view of any customer. Along with this, an advanced, full-picture view of the customers, including behavioral and ad data can also be gathered.

2. Seamless End-to-End Cross-Channel Customer Experiences:

For the past few years, marketers were looking for a solution to provide seamless end-to-end cross-channel customer experiences. But in reality, the requirement of complex technology integrations and heavy investments to connect all the different marketing platforms make it an uphill task for any form of business. The Marketo powered Adobe Experience Cloud comes with an unparalleled set of solutions across analytics, content, personalization, advertising, and commerce to automate the entire buyer and customer journey.

3. Power Of Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning:

Adobe and Marketo both come with strong content intelligence engines based on artificial intelligence (Adobe Sensei) and machine learning (ML). The combination of both results in a more powerful living and breathing data environment to deliver much-enhanced visitor’s and content author’s experiences. For example, on the authoring side, tools like Smart Tags help marketers to create and execute more personalized experiences by receiving automated suggestions to catalog content. This also makes it easy to find assets and reuse them to improve content creation and campaign execution. The data-driven approach and intelligent repository of content assets enable companies to focus their marketing efforts on the most valuable prospects and customers.

4. Data-Driven Personalization And Consistency:

Companies can personalize each and every experience of website visitor that better matches their interests by combining the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning in Adobe Target segmentation and Targeting Capabilities. It’s highly necessary to target audiences with the right message at the right time based on all their interactions and carries forward this level of personalized communications at the individual level for a better brand and customer relationship. Also, the data-driven decision-making process has been extended to the next level with tools for A/B and multivariate testing, landing page optimization, automated optimization of campaigns and multi-channel marketing automation activities. This enables marketers to deliver loyalty-building customer experiences across the web, mobile, email, in-store and in-person.

These are just the tip of the iceberg, and Adobe will continue to enhance Marketo to tightly integrate with Adobe Marketing Cloud. Over the past few years, Adobe has successfully acquired and integrated many solutions – CQ5 (now Adobe Experience Manager), Neolane (now Adobe Campaign), Omniture (now Adobe Analytics), to the Adobe Experience Cloud Suite. Today, all these products have evolved to become the core solutions in the Adobe platform. Now, the latest integration of the Marketo into the Adobe Experience Cloud has raised the bar for personalized and fully immersed experiences and the synergy of Adobe and Marketo is undoubtedly and overtly going to glorify the future of B2C & B2B marketing.

NextRow Digital is a systems integrator new age digital agency, and an Adobe Silver Partner, specializing in marketing cloud and technology implementations. With our extensive experience combined with a flexible, collaborative approach, we have helped clients meet their business needs successfully to overcome the challenges of the digital transformation and creating an omnichannel customer and e-commerce experiences.

Disclaimer:

The above blog represents the views, analysis, and opinions of the author and not necessarily represent the views of NextRow Digital. The author of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site. The author will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information. The author will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information. Also, to the extent permitted by applicable law, products – AEM, Marketo, Omniture, described in the above blog content, are patent and trademark products of Adobe™ and the same hold the full right with the patent, copyright, trademark, and any other software and intellectual property rights.