Delivering digital marketing success

NeilMorgan

Neil Morgan
Senior marketing director
Digital Marketing Business Unit, Adobe

People today can interact with businesses across multiple channels and devices. Businesses have to figure out how to best attract, engage and retain these customers in a world where the reach and quality of experiences directly impact success.

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Sponsored by Adobe

They need to effectively deliver the right online experience to the right person at the right time, wisely spend online ad budget to drive the best acquisition traffic and better monetise audiences to command the highest possible ad rates.

How can they achieve this? By optimising every digital interaction and turning each one into an opportunity to deliver value back into the business.

Recognising these challenges, Adobe is delivering solutions that enable digital marketers to align business goals and automate essential online initiatives, empowering them to make better decisions and execute them faster.

Marketers must make every digital interaction an opportunity to deliver value back into the business

There are four core areas we are focused on. The first is personalised engagement, which gives marketers the power to better connect with customers by delivering personalised experiences in real time. The second is multichannel campaign execution, which enables marketers to make timely decisions to execute multiple campaigns – be it search, display, social media, mobile, video, or games – that will deliver the highest return possible returns.

Then there’s media monetisation, which provides clear return on investment (ROI) metrics on advertising spend so marketers can clearly understand how to optimise content across all the digital channels available, providing the optimal yield for their ad inventory. Finally, there is analytics and reporting; enabling data-driven decision-making to optimise marketing efforts.

For marketers, getting the right platform that lays the foundation of their company’s digital presence is critical. So too, is a robust and scalable platform that is able to manage both the content and data. Data can come from a web clickstream, social media channels, mobile, video, customer relationship management software, call centres, point of sale or third-party marketing systems such as email and ad serving.

Being able to capture, collate and analyse all of the information in one place enables marketers to truly understand their investments, how effective they are and how best to optimise them.

Having content is, as many marketers know, only part of the story. Being able to manage the content is as important as compelling digital assets.

These capabilities are delivered as part of Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite that Premier Inn (below) has adopted. This has enabled the brand to adapt content according to customer behaviour and then quickly publish content to all relevant marketing channels, ensuring marketing campaigns have real impact and deliver far greater ROI.

For more information on Adobe Digital Marketing click here.

Case Study: Premier Inn’s premier experience

PremierInn

Premier Inn, an award-winning member of the Whitbread corporate family, is the UK and Ireland’s largest hotel brand, with 620 budget hotels and more than 47,000 rooms from Elgin in the north of Scotland to Helston in Cornwall.

With a strong commitment to service and a unique money-back guarantee for customers, Premier Inn identified an opportunity to improve its online presence by implementing an enterprise content management solution (CMS) that would allow its marketing team to create and update its own web pages and content, rather than rely on external suppliers.

Working with VML, its primary digital development agency, Premier Inn evaluated the options for its new web platform. Based on Java and other open technologies, the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite (DMS) offered the flexibility the company was looking for, including easy integration with its existing booking engine and other back-end systems.

Faster, more flexible marketing

As part of the Adobe DMS, Adobe CQ has given Premier Inn the marketing flexibility it needs to maintain its market leadership. “The ability to make content changes to the site ourselves, instead of asking the technical development team to do it for us, has been critical,” says Kate Arthur, relationship manager at Premier Inn.

“Using Adobe enables us to implement changes in a day that might have taken weeks before, such as a promotion for last-minute travellers over the holiday season.”

CMS functionality, such as the easy creation of page templates, makes it simple for Premier Inn marketers to reuse elements of successful promotions for even greater efficiency.

Data-driven web optimisation

The Adobe DMS, including Adobe SiteCatalyst and Adobe Discover, helps Premier Inn achieve maximum marketing impact from its web platform. “We use data produced by the Adobe DMS to monitor the performance of our website on a weekly and monthly basis, including changes in traffic and conversion levels, which helps our marketing team guide our investments in search and other tactics,” says Arthur.

The company is currently in the process of implementing Adobe Test&Target™, another element of the Adobe DMS, to enable A/B and multivariate testing to optimise the relevance, quality and effectiveness of its online promotions and web experience for customers.

Expanding worldwide, across channels, throughout the corporate family

Premier Inn is now expanding its implementation of Adobe CQ into a multisite, multinational platform to support its operations worldwide.

At the same time, the company is building an optimised mobile site based on Adobe templates to give travellers access anywhere, any time to information and booking.

Based on the success achieved by Premier Inn with its Adobe investment, parent company Whitbread is now using Adobe CQ to power its own corporate site, as well as sites for its Beefeater and Table Table restaurant brands.

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