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It started with 2,600 people packed into a Salt Lake City hotel ballroom eagerly awaiting the show to begin. This was my first year attending, so I didn’t know what to expect. The room looked like it has been set up for rock concert rather than a business conference. As a voice came over the loud speaker letting us know that the show was about to begin, Daft Punk started playing, the lights dimmed and the opening keynote for Adobe’s Omniture Summit began.
The annual event is a three day marathon of training, keynotes, breakout sessions, networking and, of course, partying with some of the best web analysts, advertisers, developers and digital marketers in the world.
The theme for this year’s summit was that digital marketing was the new extreme sport. If you think about it, the concept makes a lot of sense. Digital marketing, similar to extreme sports, is a combination of art and science. Whether you are analyzing a snowpack or spinning 180s over 120 foot gaps in the back country, you can’t (and shouldn’t) do one without the other. Summit takes all that is awesome about digital measurement and crams it into a very short time period. This makes for some very late nights and a lot of early morning coffee. But it is all worth it to spend some time with some of the world’s best and brightest marketers.
So what did I learn from the experience? Lots more than I care to write, but below are my four biggest takeaways.
It’s all about data and using it in real time
One of the biggest advantages that digital has over other marketing channels is measurability. Pretty much everything digital can be tracked, which means that as marketers we are sitting on a gold mine of data. In the past those who were able to capture this data and gain insights from it were the ones who were successful. Don’t get me wrong, this is still critical for anyone in Marketing Science. Now there is just another piece of the puzzle: On-the-fly optimization and personalization. The industry is becoming more dynamic; and those who are able to leverage their data in near real time and across tool sets and platforms will succeed.
Adobe’s newly updated Marketing Suite now makes this easier than ever. With 12 products and counting, the suite allows us to combine our data into one place and leverage it across multiple tools. New additions to the suite this year like a all new version of Site Catalyst (Adobe’s flagship product for site analytics) as well as on the fly global suite segmentation (segmentation no longer limited to just one tool) will allow us to realize the true power of the data and ultimately create a better user experience as well as do some incredible analysis that will drive ROI. Best part of it all is that this can all be done in real time, which means we can now leverage our insights to affect our customers while they are still on the site!
Creating cross-device experiences with relevant content is critical
The proliferation of mobile devices in the digital space means that as marketers we need to continue to adopt cross platform experiences. This is nothing new; we all know our customers are no longer just on a desktop. The digital purchase cycle may start on a desktop, involve a mobile app and ultimately end on a call center.
A relevant and seamless experience across devices requires us to leverage data from all these different platforms. It requires a lot of smart people and a deep knowledge of tool sets to accomplish. But the same holds true for almost every problem we face as digital marketers. Just because something is hard, does not mean we should shy away from it. The good news is that companies like Adobe have recognized this and are making it much easier to do. Personalizing a message to each customer and doing so across devices will allow us to achieve what was dubbed at Summit as the holy grail of digital marketing: mass customization. Imagine how successful our sites/apps/etc. could be if they were all tailored to the individual user.
Social is kind of a big deal (if you didn’t already know)
One of the biggest announcements of the event was launch of Adobe’s new Social Analytics tool. It is not yet in beta, so we didn’t get a full demonstration, but at first glance, the tool looked quite powerful with the ability to do in-depth analysis across multiple platforms. But the best part, it integrates with the rest of the marketing suite!
This is huge, not only will we now be able to pull all of our data from one place, but we can also easily analyze our social activities and see how they are impacting our site and vice versa. In addition to this new announcement, Adobe has been working closely with Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to help pull even more social data into the Marketing Suite through API integration and application tagging. Doing so helps us easily gain insight into and optimize our various social platforms.
As the social space continues to grow, measurement and optimization will become even more important. We look forward to seeing more the Social Analytics tool as more information becomes known.
Despite all this science business, content is still king
Some things never change; there is no substitute for compelling content. This has been a fundamental truth for marketers for quite some time now. We can optimize all we want, but if you don’t have compelling content on your site to keep your visitors engaged and coming back you won’t be in business for long. The meshing of art and science will continue to be vital to the success of any digital program. The art side to create the content and the science side to optimize it to enable it to reach its true potential.
Coming out of Summit
I can now see why it is so important to be able to integrate your tool sets to be able to provide holistic view of your marketing activities. This view not only gives you the ability to tell the entire story, but to use data from one tool/platform to influence a visitors experience throughout the entire purchase cycle. Integration capabilities should already factor into your decision process when picking an analytics tool. And as marketers begin to leverage their data more and more for real time optimization and personalization this will become even more important.
The addition of social analytics capabilities to Adobe’s Marketing Suite has been ground breaking as well. It is now possible to perform social analytics and truly optimize social with some of the same tools we already use to optimize our web sites. We can now show how our social activities affect our site activities and show a true return on our social investments. Those who are able to capitalize on this will be on the cutting edge of analytics and will prosperous for years to come.
