Adobe Experience Manager — what it is and how it works
Trying to keep track of all your digital content and assets — let alone organizing and using them effectively to reach your customers and earn their trust — is daunting, to say the least.
As a business owner, you need a solution for managing all of your digital content. Maybe you’ve heard that Adobe Experience Manager can simplify digital content management, but you aren’t sure if it’s time to make the switch.
Adobe Experience Manager combines digital asset management and content management into a unified solution for delivering timely, relevant, and personal experiences. This article will break down what Experience Manager is all about and show you why it’s the best option for comprehensive digital content management.
This post will discuss:
- What Adobe Experience Manager is
- How Experience Manager works
- Key features of Experience Manager
- Benefits of Experience Manager
- Integrating Experience Manager with other products
- Getting started
What is Adobe Experience Manager?
Adobe Experience Manager is a software solution that’s equal part content management system (CMS) and digital asset management (DAM) system.
Experience Manager helps companies regain control over their digital content, which is often spread across numerous sites, channels, and apps — by providing much-needed structure for content management. This reduces the complexity of content management to save businesses time.
According to a 2021 Forrester report, Experience Manager is the most robust CMS on the market. More than 128,000 websites rely on the agile setup of Experience Manager to manage their content.
Unlike other solutions, Experience Manager allows you to manage and sync data and content across different internal systems as well as customer-facing channels. This amounts to a more comprehensive, unified customer experience that saves your team time while improving your public image.
How Experience Manager works
Brands rely on Experience Manager because it encompasses several functions that work together to create a streamlined, simplified experience. Experience Manager allows you to manage content fragments, create responsive web designs, and more.
Experience Manager works by combining these six time-saving solutions into a single platform.
Content management system — Experience Manager Sites
Adobe Experience Manager Sites is a marketer- and developer-friendly content management system. With Experience Manager Sites, you can quickly build a website using templates and ready-to-use components. Developers can also customize the site with minimal code.
Experience Manager Sites lets developers and marketers publish content simultaneously and seamlessly on nearly any platform or channel. Plus, its generative artificial intelligence tools make it easy to change the tone of voice, add content variations, and make universal changes to all content.
Experience Manager Sites is perfect for creating personalized experiences for different customer segments. For example, if you’re a software company that caters to both businesses and individuals, you can create separate landing pages for both audiences in just a few clicks.
Experience Manager Sites is fast, easy to use, and secure, so it’s a popular option for both resource-minded small businesses and busy enterprise teams.
Digital asset management — Experience Manager Assets
Adobe Experience Manager Assets is a digital asset management system which is a cloud-based system that stores and organizes all of your digital files. Instead of trying to locate files between your employees’ separate computers and accounts, a DAM makes it easy for your team to access assets like images, videos, and even 3D models in a shared environment.
For example, you can store a social media post template on the DAM and share it with your team. When you train your team to pull from this template, you’ll ensure that all social media posts follow your branding guidelines. Experience Manager Assets also tracks changes, so if anyone adjusts the templates, you can see it in the revision history.
Experience Manager Assets lives on Adobe’s cloud, so you don’t have to worry about storing large files locally. Plus, Experience Manager Assets is fast, scalable, and integrates with other Adobe software to streamline your workflow.
Digital enrollment and forms
Experience Manager includes digital enrollment and forms, which helps you build a smooth digital enrollment and onboarding journey from start to finish. This feature removes the need for paper, helping your business easily embrace digital transformation — all while speeding up your workflows.
Digital enrollment and forms makes it easy to build digital forms, collect e-signatures, and kick off onboarding with simple automations. For example, sales teams can build onboarding forms for new clients instead of sending dozens of emails back and forth. Once the client completes onboarding and signs a contract, the system will automatically send the client a message about onboarding. This helps your sales team save time and gives clients a better experience.
Whether you want to create forms for internal or external use, digital enrollment and forms are easy to use across multiple platforms.
Digital Screens
Digital Screens is a digital signage solution that gives marketers the ability to create and manage digital signage for stores and venues. With this feature, you can communicate with digital signs displayed in store, which makes Digital Screens ideal for omnichannel businesses.
You can create and update the signage easily, as well as coordinate sign messages in multiple locations from one dashboard. For example, if your company has a brick-and-mortar presence, you can use Digital Screens to add smart product recommendations to in-store displays — and even customize the product suggestions based on each store’s clientele. This elevates the in-store experience, educates shoppers, and saves time for in-store staff.
In a world where customers expect a consistent experience both online and offline, Digital Screens gives you the power to sync your marketing in the physical world with your online efforts.
Digital Guides
Digital Guides is software for creating product documentation and supporting content. Digital Guides is a component content management system (CCMS), which isn’t to be confused with a CMS. This tool structures content by organizing it into components that you can easily change out as needed.
For example, if you change a product feature, you need to ensure that all of your help documentation addresses that change so customers have a consistent experience. Without a CCMS, you would have to make this change manually. But Digital Guides makes it easy to make these changes at scale by easily swapping out content components.
Product features change over time, and that can cause disruptions for both your employees and customers. Digital Guides helps you easily format and link your user guides to help everyone have a better experience.
Adobe Learning Manager
Adobe Learning Manager is software that allows you to create your own training programs. You can use it for customer education, sales and partner training, franchise and in-store training, employee reskilling, and compliance training.
Normally, it takes a lot of time to create personalized training for your business. But Learning Manager allows you to create both internal and external training with 86,000 ready-made courses from an existing content marketplace. It also comes with engaging features like gamification, leaderboards, and social learning.
For example, you can use Learning Manager to train new managers in your organization on leadership best practices. Learning Manager also gives you the ability to engage customers with external-facing training, which can increase engagement and sales.
Key features of Adobe Experience Manager
Experience Manager comes packed with powerful features to streamline your workflows while creating an all-around better customer experience.
Project dashboard
Experience Manager comes with a sleek, centralized dashboard that gives you a high-level view of all projects. Every project is a resource group represented as a tile for easy access.
For example, all of your training materials might be under one tile in the dashboard. This helps you quickly access your different projects, as well as add tasks, assets, or external links for each project.
Out-of-the-box technology
- Experience Manager is a plug-and-play platform that you can use with zero code. The user-friendly setup makes it easy for anyone to use, thanks to its:
- What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editor
- Editable templates and core components, such as headers and footers, with adjustable styling
- Responsive layout
- Add-ons
While coding isn’t necessary to use Experience Manager, developers can still add custom code to personalize the platform even more. But you don’t need to be a development savant to use this platform effectively because of its:
- Low-code setup. The low-code options in Experience Manager allow you to customize templates with very little coding knowledge.
- Example code. Experience Manager provides example code to show you what’s possible in the platform.
- Open source. Experience Manager is built on open-source Java. Developers can use open-source React and Angular Core components too. This means there’s a large developer community available to answer any questions you have about customizing Experience Manager.
Cloud service
As a cloud platform, Experience Manager is very scalable. All of your users will always have access to the latest features. You don’t have to worry about the time or expense of managing your own IT resources since Adobe manages all upgrades for you.
Adobe also takes cloud security seriously. Experience Manager has robust security features, including access management, encryption, and multifactor authentication.
Visual media conversion
Resizing images and videos for every channel is time-consuming, especially if you have a lot of assets. The visual media conversion feature of Experience Manager allows you to convert files into different sizes and formats in bulk.
For example, if you created a social media graphic for Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, all of these channels have different image sizing and formatting limits. Visual media conversion allows you to quickly convert these images into the right sizes with just a few clicks.
Omnichannel content delivery
The Experience Manager headless CMS facilitates omnichannel delivery. You can manage multiple websites — even if they’re in different languages — to create a full omnichannel experience for customers around the globe. Experience Manager allows you to share content on every channel, including mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, to deliver a consistent experience across multiple touchpoints.
Benefits of Adobe Experience Manager
Instead of using a piecemeal approach for your business, Experience Manager gives you multiple solutions rolled into one convenient platform. More businesses are investing in Experience Manager because of its:
- Easy-to-use CMS. You don’t need any special experience or training to manage content in Experience Manager. The intuitive platform allows non-technical users to easily manage content across multiple properties.
- Automated workflows. Experience Manager automates tasks to keep the ball rolling for your teams. Use the artificial intelligence (AI) features to tag, crop, and distribute assets in record time.
- Improved search for digital assets. Stop wondering where your images and videos are. Experience Manager pulls all of your digital assets into one place, making it easy to find and adapt content as needed.
- Personalized content. Easily create content variations on each channel to create hyper-specific experiences for all of your target personas.
- Ability to target customers wherever they are. Experience Manager gives you the ability to deliver targeted experiences, regardless of where customers choose to engage with you.
- Better task management. Content management requires a lot of tasks, which is why Experience Manager streamlines digital asset management to-dos. Easily add tasks to each project in your dashboard to stay on top of your workload.
- Easy integration. Keep everything on the same platform. Whether you’re using third-party analytics or Adobe Marketing Cloud, Experience Manager easily integrates with other tools.
- Flexibility and scalability. Boost engagement by creating different content variations for all of your personas in just a few clicks.
- Add-on functionality. If you need more specific functionality, Experience Manager add-ons are available through third parties and the Magento marketplace.
Integrating Experience Manager with other products
While Experience Manager comes with a lot of features out of the box, organizations can also integrate Experience Manager with additional services to get even more value out of the platform. Try integrating it with other products, such as:
- Ecommerce software. Experience Manager integrates with major ecommerce solutions to streamline content and asset management. It integrates with Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, Shopify, WooCommerce, and more.
- Adobe Workfront. Manage your team’s tasks and workflows by integrating Workfront with Assets. This integration makes it easy to approve content, deliver assets, and publish content using the power of automation.
- Adobe Creative Cloud. Whether you’re brainstorming content ideas or need creative variations for different platforms, integrating Creative Cloud with Experience Manager makes it possible to process assets at scale. Configure files in Experience Manager to effortlessly bulk process files with Lightroom Presets, Image Masks, and more.
- Adobe Target. Integrating Adobe Target with Experience Manager makes it possible to personalize web content to each of your target personas. Target can show you which customers to focus on so you can message them more effectively with Experience Manager Sites, Screens, or Forms.
- Adobe Analytics Cloud. Get a more complete view of your web activity by integrating Analytics Cloud with Experience Manager. Track the performance of your Adobe Forms and continue optimizing your content to encourage even more engagement at scale.
Getting started
Adobe Experience Manager is an all-in-one suite that simplifies content and asset management at scale. It integrates with multiple solutions to streamline workflows, automate tasks, and provide a better customer experience.
When you’re ready to get started, learn a little more, or try it for yourself, get a demo of Adobe Experience Manager.
Experience Manager combines digital asset management and content management into a unified solution for delivering timely, relevant, and personal experiences. It helps you source, adapt, automate, and deliver one-on-one digital experiences across web, IoT, and more — at any scale — powered by the latest AI. As a cloud service, Experience Manager is always on and up to date so you can make the most of your content and stay ahead of rising customer expectations.
Watch the overview video to learn more.