Catch the best of Summit for high tech
For high-tech marketers, Adobe Summit 2023 was the place to be. Experts explored the challenges faced by the industry and shared strategies to help tech firms prioritize the central theme — experience-led growth. Each session offered a unique perspective on how to curate and deliver next-gen experiences — that is, experiences that put customers’ needs and behaviors at the center of a personalized journey — for both individual buyers and buyer groups.
This year’s Adobe Summit focused on three major strategies for the high-tech industry, all of which support experience-led growth. First, high-tech companies need to invest in a modern marketing platform. Next, they need to focus on smoothing out the customer journey and engaging on the buyers’ terms. And lastly, high-tech companies need to increase agility and productivity to effectively scale marketing teams.
Three major experience-led growth strategies for the high-tech industry:
- Invest in a modern marketing platform.
- Smooth out the customer journey and engage on the buyers’ terms.
- Increase agility and productivity to effectively scale marketing teams.
In case you weren’t able to attend the sessions live, we’ll explore these strategies and match them up with highlights from some of the most impactful high-tech industry sessions from Adobe Summit 2023 — including speakers from leaders like Red Hat and Lenovo — to help you deliver experiences that turn prospects into lasting customers faster than ever.
Invest in a modern marketing platform
High-tech firms feel the pressure to deliver the experiences that today’s buyers expect. They are investing in customer experience (CX) platforms that bring together all the capabilities they need and rely on customer data as a foundational element.
With the approach of a cookieless future, high-tech organizations will be challenged to create personalized experiences with fewer data points. This represents a significant shift for brands as 75% of marketers still heavily rely on third-party cookies, and 50% of all experience personalization is currently dependent on third-party cookies. To navigate this, high-tech companies are now investing in customer data platforms (CDP) that are tightly integrated with the rest of the martech stack. Full-featured CDPs do the hard work of bringing together customer data into a single profile or account that allows for deep customer insights and real-time delivery of customer experience.
The Summit session CDP Selection: Capabilities to Look for and Building Buy-In explored how to select and successfully build a CDP as part of a strong first-party data strategy. The session dove into why CDPs are essential for powering great customer experiences, how to choose the right partner to future-proof data management, and what you can do now to prepare for organizational and personal success.
Chris Sessoms, senior manager of web technology and infrastructure at Red Hat, led the session and shared how Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform was central to building a winning data strategy. “We had to explain to our executives that yes, we are bringing another set of acronyms to your forefront. This is a foundational platform that has services with tech on top of it,” Sessoms said.
Red Hat set out with a goal of $1 million in marketing savings after one year of using Real-Time CDP. Along the way to reaching that goal, Sessoms learned four main things a CDP needs to do — data ingestion, profile consolidation, activation, and data governance and consent management.
A CDP’s data ingestion needs to include first-party customer data from both known and unknown sources — and as announced at Summit, Real-Time CDP now also combines partner data that includes additional attributes and identifiers. High-tech companies are working to consolidate profiles, meaning their CDP should bring these new events and attributes about buyers into the identity graph as they become available. That way, brands can have real-time information about who customers are and how to best reach them. When it comes to activation, high-tech companies are thinking broadly and include channels like marketing destinations, personalization destinations, and enterprise systems like a data warehouse or call center. And finally, when data is ingested, the consent that is attached to the profile needs to be carried through the system and stay compliant with regulatory policies.
Smooth out the customer journey and engage on the buyers’ terms
It’s no longer enough to provide personalized one-off experiences. Instead, customers expect their interactions with high-tech brands to feed seamlessly into a curated journey. While the high-tech industry is well known for making data-driven decisions that activate personalized experiences, some brands still struggle to break down data silos that make it difficult to have a full view of the customer.
Cutting Edge Insights: How High-tech Companies Lead With CJA explored how high-tech brands like Lenovo are using Adobe Customer Journey Analytics to combine all their customer data in one place and make insights more accessible across digital, marketing, and offline sources.
In the session, Tusharadri Mukherjee, director of digital analytics at Lenovo, discussed best practices and pitfalls to avoid when combining multiple channels of customer data. To start, Mukherjee explained how fragmented teams and systems create chaos instead of insights. If high-tech companies want to stitch together seamless journeys and identify customer pain points, they need to start by connecting siloed data. More specifically, merging different sources of online and offline data is essential to understanding complex buying journeys. And this is where Customer Journey Analytics really shines. By unifying customer data all in one place, the platform makes the handoff between experiences smoother and more personalized — whether it be to another digital marketing experience or transitioning to a sales conversation.
With the right technology, unified data can provide valuable insights into the complete customer experience. For example, these insights can help high-tech companies pinpoint where customers fall out within the journey before they convert — and then create experiences that engage those customers in more meaningful ways. Because unified data is easier and faster to act on, it also allows high-tech companies to find creative ways to diversify revenue streams.
Increase agility and productivity to effectively scale marketing teams
The pressure to create and launch marketing campaigns quickly is mounting. In fact, 80% of B2B sales interactions will be digital by 2025. It’s becoming more difficult for high-tech organizations to make sure that those campaigns are built quickly and run smoothly across various channels. Often, high-tech marketing teams face manual, disconnected workflows and tools or feel overloaded with work with limited visibility. Without a content supply chain, brands are challenged to keep up with the content demands and often fall short. This extends the time it takes to bring the message, the product, and the personalized experience to market.
That’s why having the right technology is crucial. In Accelerate Campaign Creation with Marketo Engage and Workfront, Dylan Vargas, manager of marketing operations at Commvault, offered up a blueprint for streamlining and automating its campaign creation and execution process — which included integrating Adobe Marketo Engage and Adobe Workfront. In the session, Vargas explained how Commvault shifted from siloed workstreams to a seamlessly connected campaign supply chain using tools that talk to each other.
With these technologies now working together, teams follow seamless proofing and approval workflows. They can see where a campaign is, troubleshoot reasons for any holdups, and access all communication as an audit for later reference. Once a campaign is live, teams have expanded access to campaign performance, so the right stakeholders have visibility on any insights.
“Like you, we’re always looking for ways to improve on ourselves. How do we get better? How do we use this data better? And how do we start to use this data to inform ourselves?” says Vargas. “We needed to get that ROI reporting to see what these campaigns are producing and understand the success rate.”
Since integrating Marketo Engage and Workfront, Commvault has seen impressive success. It has reduced the time needed to build a campaign by 78% and accelerated campaign time to market by 64%. It has been able to scale operations to handle 59% more campaigns and to run more than 200 programs each month using a dedicated center of excellence. What’s more, Commvault can now accurately measure attributions across touchpoints to optimize marketing spend. By automating request assignments, the marketing team was able to free up the resources of one full-time manager, who can now support more innovation.
The forefront of innovation
The high-tech industry is constantly innovating. That innovation takes a number of forms, one of which centers around collecting, managing, and analyzing data. High-tech marketers now have access to new data sets that uncover fresh insights and ways to measure their business success. Instead of relying solely on traditional metrics, marketing leaders now use predictive and prescriptive metrics to constantly improve their marketing strategies and gain insights into future trends.
Some of these fresh insights were revealed in the Summit session Marketing Metrics of the Future with Qualcomm and 451 Research. In it, Sheryl Kingstone, vice president of customer experience and commerce at 451 Research, discussed some of the latest trends that high-tech marketers should be focused on. “It’s all about improving the customer experience, understanding the people, and understanding that the automation of what we are doing is all about managing processes and the data that drives it,” says Kingstone.
“It’s all about improving the customer experience, understanding the people, and understanding that the automation of what we are doing is all about managing processes and the data that drives it.”
- Sharyl Kingstone
Vice President of customer experience and commerce, 451 Research
New research presented in this session shows that there is a correlation between how much an organization emphasizes customer experience and the equity they get in return. As a result, high-tech organizations need to establish authenticity and build trust with their customers — neither of which can be accomplished without having the right data and knowing how to use it. Unsurprisingly, research also shows that high-tech leaders who are digitally driven use more advanced measurements. These leaders concentrate on social influence scores, website visitor engagement, and the time to convert a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) to a sales-qualified lead (SQL). Together, these scores follow the journey from a customer’s initial behavior through the moment they buy — and help to deliver just the right experiences at each moment.
Dive into on-demand sessions
Adobe Summit 2023 explored strategies for the high-tech industry to achieve experience-led growth. Throughout the sessions, high-tech leaders discussed their own experiences with these strategies — which included modernizing and rationalizing the tech stack, smoothing out the customer journey, and increasing agility and productivity to scale marketing teams effectively.
If you missed Summit in person this year, you can still explore all the sessions on demand. Dive deeper into lessons for high tech or catch up on the latest capabilities that were unveiled during Summit — including dynamic chat, live forms and livestreams, generative AI, integrated campaign development workflows, and more.