When consumer attention is a scarce commodity, personalized content at scale is a necessity for brands seeking to maintain relevance and foster meaningful connections with their audiences. The funnel is non-linear, and the places and spaces brands meet their consumers is evolving at the speed of light. Consumers are hungry for one-to-one, experience-based connections.
According to a study by Bain & Company, customers who have a positive emotional experience with a brand are up to eight times more likely to become loyal customers and make repeat purchases. Another study by Harvard Business Review found that customers who have an emotional connection with a brand have a lifetime value that’s four times higher than those who don’t. Meeting consumers where they are and when they’re most receptive requires real-time optimization and more content than ever.
To create and deliver that content across owned and paid channels, many large matrixed organizations use complex end-to-end workflows. Project managers work in Adobe Workfront, while visual designers and creative engineers work in Adobe Creative Cloud. Content authors work in Adobe Experience Manager, and marketers work in Adobe Experience Cloud applications like Adobe Marketo Engage or Adobe Journey Optimizer to deploy the content at various endpoints.
Marketing teams need a comprehensive framework to guide them through this intricate process.
Leveraging Adobe's enterprise technologies, they can enhance every phase of content creation and distribution and deliver impactful brand experiences with efficiency and precision.
Ideation and brief — the strategic genesis
At the heart of every successful campaign lies a well-conceived strategy. In the "Ideation and Brief" stage, teams evaluate the addressable market to prepare for execution. This involves developing a cohesive strategy that aligns with business objectives, crafting a detailed creative brief, identifying the target audience with granular specificity, and meticulous budgeting and planning. This foundation sets the stage for a streamlined workflow, ensuring that all subsequent actions are purposeful and strategically sound.
Leveraging learnings from previous marketing campaigns, including both their own data and insights and segment refinement from Adobe Real-Time CDP and Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, marketing teams can start the creative process with an understanding of both personalization and experience performance metrics that will be required for omnichannel delivery across owned and paid channels.
Creative process — orchestrating creative excellence
The "creative process" phase is where concepts come to life — the orchestration of freedom of expression across visual design, photography, videography, copywriting, and project management. Marketing teams can optimize these creative endeavors to produce content that not only captures attention but also resonates deeply with the intended audience. The emphasis is on seamless integration of talent and technology, ensuring that the creative vision is realized without compromise.
By enhancing creativity and speeding up ideation, Adobe’s content supply chain solution — including Firefly — supports personalization at scale. Using insights gleaned from the creative brief and audience definition, marketers can generate both imagery and copy that conform to brand standards and campaign objectives and safeguard them with the intellectual property and ethical protections that are foundational to that system.
Effective "collaboration and reviews" are crucial for producing quality assets. The framework needs to facilitate cross-functional team interactions, allowing for robust collaboration, precise annotation, thorough reviews, and unanimous approvals. This stage ensures that all creative assets are scrutinized and refined by diverse perspectives, leading to a final product that meets the high standards of the brand and exceeds the expectations of its customers.
To address concerns around the use of AI-generated content, Adobe Workfront and Frame.io drive the necessary legal and regulatory review and approval of all content, including AI-generated content, to make sure that all ethical, copyright, and compliance considerations are met before further derivatives and variants are produced. Moreover, Firefly enables the training of models and adherence to brand standards to ensure on-brand content, and Express applies templates and governance to allow only certain brand-approved asset components to be edited. This early-stage standardization streamlines and shortens the review and approval process.
Digital experience production — curating and customizing content
The "digital experience production" phase addresses the staging, organization, optimization, and derivation of digital assets. Content is not only created but also thoughtfully curated to ensure relevance across different regions and markets. This stage focuses on effective storage and searchability, the creation of experience variations, and the strategic timing of staged releases, all of which are key to managing a brand's digital presence. Digital assets are analyzed and tagged, improving discovery and reusability.
The heavy lift of producing variations on content and assets for global and personalized distribution, including regionalization and localization and channel-specific variations, occurs in this stage through Adobe Experience Manager Assets and Adobe Express — as do further review and approval workflows that provide the final stamp of approval before content is staged for release across channels.
Distributing content across various channels requires a nuanced approach, and the "omnichannel deployment" phase is designed to address this complexity. Content delivered through direct messaging, digital properties, mobile applications, commerce, point of sales, and digital signage, must not only be consistent with the brand's messaging but also personalized to engage customers effectively. The orchestration of these efforts is meticulously planned to maximize reach and impact.
Content at this stage is labeled and provided to channel-specific platforms for segmented or one-to-one delivery or readied for personalization at the last millisecond. Content and product recommendations are performed based on an individual’s affinity, and engagement and delivery analytics are collected for future analysis and recommendations.
The final phase, "measurement and optimization," brings the iterative cycle full circle. Evaluating the performance of experiences through online and offline data reveals insights that inform future strategies. This includes analyzing customer journey analytics, managing customer data, employing propensity modeling, and enhancing personalization. Compliance and data labeling are also key considerations, ensuring that operations adhere to regulatory standards and best practices.
Using Adobe Sensei's analytics capabilities to delve deep into customer behavior and journey analytics and inform predictive modeling, customer data records are updated based on engagement and interests and propensity models are refined. There’s also an opportunity to provide final personalization based on real-time interactions. Strategic insights generated by these consumed experiences are used to drive performance in the next round of ideation and brief, and to refine and optimize the creative process to boost brand engagement.
The bottom line
The right framework, grounded in strategic planning and enriched by Adobe's robust technologies, is crucial in guiding marketing teams through each step of the content supply chain, from the spark of an idea to the analysis of campaign performance, empowering them to craft stories that form meaningful connections with consumers, inspire loyalty, and drive transaction.
If this sounds like something your business needs, we'd love to talk with you at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, where we'll be easy to find as a Diamond sponsor.
Jay Proulx is the senior director, Adobe at TA Digital and a passionate leader who loves to evangelize customer experience capabilities and believes in aligning solutions with evolving market conditions, technologies, and competitors.
Jay’s long history with Adobe technologies started over 20 years ago with ColdFusion, Flash, Flex and LiveCycle Data Services. He is certified in leadership and product management with Scaled Agile and Scrum. He also leverages digital-transformation methodologies that champion transparency and planning for change.
At TA Digital, he focuses on the broad suite of capabilities provided by Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe Experience Platform, and other rapid go-to-market solutions.
Jay has actively engaged and negotiated with strategic partners and technology vendors. He has scaled organizations by building a diverse global talent mix to evolve empowered, high-performing teams.
