B2B customers today expect the same level of tailored experiences that they enjoy when shopping for themselves. They want to know companies understand them and their needs. This means being able to deliver compelling, consistent messages to existing and potential customers across all channels, offering the right products and services at exactly the right time.

Given Adobe’s diverse customers worldwide and comprehensive product offerings, creating personalized messaging to engage people can be challenging. Adobe’s marketing teams need quick, easy access to information on tens of thousands of customers to make sure they are offered the best, most relevant experiences at every step in their journeys.

Personalizing global marketing experiences

The team responsible for marketing Adobe Experience Cloud solutions follow a particularly sophisticated approach to customer engagement, as the apps provide a wide range of integrated solutions to many of the world’s leading brands as their digital marketing scales and matures.

Modeling the value of its own solutions, the Global Campaign Operations Team standardized on Adobe Marketo Engage and Adobe Workfront to transform how team members inside and outside the company collaborate to develop and deliver winning digital campaigns.

“Our job is to clear the way for our marketing teams to stay engaged with existing and prospective customers,” explains Angela Davis, manager, campaign operations team at Adobe. “Together, Marketo Engage and Workfront improve our efficiencies and enable us to expand the scope and reach of our efforts to nurture stronger leads.”

Supporting growing global campaigns

Although the team includes just 20 people, they support global campaigns for more than 200 stakeholders and marketers, using its marketing automation solution to support 19 types of requests. While the majority involve email campaigns or webinars, the team also handles requests across all channels including events, paid media, nurture, engagement streams, and content syndication. With all customer engagement points flowing into one platform, the campaign operations team gains better visibility into how Adobe interacts with customers, preventing marketers from flooding customer inboxes with unnecessary, ineffective communications.

Visibility and reporting provide greater insights into how customers respond to messages, and where they are in the customer lifecycle while audience segmentation helps the team create personalized experiences through a variety of channels. The campaign operations team segments audiences to create personalized experiences through a variety of channels. Detailed reports also get fed to business development representatives (BDRs) through the Marketo Sales Insight connection with Salesforce. This empowers BDRs to lead more meaningful conversations and make an impact faster.

“With a busy team supporting campaigns from around the world, we need to be as effective and efficient as possible. We rely on Marketo Engage to improve how we collaborate and create diverse, high-value campaigns. For instance, using the Program Member custom fields feature we can develop new, streamlined campaigns in centralized rather than disjointed programs. This functionality alone has allowed us to scale and support a greater number of personalized campaigns with less effort,” explains Tanea Porro, manager, campaign operations team, Adobe.

Faster time to market with streamlined campaign requests

While the marketing automation solution brings marketing and customer experiences together into a single platform, the overall campaign orchestration process has become fragmented over the years due to acquisitions and global growth.

The campaign operations team worked with four separate Marketo Engage instances. When marketers and agencies needed to request campaigns, they would need to use one of seven different systems — ranging from Jira and Zendesk to email and Slack — depending on the app, region, or type of campaign involved. The campaign operations team required a team member working nearly full time just to read and assign all incoming requests.

“Having a disjointed intake system was confusing for our stakeholders. It also affected our efficiency and our ability to meet SLAs,” says Porro. “We standardized on Workfront for managing campaign requests. Now, regardless of product or region, all marketers collaborate in a single location.”

Gone are the days when new marketers or agencies might need complicated training on how to submit different types of campaign requests. The intake form uses dependencies to customize the fields for each request. An email campaign might need headers, calls-to-action, and links before it can be finalized. The work management platform only allows requests to be submitted once all required information is included and any further communications are managed within the platform to create an end-to-end record of the request.

“With Workfront we spend much less time sending messages back and forth with marketers,” says Porro. “We reduced administrative time by 75%, building confidence and trust through our more open and streamlined communication model.”

Automation doesn’t stop at the intake form. Incoming requests are automatically routed to the correct member of the campaign operations team depending on the type of request. This eliminates a day spent manually assigning the request, improving time to market from 25 days to just 9 days on average — a 64% increase.

The increased efficiency around assigning work also allows the campaign operations team to better prioritize work and manage team capacity. “The number of average monthly requests increased from 157 to 250 — a 59% increase — without needing to dramatically increase team size,” says Porro. “We’re working more efficiently and even have more time to focus on supporting long-term strategic and business objectives for Adobe.”

Automating campaign orchestration

Having experienced improved collaboration and other efficiencies, the campaign operations team next plans to leverage Workfront Fusion, a low-code, no-code integration platform, to automate marketing automation workflows to further streamline campaign operations.

For example, assets managed through Workfront can be automatically delivered to the marketing automation platform for activation, eliminating manual content sharing — and the chance of unapproved assets accidentally making their way into campaigns. And if campaign teams need to prioritize new assets — or modify and reapprove existing assets to support new initiatives — templates and workflows make it quick and easy.

“Our job continues to grow, with new channels and more ways to personalize communications every day,” says Davis. “Marketo Engage and Workfront help us continue to automate and evolve to support changing marketing demands around the world.”

Expand your knowledge

How Lumen Drives Agility for Omnichannel Customer Experiences: To bridge the gap from strategy and planning to omnichannel execution and tracking, Lumen leverages Marketo Engage with Workfront (both technical integrations and customized workflows) to drive cohesive experiences and coordinate along with other Experience Cloud applications. Watch this Adobe Summit session to learn how Lumen is driving campaign agility and increasing productivity.

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