Best practices to engage and convert customers.

The customer acquisition challenges Adobe faced.

Our primary hurdle was that we were operating with a cost-focused customer acquisition model — more concentrated on the price tag of creating experiences rather than the needs of the people we were creating them for. Across our enterprise, there were inconsistencies in our approach to how and where we invested our marketing budgets and executed our campaigns. Other specific challenges we faced included:

• Isolated teams. Our display, paid search and social, and email marketing teams operated as independent entities, with different execution strategies and cost-reporting processes. This fragmented approach made it difficult to get a big-picture view of our marketing efforts, demonstrate our contribution to the business, and identify opportunities for scalable growth.
• Siloed media agency strategy. Our global media agency partners help plan, execute, and measure our ad strategies. Different Adobe teams contracted with numerous agencies without a cohesive standard operating procedure for vendor management.
• Proliferation of channels. The evolving media environment increased pressure on our marketing teams to plan, reach, measure, and optimize campaigns across a greater number of destinations. The restrictive nature of our multi-touch attribution impacted our ability to diversify our media mix.
• Data collection and measurement obstacles. We had difficulty capturing, integrating, and measuring data that could deliver the actionable insights needed to improve our customer acquisition methods. This was often a result of our siloed approach to channel management, media execution, and efficiency initiatives like SEO optimization.
  • Our team had a hard time unifying measurements across fragmented media, making it difficult to adapt to trends, competitor activities, and other changing conditions.
  • With disconnected insights and different analysis tactics between teams, customer journeys were not measured consistently. Even in well-established channels like display ads, the team struggled to monitor and improve campaign performance.
  • Without the right tools to gather real-time, granular insights across channels, the team had to focus on more traditional channels that were easier to measure, thereby limiting our ability to connect with newer, high-potential platforms where we could acquire customers.
• Poor visibility of marketing ROI. With marketing channels each having their own strategies and independent financial reporting methods, it was difficult to tie each marketing channel to overall revenue and growth.
• Increasing privacy regulations. Marketing teams rely on data to build strong customer relationships. But increasing and evolving global privacy legislations have made legacy targeting and measurement strategies more challenging. Signal loss and the deprecation and fluctuation of third-party cookies made it even harder to gather accurate data. These factors impacted our ability to garner a sophisticated understanding of the limited channels we had in the market.
• Rising costs. Digital advertising rates, measured in cost per mille (CPM), were rising. Simultaneously, conversion and click-through rates were falling.

Marketing's mission is to generate revenue by attracting new prospects and strengthening loyalty with current customers. But 47% of chief marketing officers view marketing as a cost center rather than a profit generator.

In the face of these challenges, the internal marketing organization felt called to action — to drive growth through an effective cycle of planning, activation, measurement, and optimization. They wanted to:

• Create greater marketing process alignment across the global organization.
• Plan advertising and marketing campaigns effectively across channels using data-driven budget and audience strategies.
• Expand reach and discover relevant audiences to target and convert the right prospects with impactful customer experiences.
• Access holistic measurements across our full marketing wallet in a single system.
• Make real-time, in-flight improvements across all channels and tactics to achieve every conversion goal.
• Speed up the time from insight to action, maximizing ROI and revenue impact throughout campaign life cycles.

To reach these goals, we needed to create stronger alignment through a new operating model and make data the north star of our customer acquisition strategy.

Realigning our organization with a new operating model.

Adobe has experienced steady growth over the years, and the pandemic accelerated sales of technology solutions and services that supported dispersed workforces, like our cloud-based platforms. In Q2 of 2020, sales were up 14% from Q2 of 2019. Our teams quickly mobilized to meet the surge in demand and invested more in our marketing efforts in a short period of time. This rapid increase in our global campaigns illuminated the weaknesses of our fragmented operation.

Having 22 separate media-buying teams with their own strategies and different agency partnerships led to a lack of global coordination. This approach reduced our leverage of total media spend by spreading our budget across different teams and agency partners.

Our goal was to streamline investments and maximize our global marketing spend to acquire customers in a more efficient and cost-effective way. This new operating model had three critical components:

Reach — finding and converting prospects.

With more channels, the restriction and loss of third-party cookies on many platforms, and heavier privacy regulations, our traditional engagement methods didn’t have the same reach they once did. With a new approach and connected data, we ensured continued reach to the right audiences and grew our customer base. We were able to:

• Build partnerships and overlap data with trusted data partners, publishers, and brands using data clean rooms to find and activate audiences while still adhering to privacy regulations. These partnerships opened new channels — such as CTV, commerce media, new social and short form video, and digital audio — so we could reach known and pseudonymous audiences across new channels. We knew who to reach, where to reach them, and how to deliver meaningful content that provides the information they need to make a purchase decision.
• Create lookalike audiences to find high-value audiences through prospecting campaigns.
• Use our own real-time customer data to execute personalized, owned media campaigns to strengthen loyalty with our customers.

Teams across Adobe could expand their reach despite evolving customer behaviors and channel diversification. Here are some examples:

Analyze audience reach and conversion performance.

With data streaming into Experience Platform from multiple applications, we used Customer Journey Analytics and Adobe Analytics to better understand those insights in real time, such as the most impactful channels, creatives, and messages for each customer segment. Then, we created personalized experiences for each prospect and customer and drove conversions by responding to journey signals.

Using Mix Modeler, the growth marketing and insights team, which is responsible for driving global customer acquisition and creating business impact through insights and analytics, could track incremental impact across channels. With frequent data-driven insights, they were able to refine marketing spend and channel mix faster and with more confidence. This agility enabled them to maximize ROI across campaigns and establish a foundation primed for scalable success.