How Adobe’s new B2B products improve customer hyper-personalization
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Today’s B2B sales customers have increasingly sophisticated, changing expectations.
Rather than simply being treated as an anonymous entity within a company, they want and respond best to targeted, personalized, tailored campaigns that mirror past interactions.
“Customers expect to see the full context of who they are and how they engaged in the past,” said Brian Glover, senior director of product marketing and B2B strategy at Adobe. “The challenge for brands is to connect with customers on their terms and create personalized experiences at scale.”
B2B marketing and sales departments are increasingly leveraging AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities to identify buying patterns and match response to and engagement with specific campaigns and marketing channels. This hyper-personalization helps target customers and predict their future purchasing patterns.
According to AIMultiple, 71% of B2B marketers are interested in using AI for personalization, 63% are interested in using AI to identify trends, and 59% expect AI to help identify potential customers.
AI powered by Adobe Sensei
Adobe is looking to bolster its presence in this area with several new and expanded products announced this week at the Adobe Summit – The Digital Experience Conference. These capabilities aimed at driving personalization are powered by Adobe Sensei, the company’s AI engine, and are embedded in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform Adobe Experience Cloud.
“The bottom line is, how do you get a better idea of who will become a customer?” said Glover.
He quoted one time US Postmaster General, businessman and alleged father of marketing John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the problem is I don’t know which half.”
“Today’s challenge might as well be, ‘I know I should double my funds in accounts, but I don’t know which half,'” Glover said.
Adobe’s comprehensive predictive lead and account scoring helps brands determine account context by identifying the people within their account and their behavior, he explained. This helps to understand whether they are likely to become an opportunity and a paid customer, leading to a better ROI.
For example, models can look at leads and accounts that have become customers and the digital behavior that preceded them — such as opening emails or filling out website forms — and compare them with other accounts. Those with similar patterns of digital behavior get high scores. Based on those matches, marketers can then shift their tactics from broad campaigns to more targeted direct digital ads, one-to-one outreach, and small field events.
This tool can be used within the Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) and will also be available later this year with the B2B marketing automation app Adobe Marketo Engage, Glover said.
Likewise, the new Adobe Marketo Measure offering provides insights into marketing spend and campaign performance. Through Adobe’s Real-Time CDP, marketers can then identify account leads and shift dollars to the most appropriate online and offline channels.
“You might find that you get a higher ROI through some digital channels and interactions rather than a live event or conference sponsorship,” Glover explains. “It helps to resolve John Wanamaker’s adage. I get more valuable insights that help me make decisions in an even better way.”
Engaged with your customers — with help from AI
Adobe also announced the release of Adobe Dynamic Chat, which enables marketers and prospects to engage and accelerate the buying process, as well as AI-driven product recommendations and live search results for both B2B and B2C brands through its e-commerce software Adobe Commerce.
With multiple people on procurement teams and countless touchpoints across digital and physical interactions, it has historically been a challenge for marketers to determine who is most likely to respond to a particular campaign and whether that will translate into a purchase, Glover noted.
“Which people should I target, what are the leads in each account?” he said. “It helps marketers have a more consistent, personalized experience across emerging channels.”
Real-time customer behavior data based on their interactions and those of peers helps build “people-level profiles with context,” Glover said. Creating a complete picture of how campaigns are performing throughout the customer journey translates into wider engagement, as marketers can determine who responds to what and how best to follow up based on history and preference. Emails, mobile and web interactions, events and interactive chats can be synchronized and leveraged to make marketing more effective and create new opportunities and pipelines.
All things considered, Glover noted, the nature of the relationship between marketing and sales is evolving into one that’s more profound and symbiotic — compared to the past, when one simply handed over to the other.
“They’re engaging key accounts at the same time,” he said. “The challenge is how they stay coordinated; how does the left arm know what the right arm is doing? We are moving from a rules-based marketing era to an AI-powered marketing era.”
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This post How Adobe’s new B2B products improve customer hyper-personalization
was original published at “https://venturebeat.com/2022/03/16/how-adobes-new-b2b-products-enhance-customer-hyper-personalization/”
