A Look at Adobe’s Marketing Cloud
A good website is the core of any consumer experience these days, as any company providing web design in Essex would tell you, but there is a lot more to the marketing experience than just website design. Marketing today is a complex activity, and one that most businesses – even large ones – do not have the expertise or the resources to handle in-house.
Adobe has done a very good job of addressing this with its suite of six marketing cloud products. The company started work on them back in 2009 and has put together a fully featured platform for marketing and analytics.
A Digital Marketing Platform
The marketing cloud initiative is something that contributes to more than 17% of Adobe’s valuation. Their web marketing cloud generates more than $1.12 billion in revenue and includes social features, analytics, cross-channel marketing, consumer targeting and more.
The cloud platform has succeeded for two main reasons. Firstly, it puts the power of massive data farms into the hands of even the average small business. Complex real-time analytics and data gathering, previously only available to the biggest of businesses, is now something that everyone can take advantage of, without needing to buy expensive hardware and software.
Fighting Fragmentation
Secondly, having advertising, analytics, social media and multi-channel marketing all under one roof reduces some of the complexity and fragmentation in the marketplace. It is confusing enough to buy a site by Enovate and then get SEO services from a third party, and maybe have your domain name registered elsewhere. Having dozens of marketing accounts with different billing dates and log-ins makes the problem even more difficult to manage.
Traditionally, advertising, analytics and social media have been treated as separate things, but the main platforms are trying to change that. Facebook now allows marketers to reach people based on third-party websites they visit, and the analytics tools offered by most social networks – even Twitter – are becoming increasingly sophisticated, but fragmentation is a big problem.
Outsourcing your marketing tools to a single provider makes life easier. You have just the one interface to learn, one company billing you and one contact for support. The idea of Platform as a Service is something that more and more companies are starting to accept, and online marketing is the perfect place for it.