Online marketing: more software or more service?
A marketing toolbox from the cloud
Let's take a look at Adobe Marketing Cloud: It includes an integrated set of solutions for content management, targeting, campaigning, and digital forms. It helps companies efficiently manage personalized campaigns and customer journeys.Adobe Advertising Cloud is an end-to-end platform that enables advertising delivery across traditional TV and digital formats. It simplifies the delivery of video, display, and search advertising across all channels and screens and makes campaigns measurable across channels. The targeted use of advertising budgets can be continuously optimized accordingly, increasing the effectiveness of campaigns.Adobe Analytics Cloud combines Adobe Audience Manager, a platform for data and audience management, with Adobe Analytics, the specific solution for real-time analytics and detailed audience segmentation across all marketing channels. All these useful marketing tools are based on Adobe Experience Manager, which was co-developed in Basel.
Agile platform for SMEs and large corporations
The Adobe Experience Cloud is an agile platform that is suitable for digital marketing in all industries, and there are hardly any industries that do not want to use such methods.The reference list includes SMEs as well as large international corporations. If we pick CSS as an example, we learn that it uses Adobe Analytics to optimize its online marketing measures. This involves analyzing customer behavior on the company website and measuring the success of the advertising measures with Adobe Analytics. As a result, CSS Insurance has been able to reduce the cost per contract by 80 percent, and Franke, a Swiss kitchen manufacturer, is using Adobe Experience Manager to improve its global website.
Interfaces to existing systems are important
Good planning is one side of data management, optimal implementation then the other. This is where other software providers come into play, such as the Swiss offshoot of the German software house Censhare, which has created a significant market share in digital media production as a supplier in just a few years. The solutions are aimed primarily at medium-sized and large companies in the retail, financial services (banks and insurance companies) and logistics sectors, including Swiss Post. The company offers the appropriate interfaces to more than 30 product information management (PIM) solutions. Preparations are also underway for entry into packaging management, i.e. that part of the printed matter market that still promises a certain amount of growth and in which - as will be explained in another article - digitization is in full swing. Censhare is launching a complete solution on the market that covers all important functionalities, from layout to approval and workflow control. In the interview, Managing Director Jürg Weber also clearly distinguishes himself from companies such as Adobe: "We do not create customer journeys, but take the necessary data from them. Our core competence is managing content."
Keeping an eye on workflow
Let's return to production and let a service provider have his say in order to find out to what extent data management and especially DAM/MAM (Digital or Media Asset Management) are important in everyday life.Markus Trachsel, Head of Prepress at Stämpfli AG, lists the systems he uses for these purposes, such as the Elvis DAM database from Woodwing, which can be seamlessly integrated into the in-house Stämpfli Editor-Box editorial system, as well as Eyebase and Contentserv or the Direct Smile dialog marketing system.Stämpfli sees itself less as a system integrator, however, and more as a process consultant with an eye on the overall process. Jürg Trachsel explains: "Together with our customers, we strive for process optimization, meaningfully supported by publishing systems." The demand for such services has grown steadily in recent years and is now showing a strong upward trend, as Trachsel adds. However, the initial inquiry often focuses on the price. Then it is important to show the customer the advantages of using the system in order to put the price-performance ratio in perspective. After all, customers often do not take into account the cost of their own infrastructure and the resources they need, for example, for time-consuming searches in filing structures. If a company is looking for a system to improve central data management and the organization of the data or storage structure, its own solution is more likely to be in the foreground. If, on the other hand, very different content is managed, products with diverse processes are manufactured, content is held for reuse, then an external solution with interfaces to the customer is advantageous.
Services instead of production
In principle, it is important that assets are managed and refined. Based on many years of experience, Stämpfli has come to the conclusion that very few companies exploit their potential in this area. For example, when automating marketing processes, a user can see how often an asset has been used and in what context. Together with customers, it is important to analyze topics such as user regulation, data structure, data flow, metadata including maintenance, copyright management or tracking when developing databases.With the ever-increasing flood of information and data, the retrievability and handling of assets is already a central topic today, says Jürg Trachsel, and is of great importance for Stämpfli as a service provider in media production.Even though artificial intelligence will relieve service providers of the task of keywording and structuring data in the coming years, the complexity will increase due to the wide range of possibilities. For this reason, services around process consulting and automation, system setup and maintenance, and support will be increasingly in demand. New fields of activity are emerging here that have disappeared or are still being lost in the (pure) printing sector.
Analytics
Audience Manager
Campaign
Experience Manager
Target
Social
Primetime
Media Optimizer
Adobe Experience Cloud
