The Adobe Symposium is an annual event, now in its sixth year, dedicated to the world of digital marketing. This year’s event, held recently in Sydney, boasted the largest audience yet, because, well, digital transformation.
While much of the program was geared towards the large enterprise end of town, a particular theme was explored that should be made a focus for any business navigating the challenges in digital marketing, which is pretty much all of us.
That theme was ‘experience’.
‘Digital experiences are supposed to blow our mind but some of them go completely unnoticed. And they must work, flawlessly and beautifully.’ – Shantanu Narayen, chief executive, Adobe
With new expressions such as ‘entertailing’ and ‘shopertainment’ (yes, these are actual words now), businesses are trying to capture and maintain customer engagement, and this is about staying competitive by giving your customers a valuable digital experience.
People today share a growing maturity for moments over material, and the focus for businesses now should be to stop selling products or services, and realise that they’re selling experiences, an appetite for which has been fuelled by the explosion in mobile use.
Going digital used to be as simple as moving from print to digital, but today it’s more complex than it’s ever been before.
Adobe, which “helped revolutionise the desktop publishing era”, wants to turn paper-based businesses into 100% digital workflows using processing power and the power of data analytics.
This means bringing together content and data with the right intelligence and integration of all your document and creative production needs. And while the Adobe product offering can be pretty price-prohibitive to a lot of smaller businesses, the central truth is sound: get your processes streamlined and integrated and stop balancing 17 pots on the one stovetop.
Getting rid of paper-dependent workflows that relied on forms, invoice books, in-trays and so on was the first wave of digital transformation, and it was a slow process that is still unfolding in many businesses.
The second wave took the sales process from a rolodex full of contacts and a wallet full of business cards and put it online into customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
We’re at the beginning of the third wave of transformation now, and while the previous two were about us, making our lives better, and bringing efficiency to our businesses, it’s now about the people out there, says Brad Rencher, Adobe’s executive vice-president and general manager of digital marketing.
This means developing your business so that customers don’t even know that you exist; connecting them so that people can engage in the way they want to, on their terms, and getting the right content to the right person at right time.
“Is our company at risk of moving slower than our competitors? Do we have the right platform, the right people? Or is technology and process getting in our way?”
SmartCompany was a guest of this year’s Adobe Symposium.
Zoe Dattner is the strategy and operations integrator at Dattner Group, and former head of publishing operations at Private Media, owner of SmartCompany.
