Adobe
Between March and April 2017
Canada, United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany.
1,165 digital marketers in enterprise companies
An average of 7,000 employees
B2B high tech, financial services, media and entertainment, retail, travel and hospitality
Somebody may beat me, but they are going to have to bleed to do it.
Serious runners are a bit insane.
They’re up before the sun — sweating and chafing and cramping their way along dusty roads.
But on every great run there is that moment. The moment the sky overhead expands and your heart pumps perfectly in rhythm with your legs. And everything else fades away.
This is called the runner’s high.
As a serious marketer, you are a bit insane. Your customers expect more than products and services. You need to follow wherever they lead and be faster than they expect. Delivering personalized experiences on just the right device at just the right time.
You need to become an experience business. But as you transform, you’ll feel that wind pick up behind your back, you’ll feel those organizational muscles begin to move you faster up the road, and it will all remind you why you set out on this road in the first place.
We’ve used these findings to demonstrate four milestones you should watch for along your own path to transformation. The goal? For you to find your high as an experience business.
When stepping onto the road of your transformation, you can learn from the successes (and struggles) of the brands around you. So we asked our respondents how they thought they were doing.
This year, companies in all industries except retail report making strides toward digital maturity. Overall, almost one-fourth now self-report “Advanced” maturity, which is a large increase from 2016, which means they have strong technical skills, use automation, generally follow best practices, and have their data mostly integrated.
When you’re in the midst of transformation, it’s good to know that your efforts will be worth it. Our findings help with that by showing that the vast majority of brands believe their efforts toward maturity have differentiated them from their competitors.
A runner would never attempt 26 miles without training. And you can’t expect to transform into an experience business overnight. Transformation is a journey — one that’s more like a marathon than a 5K. With the goal fixed in your mind, it’s time to look to the road ahead. Using the data from the survey, we highlight four milestones you should pass (and maybe have already passed) as you transform your business.
To be a consistent winner means preparing not just one day, one month, or even one year — but for a lifetime.
Start by assessing your digital fitness. Here, we’ve identified some important features in the physiology of an experience business. As you can see, even brands claiming advanced maturity still have some work to do. As you look at where mature brands and other brands in your industry are, consider your own ability in these areas.
The features we just called out are important to your transformation, so we gathered some deeper insights about specific tactics to better help you assess your fitness for the road ahead.
More companies are making their content personal and engaging. Automated personalization for web was up 51 percent over 2016. And we saw a 115 percent increase in automated personalization for mobile. Here are the percentages of brands using automation to create personalized content.
Maybe the most important assessment you need to make is the impact your efforts are having on your customer. We found that companies have multiple methods of understanding the effectiveness of their customer experience efforts, but a few rise to the top as shown below. However, when it comes to specific metrics of customer experience, conversion rate is the favorite across industries. About half of all companies are using it.
I’ve always liked hills. I see a challenge, a goal, and I feel instantly galvanized to achieve that goal.
Once you’ve assessed your fitness, it’s important to map out your route, set goals, and develop a plan. Be sure to take a holistic approach that advances your digital maturity across all areas of your organization, including structure, people, processes, and tools. Start slowly, get wins where you can, and increase your efforts over the long run.
Of course, one of the most important parts of your plan is your budget. Here are the top areas where businesses say they’re increasing their budgets over the next 12 months. See if you’re keeping up — especially in your industry — and if you need to change direction or emphasis.
Another crucial step in the planning process is to identify challenges you face and commit to pushing through them. This is especially true for areas like testing, which respondents — especially those in Europe — said is a bigger challenge this year than last.
As we’ve seen, data is key, so your plan may need to include improvements to your data-driven marketing strategy. Our research shows that while using many types of analytics (such as real-time analytics) is limited today, significantly more brands will be using all types of analytics in the future.
As you plan, keep in mind that it takes more than a good digital platform to be competitive. A huge part of your road to transformation involves the structure of your entire organization, so as you look to your technology, make plans to do the following as well:
Make being an experience business a company-wide priority.
Be prepared to change how your organization thinks and acts.
Consider hiring a partner to coach and guide you as needed.
Promote cross-company groups that work together.
Encourage open environments with an agile process.
Assign responsibilities and work in phases.
Run for 20 minutes and you will feel better. Run another 20 and you might tire. Add on three hours and you’ll hurt. But keep going, and you’ll see and smell and hear and taste the world with a vividness that will make your former life pale.
As you begin running with your strategy, start slowly. Build as you go, and be mindful of your digital maturity — especially in terms of what’s happening in your industry. Draft off industry leaders by identifying new technologies and strategies that are gaining traction in your industry. Implement those that make sense for your business.
Keep your end goal in mind, but pace yourself and focus on short-term wins. When asked to pick their top three strategic capabilities for the short term — over the next 18 months — most respondents chose areas that will enhance the customer experience.
This focus on customer experience is even more apparent as companies look further into the future, but no one thinks getting it right will be easy. In fact, when presented with a list of capabilities and asked to rate their importance to their customer experience over the next three years, more than half of the respondents saw many of those capabilities as very important. This shows that there’s no silver bullet. Brands need to invest in a wide range of technologies and capabilities.
Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.
Being an experience business has no finish line. Instead, it’s an ongoing journey with an ever-changing destination.
Go For The Win
But like the marathon runner who thinks they’ve finally crossed their last finish line and then finds themselves signing up for the next race, you reach a point where it’s no longer all work.
The high you get from being an experience business is almost addictive. Whether it comes from increased sales, new customers, or higher loyalty, it’s a high you want to achieve again and again.
Adobe is committed to helping you become an experience business. If you want to dig deeper into the results of our survey, including more information on the differences between the U.S. and Europe, download our full report. But when you’re ready to act, we can help you transform.
Adobe Experience Cloud makes it easier than ever to gain momentum on your path to digital transformation. This integrated set of solutions has everything you need to grow your digital maturity in a holistic way and create and deliver great customer experiences that will keep your customers coming back again and again.
References
Amby Burfoot, http://www.quotemaster.org/qe1092a166373f8b1ab9013f9c6194bff.
Bill Rodgers, https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/billrodger199240.html.
Jamie Anderson, ICF Olson, personal interview, April 21, 2017 and June 15, 2017.
Jeffrey Gross, Epsilon, personal interview, May 31, 2017.
Jim Goldschlager, Slalom Consulting, personal interview, May 3, 2017 and June 5, 2017.
Julie Hoffman, Adobe, personal interview, May 31, 2017.
Nick Christy, R2i, personal interview, May 30, 2017.
Scott Jurek, Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 95–96.
Steve Prefontaine, http://www.whyirun.co/25-inspirational-steve-pre-prefontaine-quotes.
