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SALT LAKE CITY—Adobe announced a new predictive marketing workflow in Adobe Analytics that enables marketers to quickly identify and target high-value audiences in minutes.
The company made the predictive analytics announcement about Adobe Analytics, a key element of Adobe Marketing Cloud, at its digital marketing conference, Adobe Summit 2013, held here March 4 to 8.
Adobe officials said traditionally marketers have relied on a cumbersome, time-consuming process that requires crunching large quantities of data over weeks or months to help them identify high-value audiences. The complexity and expense of this approach has led some marketers to bypass the use of data analysis altogether and end up defining audiences based on opinions or assumptions.
However, the new predictive marketing workflow in Adobe Analytics is designed to help marketers and marketing analysts sort through terabytes of data quickly to uncover valuable audiences. In a matter of minutes, the marketer can identify audiences based on shared characteristics and score them according to how likely they are to convert. This allows marketers to then use Adobe Target to tailor offers to each distinct audience.
“The ability to quickly and consistently unearth critical audience data hidden in multichannel data is essential to marketing,” Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of digital marketing at Adobe, said in a statement. “We are saving digital marketers both dollars and time, cutting out weeks or even months of laborious data mining to find the right audiences to target, at the right time and on the right device.”
The old sayings “He who has the most data wins” and “All data is created equal” are simply not true, Rencher said. What matters, he explained, is what kind of analysis can be put to that data. With the new predictive marketing workflow, marketers can answer critical business questions, Rencher said.
Adobe gave a hypothetical example of the chief marketing officer of a car rental company who wants to maximize revenue from car rentals in Florida during the winter holiday season. To accomplish this, she needs to know which potential audiences would be most likely to respond to a holiday car rental campaign for Florida. She then leverages Adobe Analytics to analyze terabytes of multichannel data to uncover previously unidentified, high-value audiences, perhaps families of five or more and retired couples from the Midwest, among others.
These audiences are ranked by their likelihood of converting, which in this case is defined as the customer actually picking up the car they reserve. Each distinct audience is then seamlessly fed into Adobe Target, another of Adobe’s Marketing Cloud solutions, to receive tailored offers that match their unique interests. For instance, a six-person family would be offered a minivan or SUV and snow birds from Michigan, a sedan. This workflow can be completed in minutes, and gives marketers the kind of agility they need in a world that moves increasingly at the speed of digital, Adobe said.
“Adobe’s new predictive marketing workflow represents a significant step forward for the digital analytics community as a whole,” Ashish Braganza, senior manager of global business intelligence at Lenovo, said in a statement. “It will provide an integrated one-stop solution for all our statistical modeling needs. This is what the community has been waiting for, as it replaces cumbersome and time-consuming processes where we had to import data into other statistical platforms. I’m excited because finally, we can build predictive models and push them live to target customers in real-time and then test their efficacy.”
The new predictive marketing workflow is expected to be available in Adobe Analytics Premium in May, Adobe said.