The Proof of the Digital Pudding

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This is my inaugural column so let me set the tone for all future articles. I will dedicate this column to the promotion and advocacy of a data-driven marketing methodology. As I wrote on my Adobe blog, "I like to think the future of digital marketing lies in the intelligent use of data and the ability to inspire desired digital behavior based on an unparalleled understanding of content, channels and the target audience."

In October, Adobe relaunched its digital marketing solutions under the Marketing Cloud brand name. Along with this launch, we also began a fully integrated digital campaign to increase awareness and demand for the solution. The "Metrics Not Myths" campaign was launched to dispel the perception that marketing is a bunch of B.S. and that its value could not be established in numbers. We set goals for ourselves on multiple terms – overall awareness, media and social sentiment, social engagement, community growth, website traffic, and conversion.

Results within 1 week:

• Our message was published far and wide and received positively: Nearly 60 arti­cles were published in leading websites like Forbes, New York Times, Digi­day, Mash­able, TechCrunch, and CMS Critic, and we measured over 5,000 men­tions of the campaign.

• Our relevant content increased its reach: In less than a month, our Facebook community grew by more than 40 percent — up to over 21,000. Also, engagement on Facebook, measured in PTAT (People Talking About This) grew to 30 percent over a normal weekly average of about 3 to 5 percent.
• Our digital ads performed well: Adobe Analytics dashboards suggested that traffic to our website was up nearly 10 times on the day of launch. Display advertising was the referring source of 47 percent of total traffic and Typed/Bookmarked referrers (those influenced by view through from the ads and other coverage) accounted for a third of the traffic.

Results after 3 weeks:

• People like rich media content especially videos: Our paid and social media lever­aged three videos: BS Detec­tor, The Slap, and The Robot. Within paid media, videos gave us a CTR and visit rate four times the overall campaign average. On the social media side our video seeding strategy has worked well with over 1 million views of the videos on YouTube.
• The pas­sive expe­ri­ence of our Face­book app failed to sustain engagement: The Face­book app built using Adobe Social sparked considerable social engagement using the ini­tial live debate on Oct. 25 but was subsequently being used only to replay the debate video. As a result views and engagement fell sharply. The team thereafter looked at adding further engagement features to the app.

• The inte­grated cam­paign approach is working: Adobe Ana­lyt­ics suggested that the cam­paign had dri­ven direct inquiries at 1.2 times the weekly tar­get and that website inquiries were 40 percent higher than the three weeks prior to the campaign launch.

Results after a month:

• Brand-focused paid media drove sig­nif­i­cant traf­fic to our website, but at lower engage­ment rates than other traf­fic sources: Over­all bounce rates decreased by 5 percent post-launch and were down by 13 percent for organic traf­fic.

• Pro­moted Tweets improv­ed the per­for­mance of the Facebook app, and helped build our social community: Views and unique vis­i­tors to the Face­book app increased about 2.5 times over the daily aver­age since Oct. 26, when we ini­tially stopped paid media.  This was due pri­mar­ily to the Pro­moted Tweets. Our social communities on Facebook and Twitter were up by 75 percent.

Conclusion

I have run through a lot of metrics and numbers and I hope they've been succinct and self-explanatory. We have since then tracked our conversion of visitors to leads and the overall conversion has been 45 percent better than our pre-campaign period. Lots of useful data, analyzed correctly, and the analyses used to make the right marketing decisions can result in a successful campaign. And Adobe's recent campaign was an attempt to prove just that!