Marketo talk Account Based Experiences at Summit

It's been six months since Adobe's acquisition of Marketo, and the first steps towards integrating the Marketo Engagement Platform with the Adobe Experience Cloud were taken this week. The most obvious sign is the rebranding of the core Marketo platform as Marketo Engage, surely the first step in dropping the Marketo name entirely. The new AccountAI feature also got a rebrand as Account Profiling. A wave of Marketo product integration announcements were made with Adobe and third party vendors, but no timeline was given for the release of the new functionality.

For marketers, the big theme from the summit was the blurring of B2B and B2C customer journeys, and the importance of what Adobe called Account Based Experiences (ABX). This ties in with the two big product announcements from the event - the Adobe Experience Platform CDP and an extended partnership with Microsoft and their LinkedIn subsidiary as part of their Open Data Initiative to combine customer data into a single data lake.

Account Based Everywhere

Perhaps the most interesting thing from a Marketo perspective was the enablement of chatbots in ABM programs through an integration with Drift. This builds on an existing partnership to integrate Drift with Marketo's ABM module for customised chatbots experiences for named accounts. This can include dedicated conversation options for prospects at target accounts or even the option to route chat requests to the sales rep who owns the account internally. This is something that I've talked about with clients, but have never been able to implement because the most relevant customers already have LivePerson on their website linked through to their in-house telemarketing or LDR team. Even if you do have existing live chat functionality make sure your scripts and chat routing for campaigns cover ABM scenarios.

Also announced at Adobe Summit were enhanced integrations with Demandbase and LiveRamp. LiveRamp is a DMP that already integrates with a wide range of data sources for use with targeted advertising. Now Marketo is supported too, using Marketo's existing AdBridge digital advertising integration module. This allows Marketo lead and account data to be used to run paid media campaigns through LiveRamp and their DSP partners.

The Demandbase integration works along similar lines, but for account data and at a much deeper level. Demandbase is widely known as one of the leading ABM platforms. It can be used to run ABM digital advertising campaigns to target accounts through an integrated DMP. It already integrates with both Salesforce and Marketo for known account data, updating Marketo leads and accounts with firmographic information from their database. More recently, Demandbase have also launched an intent data offering. This works along the same lines as Bombora, tracking web searches and content consumption on publisher sites to determine what accounts are currently researching. This information now syncs to Marketo alongside the rest of the data that Demandbase has on accounts. This allows marketers to bridge the gap between known accounts in Marketo and unknown accounts targeted through Demandbase's digital advertising and web personalisation tools.

Best Friends

As important as these announcements are, the real ABM talking point from Adobe Summit was the latest extension to an Adobe – Microsoft partnership that is already among the deepest in the entire technology sector. Adobe and Microsoft are closely aligned across their product, sales and leadership teams. This alignment is being extended to LinkedIn, which was purchased by Microsoft three years ago and is now finally being integrated into the rest of their product portfolio. The ability to create matched audiences based upon Marketo Named Account lists is minor but makes automation of ABM programs much easier. This will work both ways, giving visibility of Marketo contacts in LinkedIn audiences. Support for Account Profiling lists identified using lookalike matching adds an additional layer of automation.

Much more significant is an integration between LinkedIn and Adobe Audience Manager (AAM), which allows LinkedIn campaigns to be run directly from Adobe's DMP, with the results reported back to AAM for further follow up. It will now be possible to build campaign lists for known and anonymous audiences using more granular targeting than is possible through the platform directly. LinkedIn's audience tools are very good but aren't always granular enough, particularly for specialist roles and verticals. Using Marketo to build social audiences is possible, but limits you to your existing marketing database and carries GDPR concerns. Using a DMP avoids these issues and allows for much better alignment with other publishers and media sources when running campaigns.

The other big Microsoft related announcement concerned the Open Data Initiative launched by Microsoft, Adobe and SAP back in September. The three companies intend to pool their customers' data together into a single customer view, with a common structure and framework shared by all their products. Customers decide which CDP or Data Lake service they want their data stored in, and then their Microsoft or SAP CRM systems and Adobe or SAP marketing platforms use that database to store all the data they need. This massively simplifies data governance in the enterprise, so has attracted a lot of interest. We're still a long way off an actual implementation of the concept, but the three companies have created an advisory council containing a wide variety of stakeholders to aid progress. Keep on eye on this one, as it has real potential.

The Platform Game

Adobe used the Open Data Initiative to tout the benefits of their new CDP which was launched at the summit. The Adobe Experience Platform is now generally available, joining Oracle and others in what is becoming a crowded market. This is a trend which clearly worries Salesforce, who revealed tentative plans to develop their own CDP away from the show. The reasons behind the trend are well understood and comprised the core message of the show.

CDPs first emerged in B2C marketing a few years ago to bridge the gap between known and anonymous experiences. DMPs work well for personalised advertising, and Marketing Automation works well for personalising outbound user journeys to known visitors. But coordatining consistent cross-channel campaigns across email, social and Web requires a new technology to combine the customer profiles from the various marketing tools into a single view that can then be used to trigger personalised messages in those same execution platforms. CDPs fulfil that role. However, they have seen much less adoption in B2B because the majority of the customer journey is based on known interactions over outbound channels or with Sales. Instead, the focus for B2B organisations has been on Master Data Management to ensure that contact profiles are consistent across the entire platform.

Marketo CEO, Steve Lucas, spoke heavily about the convergence of B2B and B2C marketing in his keynote. The increased focus on data protection and the one to one personalisation requirements needed for ABM have increased the complexity of campaigns to new levels, particularly now that cross-channel activity is considered to be normal. Many agencies are running ABM campaigns through contact databases or spreadsheets. This is the opening into which Oracle, Adobe and others are trying to push their CDPs in a B2B context. Marketo will integrate with Adobe Experience Platform, as well as the Adobe Sensei AI that powers the data discovery and decision-making capabilities of the tool. The combination of the two tools is being pushed heavily as the foundation upon which B2B marketers can build cross-channel content experiences equal to anything found in B2C.

Integration between Marketo and the rest of the Adobe stack is sorely needed. It is increasingly common for customers to have both products but integrating them is a challenge that typically requires bespoke development. Marketo integrates better with Adobe's competitors in the CMS or DMP space than it does with Adobe Target, Adobe Audience Manager or Adobe Experience Manager. The same applies to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which has a much more limited integration than Salesforce. This will change with a wave of integrations between Marketo and these products due over time. In upcoming updates, Marketo will integrate with Creative Cloud for content editing and asset management, the Dynamics Integration will gain Task creation and Owner change capabilities and Marketo Sky will gain predictive smart lists and recommended actions powered by Adobe Sensei.

These will take time to come to market as they're still in the planning stages, so in the meantime the key product focus for Marketo users are ABM and the new Sky user interface - which is where all these new features will be found The MarTech landscape is evolving quickly, with a particular emphasis on ABM as well as data management. Oracle and Adobe have made significant announcements to address gaps in these areas over the past few weeks with more to come.