Driving consumers indoors and online, it goes without stating that the COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly changed the way that brands connect with their audiences. Now is the time for brands to catch up to the digital needs of their audiences and strategically prepare for the future so they bounce back stronger than ever.

Until now, many brands have already made some sort of investment in digital, whether it’s super-charging their social media feeds, building personalization into their content delivery or more. But there is always opportunity for brands to raise their digital maturity—something that’s become especially clear today.

As CTO Solutions at MediaMonks, Tim Goodman has helped brands adapt at every stage of the digital transformation journey. Despite the different approaches taken, the first step is always the same: “We really look closely at the business goals,” he says. “Are they looking to reach their clients more quickly? Improve their message? Streamline their processes?” By aligning business goals with market changes, here is how Goodman and his team help brands focus their efforts and transform at speed.

Fill the Capability Gap Between Tech and Creativity

In his keynote address at this year’s (digitized) Adobe Summit, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen noted the importance of aligning creative teams and IT to unite such disparate experiences and the data that powers each, with both sides ultimately focused on the customer experience. “In the past, the CMO brought marketing and communications expertise, while CIOs knew how to architect systems and unite data,” he said. “But IT is becoming more customer-centric and marketing is becoming more data driven. They are working together more than ever. Your C-suite must be aligned around this customer-centricity.”

At MediaMonks, we’ve always believed in a confluence between creativity and technology, and how both work in tandem to deliver the experiences that customers need. Right now, there is a strong desire for emotionally resonant, relevant experiences in digital—and if brands aren’t prepared to offer them, then they must find a partner who can fill in those capability gaps.

Strategic Partnerships Keep Brands Current to Market Shifts

As an Adobe Platinum Partner and having won the Adobe Partner of the Year award nearly every year since its existence, the MediaMonks Solutions team is ideally situated to support brands as they aim to adapt and transform. It’s led by Goodman, who holds the record of most individual certifications (ten) and is the only individual in the Adobe Partner network globally to hold four Architect certifications (Adobe Experience Manager Forms, Adobe Experience Manager Sites, Analytics, and Campaign).

“In working with Adobe, I’m most proud of the trust we have built up together,” says Goodman. “We’ve built trust in their products, in their teams, in their understanding of the needs of the market. They’ve built trust in us to understand their technology, to implement it the way it’s meant to be implemented, and to make sure we give our clients the best advice that’s right for them.”

This close partnership and expertise has led the team to often break new ground, implementing new features from Adobe before anyone else. For example, we were the first organization in the world to implement the Adobe Experience Manager Asset Share module for a major Australian brand. This is just one of the benefits of how we keep a continuous process of learning to help brands adapt to rapidly changing market needs.

Making these adaptations can be challenging for brands, which is why it’s important to put them at ease through testing and clear communication. “Before we implement a new feature, we make sure that we’ve tried and tested it in labs before we let it loose in the wild,” says Goodman. “We also ensure that key Adobe engineers are engaged directly, because they want to see the success of these features as well.” Crucial to this process is communicating core software disciplines, including proper quality control, to marketing teams in plain English.

Translate Random Acts of Digital into a Consistent Ecosystem

Online behaviors have rapidly changed since the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, but many brands have an initial foundation to build off of for digital transformation and a more connected customer decision journey. Right now, your digital experiences may primarily function as “random acts of digital”: individual experiences that build brand love or fulfill a specific business goal, but are ultimately self-contained and disconnected from other touchpoints along the customer decision journey.

Brands looking to accelerate their digital transformation in lockstep with emerging user behaviors can save time and efforts by connecting these already-existing digital experiences together—either serving the right content for the right context or carrying user data from one touchpoint to another.  Tools like Adobe Experience Manager are critical for synchronizing data to and enabling this level of contextual relevance, resulting in unique, personalized experiences.

“A unified message is critical, and this often means unifying the silos within the organization,” says Goodman. “Whether it’s moving to cross-channel communications, or multi-tenant solutions, or a Data Management platform that streamlines the audiences for the right messages, Adobe has the answer.” Goodman suggests that brands first start with the quick wins rather than boil the ocean. “We help build a strategy for organizations to move through their digital transformation in the stages that are right for their business.”

Quick access to MediaMonks’ vast, global team of creative expertise enables brands to identify opportunities to embark on overarching transformation initiatives. “Not only do we have Tim, the most-certified Adobe expert,” says Tom Nelms, Head of Partner Growth at MediaMonks. “In total, we have 188 certifications across our network. When we combine that tech ability with our creative, front-end approach, we can help brands transform at speed and scale across their ecosystems.”

Focused on system, people and process, the MediaMonks Solutions team is well versed in helping brands overcome the creative challenge of integrating experiences along a single coherent journey. Critical to the process is that creativity and technology work together to enable the experiences that consumers crave throughout the total brand experiences. And when brands are better equipped to optimize and transform at speed, they’re able to build lasting customer connections and adapt to future changes in the market.

Ready to take digital transformation to the next level?

Consumers around the world crave personalization. In fact, 40.6% of Chinese millennial consumers don’t mind paying a premium for a personalized product. In discussing consumers’ attraction toward luxury goods with Jing Daily, Longchamp Creative Director Sophie Delafontaine hints at why personalization resonates so well today. “Nowadays, people are not looking for a bag, they’re looking for something special, something which really reflects who they are,” she said. “And this is particularly true when speaking of customers buying luxury bags.”

But if people look for products or experiences that reflect themselves, developing those impactful experiences can seem particularly challenging in a country so wide and vast as China: just 15% of its population is equal to the UK, Germany and France combined. By investing in personalization, your brand becomes better fit to further segment those audiences into actionable demographics that inspire and co-collaborate in new, emotionally resonant experiences.

To start, consider how to make a more meaningful impact throughout the customer decision journey (CDJ) and strategize around how that builds into a first-party relationship with individual users. This mindset is key for the approach we take in the work that we do, utilizing the full suite of Adobe’s Experience Cloud to deliver memorable experiences that emotionally resonate.

The Need for Data-Driven Creative Experiences

Some might see “data-driven creative” as an oxymoron, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Brands exist to serve their customers with the utmost care through the following simple reminder: behind every data point sits a real human being with a voice. That said, the aggregated data from your Adobe Analytics backend can help you better understand what resonates with consumers across the WeChat ecosystem, preparing your team to better understand the growing needs of Chinese consumers and confidently optimize their journeys.

It’s obvious that analytics can help determine which product design performs best or whether KPIs have been met. But more interesting—and this is where brands must direct more attention—is how you can use consumer interaction data to pre-test and iterate upon an idea, essentially turning users into contributors to your product design.

This process enables you to focus your efforts on key strategic areas that build both innovation and momentum in incremental steps. In developing an app or web platform, you can use these analytics to identify and remove steps that don’t add value to the user experience and adopt a more customer-obsessed approach as you go.

Here’s a breakdown of the process that has worked for us in A/B testing audiences and specific experiences built for them, using Adobe Target in a four-week sprint cycle. First, spend the first week building a hypothesis around your user—this is where personas and research come into play. Next, test and learn your prototype by launching it for the audience segments matching these personas. Once you have a minimum of about 15,000 data points, you should have enough insights to build and launch the app. Post-launch, make sure to continue to test and iterate for effectiveness. Be mindful, as this bond creates a conversation between the user and the product designers and helps inform upcoming consumer needs.

Identify Triggers and Intent for Impact

Effective personalization requires you to rethink what you thought you knew about demographics. What’s important isn’t just what Tencent UserID provides—what matters is the content that clicks with a user, and any personalized platform should recognize these preferences across a creatively differentiated experience. Adobe does this seamlessly via its Experience Cloud’s Visitor ID: a fixed, persistent identifier per WeChat user that visits your mini-program, WeChat Ecom Store or other digital properties of the brand. This allows you to build comprehensive profiles of your visitors based on their actions and interests, augmenting the data from WeChat.

Consumers are more comfortable providing data when they understand there’s a fair tradeoff. From a user experience perspective, aim for transparency in how your platform translates user interactions into recommendations and new content. The PUMA “run my way” campaign began by acquiring the user’s OpenID via a QR code scan, allowing for personalization by giving each user a choice in the color and finish of their puma avatar as well as options for the soundtrack. After running through the scene via a treadmill, users conclude the experience with a personalized video takeaway.

So, how can you execute with a platform that achieves something similar? First, move away from a one-size-fits-all mentality. Adobe Analytics and Target let you identify and segment audiences for testing, leveraging touchpoints throughout the customer decision journey to inform creative design and tailoring the user experience toward business outcomes. By turning successful tests into perpetual personalization activities, you can continue to serve your audiences their preferred experience through Adobe Target.

This part of the process trips up those who haven’t properly set up an attribution model or strategy for success, leading some to consider abandoning personalization altogether. It begs the question: if businesses continue to inundate users with the same, irrelevant ads again and again through careless retargeting in external channels, were they ever really personalizing in the first place?

Personalization is your chance to build the experience your users have always wanted on your own properties. With the right toolset, this is a tangible and practical thing to do. The mighty size of the Chinese consumer market truly enables even the most sophisticated personalization powered by machine learning in Adobe Target. It requires a lot of data, but in return offers automated targeting of your experiences to just the audiences most likely to respond. And it has the power to change the messaging and creative of any experience to the options that work best for a particular segment of the audience — all without a data analyst’s involvement.

Personalization done properly actually empowers the user to craft their own product and design their own journey to their own liking. Through a data-driven creative process that focuses its strategy on assisting your WeChat users, you can drive more meaningful, impactful, memorable user experiences.

Oleg Sidorenko, Solutions Director EMEA at MediaMonks, contributed to this piece.

Having joined the Monks in December 2019, we’ve fully initiated BizTech into our monastery, where they continue their commitment to delivering digital transformation expertise and customer experience management to brands worldwide.

The move comes at a critical moment when brands seek to deliver personalization and content at speed and scale, across channels both owned and earned—and made headlines at publications such as Yahoo Finance, Campaign and Little Black Book.

“Nowadays, everyone is making experience their business,” says Vera Cvetkovic, VP Solutions for the Americas and MediaMonks. “We’re helping them by delivering end-to-end solutions that enable those omnichannel experiences.”

“What everyone is going through is building an ecosystem to manage the whole [marketing] funnel,” Victor Knaap, CEO at MediaMonks, told Campaign. “We can add value throughout the process–from the discovery of what a platform should be to the defining and implementation for the best customer experience,” he added.

Adobe plays a crucial role in these efforts: a study described in the report “The Total Economic Impact of Adobe Experience Cloud,” cowritten by Forrester, found that organizations using Adobe Experience Manager achieved 14% year-over-year growth in new, unique visitor traffic and a 10% increase in average order value. Furthermore, marketing teams equipped Adobe Campaign, Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Target were able “to build campaigns in half the time it took with their legacy tools.”

An Unprecedented Partnership

Since its inception, BizTech has served brands big and small, including enterprise-level clients spanning industries that include banking, telecommunications, education, government and more. They’re the leading experts in Adobe’s online infrastructure and ecosystem, being one of the small few companies to achieve Platinum partnership. Our adept Solutions team is led by Tim Goodman (CTO Solutions at MediaMonks), who’s recognized as the most-awarded Adobe buff in the world.

With many of their clients juggling several workstreams and vendors, BizTech has gained trust by tackling the full, end-to-end experience on behalf of their clients. Specialized in Adobe Analytics, Campaign, Experience Manager and Experience Manager Run & Operate, BizTech has won an Adobe Partner of the Year award nearly every year since the award has existed.

Closing the Gap Between Creativity and Engineering

Now fully integrated with MediaMonks, the Solutions team is uniquely poised to marry together creative and engineering. “In order to bring complete solutions to clients, we must bring technology and creativity together at the outset,” says Cvetkovic. “Making that integration complete, we have a working process to implement and support creative solutions via Growth’s ongoing conversations with clients or Operations’ planning and execution of projects.”

This balance of flexibility, innovation and technical expertise enables brands to better meet their consumers with insights-driven creative delivered through personalized, omnichannel paths. “Every large enterprise has challenges with siloed data, legacy systems and joining teams,” says Michael Patishman, SVP Solutions at MediaMonks. “We help overcome them through considered efforts around system, people and process—removing the walls, connecting the dots.”

Enabling a Smoother, More Impactful Digital Transformation Process

When it comes to digital transformation, we believe in an agile, phased approach that prioritizes the most practical and impactful changes first. This approach simplifies the process and delivers faster results. Our unmatched Adobe expertise gives our clients the opportunity to quickly build experience-led solutions that drive customer obsession and impact, whether they’re just starting their digital transformation journey or want to quickly implement the newest technology.”

“It’s one thing when you are growing a business to get to the top, and another to stay there once you’ve made it,” says Cvetkovic. “We’re a leader in innovative solutions for our clients, and we go through a whole maturity model assessment to determine where they are and what they need to do next to move from one stage to another.”

This added knowledge and expertise helps us scale up our efforts to meet that growing demand of brands that seek to incite and sustain digital transformation efforts. Working with clients such as AkzoNobel, McLaren, HP and others to rapidly transform and elevate the customer experience, BizTech and MediaMonks are a natural fit—and we’re delighted to have fully integrated BizTech into the fold.

There’s more to explore in the Monk monastery.