Digital advertisers should focus on customer experience, Adobe report shows
A study conducted by Adobe showed that priorities across ad and marketing agencies may not be universal when it comes to customer experience.
Digital advertisers should focus on customer experience, Adobe report shows
The 2019 Digital Trends Advertising in Focus report indicated that, of the roughly 800 advertising professionals surveyed, as much as 46% of respondents said demonstrating return on investment (ROI) was the biggest priority for the rest of the business, with 42% saying it was better audience engagement and segmentation and 40% attributing improving channel efficiency.
While this data suggests that professionals in the field ultimately project strategies that yield immediate and tangible results as the most important, other findings from the counter this. Nearly a quarter (23%) of those surveyed said that data-driven marketing targeted toward the individual and another 64% stated the essentialness of content and experience management in order to build loyalty and trust with consumers.
Despite the split of opinion across the board, the research points toward the building of customer experience to be at the root of motivation – this makes sense, considering that the companies whose main goal was consumer-centric proved to be the most successful and three times more likely to surpass their business goals than their peers.
“The race to personalize customer experiences has seen brands rely more heavily on analytics and programmatic strategies,” said Philip Duffield, the managing director of Advertising Cloud, Adobe EMEA in a release. “And whilst these are so important, the opportunity facing the industry is how to balance these with creativity.
“Those that can root campaigns in deep audience intelligence and marry them with engaging real-time content delivered across the right channels, will achieve relevance and personalization at scale.”
Mike Klinkhammer, the director of Advertising Sales EU at Ebay added: “Creativity and metrics are connected. We need to focus much more on quality and relevance – those are two key words for me this year. If you combine quality and relevance, helped by automation, you get very powerful content delivered in very effective ways.”
Overall, Adobe’s report showed that advertising and marketing teams need to join on enriching customer experience by combining rich audience data and insights, while also making sure these match their respective ad-targeting strategies and keeping up a creative connection.
“Advertisers and marketers are working towards the same goal, but they’re treading different paths in order to reach the end destination,” Duffield said. “The risk is that by pursuing two very different strategies – one rooted in connection and the other in data – is that the end customer receives a very fragmented and inconsistent brand experience.
“Both strategies have merit, but to be turbocharged they need to be integrated. The report outlines how customer experience management can unify advertisers and marketers to build brand in the longer term.”