Professional Digital Marketing Tools

Whereas most people still think of Adobe as the PDF or Photoshop company, the firm has become a major player in the digital marketing business since the acquisition of a company called Omniture for ~$1.8bn in 2009. In this class/blog, I want to explore the type of digital marketing products that companies such as Adobe currently offer. My goal is to gain a better understanding of the digital marketing business and the premium tools that professional digital marketers have at their disposal.

In this first blog post, I will lay out what Adobe currently offers as basis for analysis. The products are currently broadly defined as: 1) Analytics, 2) Experience Manager, 3) Social, 4) Target, 5) Optimizer and 6) Campaign ($600M Neolane acquisition, 2013). The aforementioned product names are less important than what they offer a digital marketer. For example, Analytics contains a powerful tool called SiteCatalyst that offers digital marketers advanced web analytic tools beyond the standard Google Analytics framework. The use for analytics for a digital marketer is obvious. Having access to site data is the first step towards optimizing the web experience from a profitability and user-experience perspective.

However, beyond “analytics,” many questions remain. For example, what other tools are out there? What kind of skills would someone need to have to use them? How would one integrate analytics into a data management platform or email marketing suite? Are there predictive programs out there that allow marketers to use data to project into the future?

Many professionals narrowly focus on one area of digital marketing or web analysis and don’t know of the offerings available within the industry. Even at companies such as Adobe or Google, employees are narrowly focused on one product grouping such as “analytics” or “email marketing” or “data management” and lack knowledge of the full array of products available and/or the competitive landscape. My objective in this blog is to explore that landscape and make sense of the needs of a digital marketer and what product offerings are out there to aid in their objectives.