🎛️ Make UX strategy your focus

Your users’ preferences and expectations are constantly changing, so if your brand’s digital experience isn’t changing as well, customers will find your offerings less relevant.

Many companies have tried to fix this problem by investing heavily in updating the aesthetics of their digital properties. But this is just one part of user experience as a whole.

“UX is more than just designing a modern website; UX really is a strategy,” said Kelly Gustainis, Lead UX Researcher at Pantheon, in her recent MarTech session. “It affects more than just your design team. It affects more than just your product team. It is a way of thinking and approaching problems.”

She added, “When I say ‘strategy,’ I just mean it’s an ongoing process. It’s going to be iterative and it keeps your roadmap relevant to your user needs over time.”

Here are four steps Gustainis recommends taking to implement an effective UX strategy.

Read more here.

Consumer demands are ever-evolving. It’s what makes the role of the marketer equal parts exciting and frustrating. As the world has changed rapidly in the last 18 months, so has the game for B2C marketers – making the concept of engaging consumers across the entire customer lifecycle in a unified approach essential.

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Today, Adobe announced new features and capabilities that are rolling out on Adobe Workfront, forecasting the next phase of integrations that follow Adobe’s acquisition of the work management platform in late 2020.

Many of the new features are aimed at dynamic collaboration, enabling creative and marketing teams to work together on campaigns and related projects.

For instance, there is an Adobe Experience Manager Assets integration, now available, that serves enterprises, enabling them to orchestrate campaigns and deliver content to publishers seamlessly, while also managing approvals and other necessary steps in the creative process.

There are also Adobe Photoshop and Adobe XD plugins that allow users to stay in those environments while collaborating with internal and external stakeholders and viewing updated tasks, issues and documents throughout the process.

For B2B customers, the Adobe Marketo Engage Connector is now available through Adobe Workfront Fusion.

Why we care. Workfront was a bold $1.5 billion investment made by Adobe, and we can now begin to see how it will be used not only to improve the productivity of creative teams, but to also build out capabilities for marketers, especially enterprises and B2B Marketo customers.

Clearly, Adobe is leveraging its Workfront acquisition to create a collaboration infrastructure that is more connected to its own ecosystem than, say, a competing collaboration platform.

Read more here.

The verdict is in: Sales and Marketing are aligned on ABM strategy but are falling short on execution. While 96% of Sales and Marketing leaders agree that personalized communications to prospects are the most effective, the majority agree that feasibility is a major challenge to personalization at scale. Stop missing opportunities! It’s time you got the most out of your investments in ABM. Join this webinar to learn the findings of new research from Renegade and Conversica and explore practical tips for executing lead outreach like a champ.

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Consumer packaged goods brands should consolidate their data to deliver more personalized campaigns. This was the conclusion made by Tristan Silhol, Senior Manager, Consulting for Artefact US, part of the global data services company, at the recent MarTech conference.

CPG brands have unique challenges in meeting consumer demands for personalization, according to Silhol. Because of the nature of their business, their audience is broad, which requires a particularly robust data strategy.

“[They] have to be able to go from broad-brush mass-market targeting to targeting the right consumers at the right time with the right message,” he stated.

“In typical strategic marketing, teams are focused on assumption-based marketing, said Silhol. “So essentially, they’re building media campaigns and personalization based on external factors such as consumer surveys, brand knowledge, national demographic data, statistical data and, of course, consumption data.”

He added, “And it’s great to build broad campaigns, such as TV campaigns, but it might not be sufficient when current customers expect a lot of personalization and a certain level of relationship with the brands today.”

Read more here.

More and more, the key to solving critical marketing and marketing ops challenges is marketing technology. But with 7,000+ solutions on the market, finding the right one for your needs can be overwhelming. MarTech makes it easy. Discover dozens of time-saving, profit-boosting solutions and the actionable tactics to effectively leverage them… all in one place, all without leaving your desk, and all for free.

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This week’s Marketoonist gives some extra attention to our age of distractions.

Fishburne’s take: Leaders can influence how their teams use always-on 24/7 tools like Slack to avoid the drawbacks of always-on 24/7 working. We have to learn to navigate the tradeoffs of faster communication and productivity — and set boundaries.

Why we care. Work-from-home expanded the possible hours that someone could get work done while balancing all the unexpected life challenges that came with a global pandemic. It also eliminated the ambiguity of in-person workspaces: should I walk two desks over and tell my coworker something, or should I Slack them? (Answer: you should have Slacked them.)

Read more here.