Exploring new marketing strategies with Adobe Experience Manager

While physical stores may remain important for brand visibility in local shopping malls and commercial districts, websites continue to grow as the most viewed shop window where customers discover new products and functionalities. In the most recent Beyond Digital, the knowledge-sharing discussion club organised by digital expert Ariad, Steven Elliott, Manager of Creative Technology at leading audio equipment company Bose, unveiled how cutting-edge marketing technology like Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) helps to organise the creation and distribution of content on a global scale, while at the same time making it more accessible to different departments. By making their website the most prominent and slick place to discover new product information, Bose was able to successfully close down all its physical shops in 2019 without losing the connection with their customers.

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Exploring new markets

As a result of closing all of its stores, Bose needs to look for new ways to reach its customers. “Experiencing our products was always important for our customers”, recognizes Steven. “We therefore created demo-like experiences on our website by using our content management system (CMS) AEM. These interactive features allowed people to play around with an audio setup and configuration to experience the difference compared to other audio devices. We’ve also created a demo for the noise cancellation feature in headphones, where people can choose from different background noises and use a slider bar to adjust the level of noise cancellation.”

Steven Elliott stresses that the world is changing. “Gen Z will become more and more important for us. They are diverse, open-minded digital natives who see themselves as the most creative generation. And most importantly, they’re open to collaborate with brands. Therefore, social media in combination with AI will only become more important. We integrate social imagery from influencing customers in our e-commerce activities. For example, we’ve partnered up with the online game League of Legends as their head sponsor. The 2020 world championship had 50 million people viewers who saw their favorite gamers with our brand on their headset. New social media platforms also provide opportunities where you can get visibility on an insane scale. Our campaign #cancelthenoise on TikTok received 13.6 billion impressions.”

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Using Adobe Experience Manager to streamline the content flow

Steven Elliott joined Bose six years ago. At that point, the company’s websites were managed individually per country or region. Bose decided to centralize all the content management while making sure it could be managed in the leanest possible way. In order to streamline the content creation process, a CMS was implemented. The company chose to work with Adobe Experience Manager. “It is used to manage all the front-end content, which is everything you can see on our websites”, Steven describes. “We really looked at it in a holistic way on a structural level. We wanted to step away from dual prioritization, where you have the marketing priorities on one side and ICT priorities on the other. Based on the nature and complexity of the content we want to add, the content team or the development team starts working on the case. In doing so, both teams learn best practices and work on their craft.”

“At the center of it all stands AEM, which is used to manage all the front-end content that you can see on many of our websites. We also use Hybris, which functions as our product data management system. In addition to these two management systems, we use various other software to help us with things such as translations. We structure all the content that is the same for all our websites around the world on a global template website. This content is then leveraged and translated for usage on local websites. We only need to do this once for 22 languages and 47 websites on a B2C-level and 15 languages and 42 websites on a B2B-level, which creates a huge scale advantage”, says Steven.

Keep it simple--and accessible

When working with a CMS, content needs to be templated. “When building a custom, dynamic website where every page looks different, a CMS is not the way to go”, warns Steven. In order to let the content team work in the most efficient way via a CMS, he recommends keeping the number of web compounds low. “The more building blocks you create, the more they start conflicting which makes it more difficult for other content teams.” What sets AEM apart from other kinds of CMS is the synergies it provides with other Adobe products, such as Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target. “As you implement more of Adobe’s software, you create more insightful and helpful synergies, “Steven adds.

The ability to create online content without a technical background is seen as a huge benefit by all the digital marketing leaders who attended this group sharing session. According to Sarah Catoul, Head of Digital Marketing at AG Insurance, it allows marketers to implement content themselves. “It used to be something only people with a strong technical background could do. Now we’ve implemented AEM as our CMS, everyone is able to do it quickly.” Jurgen Derycke, Digital Sales and Marketing Director at Kipling Emea, adds the importance of efficient content management. “The faster you can put something online and start selling, the better. Especially if you have a lot of products, it needs to go fast.”

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