Marketing has changed dramatically over the past five years. In the early days of ecommerce, competing by price and product selection was enough to win a customer’s loyalty. But with a plethora of choices, customers are demanding more. Specifically, they want personalized experiences wherever and whenever they interact with your brand.
There’s data to back this up. According to the 2020 Gladly Customer Expectations Report, 79% of consumers say “personalized service” is more important to them than “personalized marketing” (read: retargeting). What’s worse, only 36% of consumers say brands make them feel like unique individuals. Most importantly, 84% of consumers say they’ll go out of their way to shop with a brand that provides them with great experiences.
So how do you go about creating unique and enthralling customer experiences? Here are five questions the Ziffity teams are asked frequently.
I can build web pages easily enough, why should I invest in a CMS system?
Let’s say you create content about a new product that you want to promote in many places: your website, mobile channel, blog, social media pages, and so on.
Without a CMS system, you’ll need to build everything from scratch using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. You’ll need to create a database along with the administrative interface to ensure the authorization of content publishing.
This isn’t scalable in a world where content is king. Fresh data is an essential component to keeping your brand high in search ranking results. A CMS system like Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) “democratizes” content creation. Its streamlined interface means that marketing can easily create and publish fully-branded case studies about successful customers, and customer service can create and publish beautifully designed FAQs — all without getting the web development team involved.
What is AEM exactly?
Good question! It’s a tool that allows authorized users to create and publish content across all of your digital channels, but it’s more than that. There are several critical components to AEM:
- AEM Sites – This is the actual CMS tool that allows your users to create and publish content. It features a drag-and-drop editor, along with other features to “decouple” content from the structure used to create it, so that it can be published virtually anywhere.
- AEM Assets – This tool allows users to manage digital assets like images, videos for use across digital channels. Users can upload an image and have it cropped and sized automatically for its designated channel. It also contains approval workflows to ensure assets are vetted within your company prior to publication. Not surprisingly, it’s fully integrated with Adobe Creative Cloud.
- AEM Forms – This is a pretty cool tool that allows you to create smart forms for your customers and prospects to complete. It can recognize individual users by their device so that your visitors can do things like partially complete a form and save it for later. It can also save forms to a user portal.
- AEM Mobile – Allows you to build and manage a native mobile app. Your content creators can use the same AEM environment to create mobile content that they use to create web content. What’s key is that users can update mobile content without the bother of a redeployment effort.
- AEM Communities – Lets you create dedicated branded community experiences — forums, groups, blogs, file sharing, calendars, activity feeds — from a library of site templates. You can also integrate social media feeds.
Why is AEM better than, say, WordPress?
Unlike WordPress or Squarespace, AEM is a hybrid CMS system, meaning the content itself is decoupled from the structure in which the content is created. Leveraging what’s known as content and experience fragments, AEM enables your users to publish content across all of your channels, including your website, mobile site, native apps, and social channels. It also lets you create master versions of content, which can then be used to create additional versions (digital assets used by a sub-brand or offices in another country, or a short form of content for your web app).
Many people say that AEM is easier to use than WordPress, which means your internal teams can quickly meet the content demands of your business.
Another key benefit is that it integrates seamlessly with other core Adobe Cloud tools used by mid-level and enterprise-class merchants, such as:
- Adobe Creative Cloud is a collection of tools for graphic design, video editing, web development, photography, along with a set of mobile applications. For example, one of your users can edit an image in Photoshop and have it sync to your web and mobile sites.
- Adobe Cloud Analytics is a suite of integrated online marketing and Web analytics that helps you measure the experience your visitors have with your brand and optimize those experiences based on what you see.
- Adobe Target is a platform that allows you to segment customers in order to create highly personalized website experiences for each customer.
What types of customers use Adobe Experience Manager successfully?
A broad range of B2B and B2C companies leverage AEM, including MasterCard, Silicon Labs, Spring, University of Michigan, Sydney Opera House and The Telegraph.
Checkout Adobe’s extensive collection of case studies here.
Is it difficult to implement Adobe Experience Manager in my organization?
Actually, all you need to do is call Ziffity and our expert implementation team can get your company up and running on AEM quickly and affordably.
