Adobe’s Marketo on Wednesday said it would help B2B firms trying to turn account-based marketing programs into more holistic, “epic” customer experiences via increased AI capabilities and expanded integrations with LinkedIn and Vidyard.
In a virtual event called Marketing Nation Live, Adobe senior vice-president of digital experience (and former Marketo CEO) Steve Lucas discussed the partnerships and forthcoming enhancements as part of its strategy to show the strength of Marketo Engage and Adobe Experience Cloud.
Though machine learning models have been built into Marketo Engage for some time, the company said its customers will be able to sift through 500 million data points across 25 million companies using its Account Profiling feature by early next year. Lucas used what we called “the humble e-mail” as a channel where AI is already delivering value to B2B marketers.
“As we’re delivering e-mail, I might know what content you want to consume, but your machine learning engine does,” he said. “The technology from Adobe Sensei is second to none at being able to understand the values of your buyer, pick up on that, intercept an e-mail that you’re pushing out as part of a campaign, and then put the right content from your library in that e-mail in real time.”
Marketo Engage had already been integrated with LinkedIn, meanwhile, but the company said it was bringing greater depth to the connection by allowing customers to sync a list of accounts to the professional social network. Whether the contacts within those accounts are known or unknown, so they can be easily targeted on LinkedIn via its Matched Audiences feature with paid media. Specifics such as role, job function and interest can then become the basis of a campaign or initiative through LinkedIn’s audience segmentation features.
“When you hand that lead over to the seller, the reality is (the question) ‘Well, what do they do?’” Lucas said. “ABM alone is not enough. You need an end-to-end engagement plan that not only appeals and markets to customers but teaches your sellers how to sellers engage. Because in B2B, I’m going to be dealing with multiple buyers — some I know, and some I don’t.”
As for Kitchener, Ont.-based Vidyard, the company said it will now work with Marketo Engage customers to more easily integrate video with ABM, marketing automation and other tools. The company whose platform includes products to host, publish, optimize and analyze video content, will also work through Marketo Engage sales reps to offer video capabilities to the latter’s customer base.
“It doesn’t matter what you do, who you meet, wherever it may be — it’s a ‘Smile, you are on camera’ world,” said Lucas, citing video as one of three macro trends facing marketers, along with artificial intelligence and data privacy. “People don’t pick up the phone. It’s not written down anymore, it’s on video. How do I glean information out of that?”
Lucas told Marketing Nation Live its latest moves reflect the fact that, as part of Adobe, Marketo is now being positioned as part of an Experience Cloud to firms that may have both B2B and business-to-consumer use cases. A customer like Nvidia, for is well known for the graphics chips in consumer PCs but also offers technology that assists corporations working on machine learning systems.
“You can still think about unique differences between (B2B and B2C) offerings, but these areas are blurring,” he said. This belief in account-based experiences is “religion-level for Adobe,” he added.
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