Adobe Digital Marketing Summit 2014: Reinventing Online Marketers

Keynotes from Adobe Digital Marketing Summit 2014: Reinventing Online Marketers

This year’s Adobe Digital Marketing Summit—which took place from March 24-28 in Salt Lake City, Utah—gave attendees valuable insight into the evolving role of marketers in the digital age. Keynote and featured speakers included highly respected entrepreneurs, creative innovators, and marketers such as Yancey Strickler (CEO and co-founder of Kickstarter); Robert Redford (Academy Award-winning actor and director); and Dev Anand (head of business development at Foursquare).

More than 100 in-depth sessions took place, covering topics like marketing analytics, social marketing, web experience management, and marketing innovations, among others. Summit sessions and labs were taught by some of the most innovative marketing professionals from top companies worldwide. Aside from learning the tools and strategies that would help them maximize various marketing opportunities, attendees were also given the chance to network with marketing luminaries.

Since the Future of Marketing is Digital, Online Marketers Need to Adapt Quickly

As technology continues to evolve at breakneck speed, online marketers will need to adapt quickly by developing dynamic digital strategies to maintain their competitive edge. Online marketers also need to merge the many silos that exist in their organizations. Seamless integration is vital in today’s digitized marketplace, as marketing campaigns need to be multi-channel, multi-device, and multi-lingual to succeed.

Reinvention was one of the keynotes at this year’s summit, and a startling survey that was released by Adobe at the summit revealed that while 40% of marketers want to reinvent their roles, only 14% knew how to go about the process.

The online survey involved 1,004 U.S. marketers, and used data collected from February 19-27, 2014 by ResearchNow. The data was divided into the following sub-groups: companies with self-reported below average or average business performance versus companies with superior business performance; and companies with high digital spend versus companies with low digital spend.

The study also revealed that more than half (64%) of marketers expected their roles to change in the coming year, and 81% expected their roles to change in the next 3 years. When it comes to identifying primary obstacles to reinventing themselves, 30% of marketers claimed that lack of training inhibited them, while 30% cited organizational inabilities to adapt.

54% of marketers believed that ideal marketers took more risks, and 45% aspired to take more risks themselves. In contrast, 65% of marketers stated that they felt more comfortable adopting new technologies once they’d become mainstream—a statistic which revealed a disconnect between what marketers wanted to do and what they were actually doing.

Respondents also admitted that more digital talents were needed to take organizations to the next level; marketers cited digital and social marketers (47%), data analysts (38%), mobile marketers (36%), and creative professionals (38%) as the key professionals companies needed to invest in over the coming 12 months.

Data is Key to Success, but Marketers aren’t Using it to Make Informed Decisions

To truly succeed, marketers need to see the bigger picture, and seeing the bigger picture will involve collecting and streamlining data from various silos. While marketers understand that data is important to success, many marketers aren’t using their data to make informed decisions. In fact, 76% of marketers admitted that they needed to become more data-focused.

Marketers who want to reinvent themselves will need to aggregate and analyze data from multiple sources, learn how to collaborate with other departments within the company to create streamlined marketing campaigns, and deliver a personalized experience to various customers. Delivering a personalized experience will require understanding who the customers are, what devices they’re using, and how they’re interacting with the brand.

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The Marketing Digest Writing Team provides the content you need to keep you well-informed on the latest developments and trends in the digital marketing industry.