Imagine you are sitting in a movie theater (or in this case, 2021 Adobe Summit). The lights drop, the green preview screen comes on, and the booming voice of Don LaFontaine comes over the loudspeaker:
“In a world where Multi-Channel Marketing scales, Marketo Rules”
This year’s Adobe Summit introduced us to such a world. In this world, new business can come from any channel; prospects can switch very quickly between very interested and uninterested, ready for change and not so sure, high or low value. In this environment, organizations are looking for new tools and approaches to adapt.
Introducing a New B2B CDP
Last week, Adobe unveiled an advanced B2B CDP (Built on Adobe Experience Platform, or AEP) that on its face is game-changing. Leveraging real-time rules, business users can develop custom segments and activate on those in real-time to build complex sales funnels. Adobe’s true-to-form grand claims reveal how critical the Customer Data Platform is to Adobe’s long term vision. In session after session, Adobe showed how to activate consumers via complex funnels, and how businesses could use targeting to close larger deals faster.
However, Summit likely confused Marketo practitioners. In fact, a number of my clients asked me how this helps your run-of-the-mill Marketo shop or allows them to activate on an audience they couldn’t activate on before. In my most telling interaction of the week, I was struck by this question by a confused practitioner:
How does the Adobe Experience Platform CDP differ from Marketo Smart Lists ?
Marketo Smart Lists are dynamic, business-rule-driven lists of contacts in your database. They allow marketers to build infinite types of campaigns with many touchpoints. For example, Smart Lists enable custom nurture campaigns with varying send-times via a Custom Stream Cadence. Types of qualifiers for smart lists include channel, engagement level, behavior, demographic, or a specific data point onboarded from your favorite CRM.
B2B CDP and Marketo
So, how does the B2B CDP / Adobe Experience Platform help your Marketo shop? I’ll answer this question with a prediction. By year-end 2022, Marketo will be the Adobe Experience Platform. In other words, every valuable piece of the Adobe Experience Platform accessed by marketers will instead be accessed via Marketo. The super-cool amazing things about AEP that doesn’t help marketers will be immediately integrated into a data science package for Marketo. The fundamental value that the B2B CDP brings to Marketo is scale. Without careful, expert Marketo implementation help, teams may struggle to see their vision turn into a reality, quickly. That said, on the back of the incredible engineering that is the Adobe Experience Platform CDP ecosystem, Marketo practitioners can finally build that infinitely complex Smart List that will respond instantaneously. As the 2021 Adobe Summit showed us, soon no marketing automation tool will even come close. In short:
In a world where Multi-Channel Marketing scales, Marketo rules.
