How ‘Mobile First’ is Rewriting All the Marketing Rules – Adobe’s Take

The rapid rise of using mobile devices as the primary channel for web interactivity has gone beyond an inflection point. It’s estimated that 57% of internet traffic to websites now comes from mobile devices, which has radically altered the way customers interact with brands. The game is changing for both marketers and app and website developers.

As Haresh Kumar, Director of Strategy and Product Marketing, Mobile and Connected Experiences, at Adobe, puts it: “Mobile is a persistent and always-on environment. This persistence is not just about the viewing or connection status, it’s about the behavior of the customer. Consumers have their mobile devices with them at all times, providing marketers with a means of constant connectivity with the customer.”

Brands must deliver a connected, personalized experience that maps to everyone’s preferences – across all devices – rather than just a series of distinct interactions. And the quality of the connected experience is dramatically impacted by the relevance of the content provided to the customer or prospect.  Adobe Experience Manager Sites addresses this, ensuring content fits within existing workflows, is fluid and intelligent to effectively scale, and optimized for all audiences and digital platforms.

Adobe is helping brands adjust legacy processes and approaches as the customer experience becomes mobile-centric, including:

• Integrating mobile experience management from a distinct silo into part of the comprehensive customer experience model across all mediums.
• Implementing analytics that combine all customer data.
• Enhancing the customer experience with new technologies that accelerate the mobile experience.

“Mobile users will not tolerate long page load times or wait to interact,” Kumar explains. “New technologies such as single-page apps and progressive web apps will deliver a step-function improvement in the mobile user experience.”

Making mobile experiences more responsive is essential, especially since Adobe has found that businesses have mere milli-seconds to show relevant content. If the page takes longer than that time to load, engaging the customer is nearly impossible. Adobe offers SPA Editor in Experience Manager to support server-side rendering and multi-site management to help with better SEO and further improve SPA performance – allowing for increased speed.

The other side of the coin is ensuring that the content is relevant and engaging. With the ability to rapidly personalize content delivery based on an individual customer’s preferences, marketing teams can do far more to ensure that what is delivered is desirable. With Adobe Core Components and Adobe Style System, IT and marketing organizations can quickly create rich experiences right out of the box, radically minimizing the need for customizations. 

Utilizing modern web technologies and Experience Manager is an important undertaking, and a key question for many businesses is where to start. Kumar recommends beginning with a modern philosophy about how content is managed. A first step is moving beyond a “page paradigm” to a focus on modular content that can be reused more easily and effectively across different channels. This allows companies to provide more consistent content across all use cases. The paradigm then becomes how to assemble the best content, not compose a webpage.

“Moving away from a channel-centric world to an independent world where content is focused on supporting the customer journey, need, or education process is the way forward,” Kumar says.

For more information on Adobe’s solutions for next-generation mobile customer experiences, please click here.