LOS ANGELES – With marketers and creatives being pushed to complete projects on ever tighter timelines, Adobe is looking to help them bring apps to market faster than before, without having to learn code or get time from overwhelmed app development teams.
The Adobe Digital Publishing Solution was launched in July. In an interview this week at the Adobe MAX conference, Michelle Sidwell, head of marketing for the digital publishing suite at Adobe, said the idea with the solution was to allow creatives to create digital apps using the creative tools they already know, such as InDesign.
So far, Sidwell said Adobe has seen traction around three primary audiences: media publishers looking for a new way to showcase their content, content marketers looking to build brand affinity and drive prospects through the sales funnel, and businesses looking to reach an internal audience with updated company and industry information or training materials.
Delivering content through an app brings certain advantages, said Sidwell.
“We’ve baked in Adobe Analytics to measure and track content,” said Sidwell. “An app is a sticky experience. You can deliver content that users want to interact with – they’re touching, they’re moving, they’re watching video.”
Each group is looking to achieve different things. Publishers, of course, want to engage their readers and grow their readership. Content marketers want to engage with a new audience and help them though the sales funnel – Sidwell said one content marketing customer, automaker Audi – averaged 41 minutes of engagement with its car brochure app, and 91 per cent of users went through a purchase funnel.
Adobe’s largest growing sector for this solution though is enterprise engagement. Corporations want to be able to deliver content to internal audiences, be able to measure it, and be able to restrict by role who has access to what.
While many mobile apps in general can suffer from a high abandonment rate, Sidwell said their customers have succeeded by carefully considering what their audience wants, and delivering the right content to fill that want.
“If there’s value in the app, people keep coming back,” said Sidwell. “If there’s nothing of true value to the audience they’re going to abandon the app.”
The Adobe Digital Publishing Solution supports Android, Windows, IoS and desktop with a web viewer, all created from one program. There’s built-in services to drive engagement, such as text and push notifications that can be segmented to different audiences, as well as native social sharing. The solution can also be integrated with Adobe’s Marketing Cloud for deeper analytics.
Pricing is based on use case and audience, such as how many employees will be using it in an enterprise engagement scenario. It’s a cloud-based solution hosted on Adobe’s servers, but the databases stay on customer servers and connect through an API hookup.
So far, Sidwell said interest has been strong from the financial services and insurance, consumer goods, automobiles, retail and education verticals.