The birth of the internet has forced change upon most industries, but marketing has arguably faced the biggest revolution of all. As the internet has developed, so have the tools to track what is happening on your website.

What began as a simple code change – the addition of a site visit counter – has grown into the embedding of complex tools such as Google Analytics. Now you don’t just count hits; you can see where your visitors came from, what they looked at and what attracts them to your products and services. In turn, you can feed this back into market research.

Analytics tools are now an essential part of the marketer’s arsenal, helping them to understand whether their campaigns, promotions and adverts are having the impact they want. Adobe Marketing Cloud is specifically designed to help develop and control how a business goes about marketing its products and services.

So What Is Adobe Marketing Cloud?

Adobe Marketing Cloud combines a number of tools, each designed to meet a different marketing need. It’s aimed at professional market researchers and other staff working in similar jobs.

Each application in the suite is run from the cloud. This means that you don’t have to worry about installing software on your computer. The applications are designed to integrate well with each other and are kept up-to-date by Adobe, so you don’t have to worry about compatibility issues or having to install updates.

Most importantly, with your work being stored and run from the cloud, it will be available across a variety of devices wherever you have access to the internet. If you need to work on your laptop whilst out and about you don’t need to find it on the company network before you set off. If you want to discuss a strategy in a meeting, you no longer need to spend time printing documents to show to your market research colleagues. Just take your tablet in with you.

Apps in Marketing Cloud

There are five main Apps which make up the tool set in Adobe Marketing Cloud.

• The first is Adobe Analytics, which is a tool for analyzing the behaviour of your customers when they visit your website.It’s similar to Google Analytics and could help to reinforce your market research activities.
• Adobe Target is a tool for testing different marketing strategies for your website and and finding out what works and what doesn’t.
• Adobe Social helps you to manage the social side of your marketing, whether it’s interacting with your customers, tracking the performance of your social media campaigns or identifying new trends which may impact your brand.
• Adobe Experience Manager is designed to help organise and manage the production of your marketing campaigns, promotions and adverts.
• Adobe Media Optimizer is designed to help you optimize the mix of marketing strategies you use and ensure you get a good return on your investment.

Why Use Marketing Cloud?

Whilst there are many sides to marketing, finding out when and why it works is essential for developing new strategies, whilst understanding when and why they are failing gives you the opportunity to act before too much damage is done. Adobe Marketing Cloud could therefore make market research jobs easier.

Adobe Marketing Cloud gives marketers the tools to facilitate this new wave of marketing activity, so it’s worth spending time getting to grips with this type of software to make sure you can get the best out of it.

Our guest blogger, Sam Wright is a journalist working with Brand Republic.