After several months in beta testing, Adobe is launching Adobe Social, which it’s pitching as a way to connect social marketing campaigns with real business results.
That was the big emphasis when the company first announced the product back in April, and when I got a demo of the current version a couple of days ago, it was the central theme again: In Adobe Social, you can track every campaign and see how it drives results product orders and revenue.
“[Marketers] have point solutions that solve specific problems, but they’re not really connecting you back to the business issues,” says VP of Marketing Aseem Chandra.
The product lets you get even more granular. You can look at the influence of individual users — not just at their general influence (how many followers they have, how many retweets they received, their Klout score, and so on), but to what extent their mentions actually drove actual revenue. So when you create a new campaign, you’re not just targeting “influencers,” but people who are actually influential for the bottom line of your business.
And it’s not just about Facebook and Twitter. Senior Product Manager Jeff Jordan says Adobe Social will deliver results for emerging social networks, too. For example, on Pinterest, it can determine which “pinned” images are leading to actual purchases.
Adobe Social also allows you to create social content and applications — which can currently be published to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ — using a drag-and-drop interface. The service comes with audience targeting capabilities, plus you can look at the data to see how effective the ads and content are, and adjust accordingly.
The other big selling point is the integration with other products in Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite — as Adobe puts it, it’s breaking social advertising out of its silo. On the publishing side, marketers aren’t just creating and measuring social marketing campaigns, they can also use Adobe Test & Target to deliver personalized messages to visitors when they come to your website after clicking on a social ad. It also integrates with Adobe Discover, so marketers can divide their social audience into segments, and seeing which types of users (i.e., visitors who spend 1-5 minutes on the site versus visitors who spend more than 5 minutes) drive the most revenue. And it integrates Adobe Insight to show how social leads to in-store traffic.