See how IdeaCloud's " High Intent, Low Investment" marketing experience outperformed every other asset on Adobe.com
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Summary

One of IdeaCloud’s longest-standing partnerships is with Adobe, who has long been associated with leading-edge innovation, premium design, and data-driven strategy. IdeaCloud has been supporting Adobe’s sales, marketing, and events teams since our founding. We’ve developed dozens of Adobe’s interactive IdeaCloud simulations for high-profile keynote addresses, executive briefings, and sales presentations that have been delivered by just about everyone in the organization from sales associates to the CEO, himself. As Marc Eaman, Adobe’s Director of Digital Experience & Platform Evangelism puts it, “IdeaCloud helps global Adobe sales teams bring compelling customer experience stories to life on any screen.”

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“IdeaCloud helps global Adobe sales teams bring compelling customer experience stories to life on any screen.” 

Marc Eaman - Director of Digital Experience & Platform Evangelism 

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In May 2018 Adobe acquired the eCommerce giant Magento and went straight to work enhancing and refining its industry-leading platform. By 2020, the two companies were fully gelled and Magento’s digital marketing team was looking to fill its funnel with leads. Having seen the great successes IdeaCloud produced in presenter-led simulations, Magento’s marketing team naturally came to this logic question: Could IdeaCloud be used as a lead generating marketing asset?

Challenge 

Delivering on this ask and adapting our platform into a self-guided experience was a multi-month initiative. Our VP of Technology, Deedee Olsen took her team back to the drawing board and deconstructed the simulation experience and the application of our patented Trigger System. They challenged past assumptions and conventions, developing an experience specifically designed to surface better-qualified, more intentional sales prospects from an anonymous digital touchpoint. 

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Similarly, our Experience Strategy team had to re-examine their storycrafting process with fresh eyes. Highly-contextualized, simplified storytelling must still be the target outcome for an IdeaCloud marketing experience. But in a self guided, digitally-embedded environment, the team wouldn’t be able to depend on many of their typical tactics. 

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One of the key aspects of IdeaCloud’s presenter-lead simulations is to keep the audience’s attention on the presenter, and we have a number of guidelines we follow to ensure we realize that goal. Guidelines include things like reducing the amount of text on the screen and to lean more heavily on a scripted voiceover that the presenter shares verbally. Presenter-lead simulations sometimes rely on a ‘choreography of clicks’ that a presenter follows as they guide an audience through a simulated experience.

Insights

“IdeaCloud interactive experiences have the highest UTM and conversion on Adobe.com.” 

Jonathan Woodward - Head of New Business Demand Generation, Adobe Experience Cloud

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As with our presenter-led simulations, we knew we still needed to deliver Magento’s message in context that is relevant and impactful to the customer. In record time, our team developed a minimum viable version of the IdeaCloud “Marketing Experience” and quietly deployed it to the Magento website without any traffic-driving or marketing strategy. The reaction from site visitors and positive results were seen immediately. Frankly, they surpassed even our most optimistic estimates, and produced a slew of new insights and key learnings. 

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Don’t Overshare

The first key insight emerged after considering countless variables and variations of how to design the experience. We had to fight to capture and maintain our audience’s attention, therefore marketing asset best practices apply here. We needed to limit the number of customer clicks and interactions or we would lose people to drop-off in the experience. Testing during R&D revealed 5 sequences to be the optimal length for these experiences. This balance provides enough story detail to effectively convey value propositions, while remaining succinct enough to limit interaction and reduce drop-off.

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Lead Gen Sweet Spot: High Intent, Low Investment

One of the biggest eye-openers for our team was discovering that our embedded experience created a unique category of marketing hero asset. What Adobe likes to call “interactive product tours” on IdeaCloud, our embedded experience presents potential customers with an asset that requires very low user investment for content consumption, while injecting just enough friction to filter only those users with a ‘high intent’ to learn more about Magento. Far less effort than reading a white paper, more friction than clicking play on a video, for instance. So our marketing experience captures and maintains focused interaction, and as you can see, occupies a unique position in this 2 x 2 matrix.

Caption: The IdeaCloud Marketing Experience requires a low level of user investment for consumption while indicating a high level of intention in the visitor. 

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Results

Because this was our first release of a self-guided experience, we took an extremely conservative approach with its rollout. Adobe published a standalone campaign landing page to feature this asset, gated behind a lead capture and qualification form.

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Candidly, we weren’t sure what to expect from the results. So we did no marketing, no promotions or traffic driving of any sort to this landing page, at launch. Adobe merely added a link in Magento’s super-nav menu to that said “Interactive Product Tour” and nothing more. And within hours, the results were blowing us away:

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Within the first 48 hours our asset was outperforming every other lead capture asset on Adobe’s Magento website by more than 3X!

Needless to say, Adobe was over the moon with these results. As the Head of New Business Demand Generation for Adobe Experience Cloud, Jonathan Woodward put it, “IdeaCloud interactive experiences have the highest UTM and conversion on Adobe.com.” They immediately made plans to expand their use of IdeaCloud’s embedded marketing experience, immediately placing an order for half a dozen new stories over the next few months. 

Are YOU ready to recalibrate your marketing approach and attract more intentional leads? Contact an IdeaCloud expert today to find out more!