Why big brands use Adobe Experience Manager as their digital platform

Jonathan Whiteside
Global SVP Technology & Engineering

Length

6 min read

Date

1 April 2021

For brands who take their digital presence seriously, a digital experience tool is a necessity. One of the fastest-growing digital experience platforms is Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). DEPT® worked with the AEM platform for major brands such as Liberty Global (i.e. Ziggo), Eriks, Koninklijke Bibliotheek and De Bijenkorf.

Why do those organisations run digital on AEM? The main reason is that it reduces complexity of delivering great online experiences for multi-site, multi-language, multi-device and multi-platform organisations. Let’s dive a little deeper into the features to see why AEM is named as a “Leader” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management and why major brands love to work with Adobe Experience Manager.

Reason #1: simple campaign

With the AEM feature, ‘Sites’, you can easily manage websites across many regions and languages. With ‘Sites’, brands are able to control multiple sites from one central location. Same goes for marketing campaigns. You can roll campaigns out over multiple sites, plus enable them across relevant territories, markets and languages.

Reason #2: SEO & user experience

Usually, uploading assets to your CMS (Content Management System) requires adding metadata and tags for SEO purposes and user experience. This isn’t an issue if you upload just one asset per day. But if you upload hundreds of assets on a daily or weekly basis, AEM has a great feature: it has the ability to detect the content information around your asset and automatically assigns metadata and tags to them. Of course you can overwrite with your own metadata and tags, but if you have a large volume of content assets to manage, this feature drives efficiency and speed.

Reason #3: measurable content personalisation

Personalisation is a time-consuming journey, but worth its weight in gold if your brand wants to deliver rich and relevant experiences for your audience, drive engagement and ultimately, revenue. Manually, this involves A/B testing and measurement. AEM does not only allow you to choose whether you want to personalise on a page- or a content fragment level, but combined with the Analytics feature, AEM allows you to measure the results of personalisation on a content fragment level.

Reason #4: one-stop shop mobile app management

Most CMS’ are not capable of managing content in mobile apps. And if it is possible, brands have the added complexity of managing apps across IOS, Windows and Android separately. With AEM it is much easier to manage mobile apps. From a content manager perspective, only one content base needs to be managed, while from a developer perspective, only one code base needs to be developed and maintained.

Reason #5: intuitive authoring experience

Adobe’s number one focus was on user experience when designing the ‘Touch User Interface’ feature. ‘Touch User Interface’ is intuitive, and it works seamlessly across all devices for authoring. Next to inline editing, editors can create content fragments and use them across multiple sites, landing pages, social channels and so on. At DEPT®, we can make sure that the author experience for custom built components is just as refined as the out-of-the-box components, ensuring a consistent user experience. We even created a component library with components we used to create for every project, ensuring an intuitive user experience. If you are interested in a demo, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Reason #6: create and manage online community experiences

If you want to buy a new car, rent a hotel room and even if you are looking for a new CMS you probably it’s likely that you look for reviews and recommendations to support your case. Therefore, as a business, a supportive online community for your brand is extremely valuable. Adobe communities helps to create online community experiences, such as forums, user groups, social sharing options which makes it easy for community members review and recommend, all without losing brand identity. Together with Analytics you can then optimise the content to drive engagement.

Reason #7: advanced workflow management

#7 is a very practical reason why big brands love Adobe Experience Manager. Usually there are many individuals involved in web content management, especially in larger organisations. Most likely, management want to be able to give various users different roles and responsibilities. In this case you need a ‘Workflow’. AEM allows ease the management of workflows. Users can choose to set up workflows for all sites, for one site or just for a part of a site. For example, you can give every employee access to a blog module, but only a select few senior employees should be allowed to review and publish.

Reason #8: suite approach

Adobe is a “One Stop Shop” for marketers. They offer all kinds of tools to create rich content with the Creative Cloud. The Creative Cloud (i.e. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign) integrates seamlessly with content management platform, Adobe Experience manager. AEM is part of the Experience Cloud with Analytics, Target, Campaign and many more. Because Adobe basically offers marketers all tooling needed to be effective, users don’t have to make custom integrations with third party software, nor do they need multiple accounts or have to manually transfer files or data from one system to another.

Speak to our AEM experts

Want to see how it works? Schedule an AEM demo with DEPT®. At DEPT®, we are AEM experts and we love to share our AEM insights with those who want to listen. We can show you all functionalities AEM has to offer and we will answer any queries you may have.