The Smartling team recently attended the Adobe Summit in North America as a Silver Sponsor. While we were there (along with many other partners and solutions providers) to increase our Adobe expertise and meet with our clients and prospects, we were excited to see what’s new with other fellow members of the Adobe Partner Program.
As the year progresses, creating a unique and inspiring customer experience has emerged as an important, if not the most important, area of focus for B2B and B2C companies alike. Smartling enables our customers to provide those types of experiences by providing the tools to translate their content and products.
Below are some companies who are helping global brands to create amazing experiences for their customers in ways we found to be forward thinking and inspiring. A few in the list are already our partners, and the rest – well, we’d love to partner with them in the future (wink, wink).
Hero Digital
We think the fact that Adobe dedicated an entire day to the theme “Make Experience Your Business” means that “customer experience” is not some short-lived buzzword. But unless you started your business in the past year, that means some pretty difficult changes.
This is where vendors like Hero Digital thrive. Hero Digital focuses on experience. They’ve built the company to look at making a purchase from the perspective of the customer journey, from first click to post-purchase support. This includes selecting the right strategies, technologies and content types – something that we’re sure every B2B marketing team is challenged with today.
As channels and choices increase exponentially, experience will be what keeps customers loyal and engaged, and Hero Digital’s mission is to help their clients with exactly that.
Digitas
In line with the themes at Adobe Summit, Digitas calls themselves “The Connected Marketing Agency”, and their goal is to “connect brands with people”. They help their customers engage with people on a human level, instead of as customers or prospects they’re trying to get something out of.
Digitals offers a handful of great solutions. The ones that really stood out to us were their DCO, or Dynamic Content Optimizer, meant to deliver hyper-personalized messages at scale, and Snacktory, a method that takes existing standard marketing assets and uses them to develop a range of “snackable” content pieces such as infographics, GIFs and podcasts. We really love these two solutions because they facilitate personalization and engagement, which are both key themes in 2018.
While we were at Adobe Summit we had the chance to meet with two Digitas team members, and we can definitely say they walk the walk and talk the talk.
Isobar
Who wouldn’t want to check in with the interactive agency behind the “Name a Coke” campaign? Isobar’s three offerings (Digital Marketing, Digital Ecosystems and Digital Products) are all geared towards merging creativity and data to deliver unique and memorable customer experiences.
It’s hard to pick just one thing that stands out in how Isobar approaches their three solution categories, but we find their Digital Ecosystem pretty exciting. Isobar has truly put their customers first by developing a network of partnerships to deliver on expertise and technology. This network supports the creative process and delivers the best customer journey possible, from user and live experiences, to content and design.
The team members we met at Adobe Summit hailed from Japan as well as the US, a clear indication that their partner ecosystem is important to them, and we were thrilled we could meet with them in person.
Microsoft
Surprised Microsoft made the list? We’re not. Over the past four years, the multinational technology company has taken some great strides into the future, including their AppSource store for business users. Launched in 2016, the app store is meant to connect business users with SaaS apps and products. You’ve probably heard about this already but we want to remind you of why it’s important.
The AppSource store is a clear acknowledgement of the current marketing technology landscape, and shows that Microsoft is finally embracing the reality of competition. Giving their customers access to best-in-class external technologies is a significant change.
The AppSource store also plays well with others – the criteria to list your SaaS app is minimal, and the turnaround time for approval is 2-4 days. That definitely makes for a good partner experience.
Yext
In the early 2000’s, when the world became increasingly digital, controlling how your information was listed and distributed was difficult. Yext successfully set out to solve this challenge by creating a way to centrally manage digital information across hundreds of different services. It’s a brilliantly simple concept with complex requirements: in order to centrally manage a company’s digital knowledge, Yext needs to partner with, well, everyone.
They started by building integrations with Google Maps, Yelp, Facebook, etc., and expanded from there. This year, Yext extended their services even further when they launched their App Directory, and later their Preferred Partner Program. We were excited to be included as a partner in the Yext App Directory launch, providing an integration allowing companies to centralize translated content for scalable distribution.
As Yext continues to grow, it’s attention to a strong partner ecosystem highlights that they continue to recognize and anticipate their customers’ needs.
Even though we couldn’t list everyone here, we really admired all of the innovative companies we met and spoke with. We’re proud to be part of such an inspiring community!
