Why Adobe & Marketo are a perfect match
I’m sure most of you reading this would have seen the news today regarding the Adobe acquisition of Marketo. I’m sure also that you have started thinking about how a Marketo functionality base driven by an Adobe UI could possibly be the best thing to happen to marketing since Larry and Sergey said ‘Let’s build a search engine’.
So, what could this mean for how Marketo is used? How much Adobe-ness will we see integrated into Marketo? This is something that I’m sure will be revealed in due course, but here are some thoughts on how I think Adobe’s toolset could improve Marketo:
Dreamweaver:
In my opinion Adobe pretty much perfected the ‘What you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) web code editor in Dreamweaver. I’m sure a lot of people working on Marketo landing page and/or email HTML coding work in Dreamweaver anyway, before copying code over to Marketo to create their pages. The Dreamweaver coding engine would be an amazing upgrade for Marketo as the built-in page builder is clunky at the best of times.
If the Marketo page builder gets any of the Dreamweaver genetics, this would allow Marketers to work on an industry leading coding platform to create HTML assets in Marketo, which would be a great step forward.
Photoshop:
Photoshop integration could lead to real time image editing within Marketo, with the ability to see results within your campaign assets straight away.
The potential of this for Marketers is huge. This will help design teams and campaign owners agree on how things should look much more effectively. More often than not design files are sent to the design team for editing with little to no reference to the end product, much more a discussion on changes limited to that file alone.
If Photoshop’s functionality was integrated into Marketo, this would allow both teams to see the end product and might trigger additional ideas from the design side if they can see in real time where their handywork is going to end up.
Illustrator:
For the creation of non-HTML assets such as eBooks and Whitepapers, Adobe also created the perfect tool in Illustrator (They seem to do this a lot luckily for us). If just some of Illustrator’s functionality were to be brought into Marketo, this is also something that could greatly improve campaign execution speed and also the design freedom available to Marketo users. Imaging being able to create and code Whitepapers within Marketo, while being able to combine smart Marketo features like dynamic content and progressive user profiling to bring these assets to life.
In summary, we should all be excited by the potential of Adobe and Marketo working together to create a truly best in class marketing automation platform and these are just some of the things that I think we might see in the years ahead.