Adobe Deepens Ties With Microsoft and LinkedIn to Enhance Account-Based Experiences

Adobe announced at Adobe Summit 2019 that it is deepening its partnership with Microsoft, leveraging LinkedIn as a data source within Adobe Experience Cloud to provide insights and recommend account actions for B2B sales use cases.

Adobe and Microsoft have maintained a longstanding partnership in the customer experience management space, with the former supplying best-in-class marketing capabilities to augment the latter’s CRM offering (Dynamics 365). Following Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn, it was only a matter of time before LinkedIn integration factored into the partnership. Included in the announcement:

• Real-time data from Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales and LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences can now be integrated into Marketo Engage (a recent Adobe acquisition for B2B marketing automation) to provide a richer view of contacts and influencers within an account.
• Adobe Audience Manager (Adobe’s data management platform) will now be able to incorporate data from LinkedIn to drive contact-based campaigns and inform targeted media buys.
• Marketo Account Profiling’s capability will be able to make use of richer contact profiles to better support predictive modeling and recommend account-based actions.

Ingesting social data to augment customer profiles in CRM is nothing new, but Info-Tech predicts that bringing this capability into a best-in-class marketing management suite like Adobe Experience Cloud will enhance the value proposition of the solution for B2B marketers. This announcement also represents the further evolution of the partnership between Microsoft and Adobe, and signals that Microsoft is continuing to explore new ways to leverage its LinkedIn acquisition to its fullest potential.

Our Take

• Adobe is a top-tier player for marketing enablement; Microsoft is well known for Dynamics 365 on the CRM side.
• The two firms are strengthening their partnership by building LinkedIn integration into Marketo Engage (a recent Adobe acquisition).
• Augmenting account and contact profiles with social data is a savvy move that enhances the value proposition for B2B marketers.

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