Adobe Marketing Cloud unveiled a new product, Adobe Experience Manager Mobile, at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona on Monday.
The new feature allows companies to create, manage and power mobile applications at scale. Aimed particularly at mobile app developers, the new product merges two previous Adobe products, The Digital Publishing Solution and Adobe Experience Manager Apps.
“It’s really the best of two offerings to create a solution for the enterprise to build and develop data-driven apps,” says Bridget Roman, senior product marketing manager at Adobe Experience Manager Mobile. “Companies can create an app in a couple of months instead of the typical 9- to-18-month time frame for native applications, reducing cost and time to market.”
Based on familiar technology, the new Adobe Experience Manager Mobile adds a new, streamlined user interface and management process for mobile applications to the Adobe Marketing Cloud. Businesses can now easily build consumer-facing or company-specific mobile applications without necessarily having pre-existing coding skills.
The mobile application can then be published to both iOS and Android devices, as well as be distributed privately within company ecosystems. Early adopters of the service include athletic retailer Under Armour, Medtronic and Hartford Funds.
Adobe Experience Manager Mobile can be integrated within the Adobe Marketing Cloud network of eight marketing solutions. This allows mobile designers to potentially leverage creative cloud applications like Photoshop and Illustrator in the mobile application design process while marketers could integrate quality mobile applications into their multichannel outreach. Adobe, however, currently only supports its own analytics suite.
In addition, Adobe unveiled a series of new core services for the marketing cloud that include geotargeting and expanded support for mobile push notifications and in-app messaging. The new location-based personalization feature allows marketers to define specific geographic regions to receive special marketing content, such as a discount at a local retail storefront.
Adobe Marketing Cloud users can also now integrate deep linking into their mobile applications to direct consumers to specific destinations such as a shopping cart or checkout page.
Adobe’s suite of new features is not targeted only at building mobile applications, but creating a better management process to continually engage with an app’s audience in order to retain them.
“As customers are reinventing their businesses around mobile, a big challenge is engaging the user after the download,” says Ray Pun, strategic marketing lead, mobile solutions, Adobe Marketing Cloud.
Pun says this is particularly an issue with Enterprise apps for specific companies since they often do not offer the same streamlined experience consumers have come to expect from the mobile applications they use at home.
Adobe was recently named a leader in the 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs, and generated $1.36 billion in revenue from its marketing cloud applications in 2015.