Enroll the Users: A Key to Successful Adoption of Cloud-Based Solutions

Most recognize that rolling out Adobe Marketing Cloud (AMC) requires digital strategy, creative, and technical disciplines. However, many overlook the fact that an Adobe Marketing Cloud rollout requires organizational change management to realize the value and maximize the investment return in Adobe Marketing Cloud.

Enterprises falter when teams make digital strategy, design, and technical decisions in a vacuum without paying attention to how business users. In this case, marketers and authors will need to change their behavior and mindset when adopting Adobe Marketing Cloud.

With business user adoption being key to success, one of the best ways an enterprise can promote adoption when implementing Adobe Marketing Cloud is to enroll business users early and often in the process.

Enrolling business users early and often promotes success in a few ways:

• Doing so aligns the overall vision for AMC with the eventual practical application of the platform tools, increasing confidence that an enterprise is building in the right direction.
• Enrolling users helps prioritize and refine the requirements that add business value, often increasing the usability of the platform by marketing and speeding time to value realization.
• And at last, enrolling business users early and often provides an opportunity to show the progress that builds excitement for AMC. If business users eagerly anticipate the platform rollout versus dread another IT application being dropped in their laps, an enterprise will reduce adoption friction.

In the enterprise implementation and rollout of an Adobe Marketing Cloud solution, there are few critical activities in which to get business users involved in the process.

Tips to Get Business Users Involved in the Process:

Involve A Broad Set of Business Users in Kickoff and Visioning

At the onset of a project, during the discovery period, have a broad set of users across the enterprise participate (actively) in the project kickoff and visioning sessions.

Give users a sense of the overall project timeline, and show them when and where they will be involved throughout the process. Doing so promotes ownership of the overall platform project, which plants the seeds for ready adoption of AMC and for the enterprise initiative to flourish.

If the sheer number of stakeholders makes it impractical to enroll all of them in these early activities, then select at least one user from each stakeholder group. The preference would be to choose the person most likely to champion the AMC platform and its potential among colleagues.

Get Input During Business Process Discussions

Realizing the full potential of Adobe Marketing Cloud means realizing that the platform has powerful capabilities to support and streamline business and marketing processes.

When discovery activities focus on marketing processes, such as those related to content workflows and approvals, campaign orchestration, lead flows, and analytics reporting, pull business users from the front lines to provide a practical perspective on the opportunities for improving and automating the process.

It is important to not be overconfident in top-down decisions during these discussions. Aim to understand how a user will use the suite of tools day in and day out to achieve marketing results.

Get Business Users Excited with the Design

Most AMC enterprise implementations also involve the rollout of a new front-end user experience. While the group making decisions during the design process is recommended to be more compact, enrolling business users on occasion to have a peek at emerging wireframe and UI designs will continue to build excitement for the platform. Excitement helps adoption, as users get pumped to dive headfirst into Adobe Marketing Cloud.

Again, if it’s not practical to show the designs to all users, then at least show them to a user from each stakeholder group who will carry a positive message about designs back to their team.

Have Business Users Attend Sprint Demos

When a project moves into development, the enterprise should guard against the perception that the project has entered a black hole and will emerge several months later. Instead, involve business users periodically so that they can see and recognize the progress over time.

When working in an agile methodology, which is highly recommended when implementing Adobe Marketing Cloud, get business users involved in sprint demos. Doing so puts their eyes on progress, and with each demo the excitement for the platform builds.

Through demos, not only do users get to see progress in the development of the new experience that will roll out to end users, but also, and possibly more importantly, they see the backend interface taking shape. They see tools coming to fruition that will soon be in their hands, and they can envision how they will be using those tools on a daily basis to move marketing programs forward.

Ensure Proper Training Ahead of Launch

Don’t skimp on training ahead of launch, and don’t hesitate to reinforce training post-launch.

No matter the excitement among business users, if they are not capable of using the tools, then the excitement will quickly wane once the platform rolls out.

Build training into your overall implementation and rollout plan, and ensure that business users set aside the time for training. Without it, you will deploy a powerful Adobe Marketing Cloud platform to users incapable of realizing its full potential.

In summary, getting business users involved early and often in the process will build buy-in for a rollout of Adobe Marketing Cloud. When the platform launches, business users will be more likely to adopt the platform, and the enterprise will more quickly realize the value of the investment in Adobe Marketing Cloud.