Lenovo optimises social media marketing with Adobe Cloud

Lenovo Australia has claimed its adoption of Adobe’s Marketing Cloud has helped it exceed search engine marketing targets by more than 30 per cent in its first three months.

The PC manufacturer’s local division partnered with Adobe-owned digital marketing consultancy, Adobe Digital (formerly Downstream Marketing), and deployed Adobe’s Media Optimiser for Search, Display and Social, as well as Site Catalyst to better manage, monitor and optimise its social content and online ad spend.

According to the company, search engine marketing represents 50 per cent of its digital marketing budget and tripled in size in the first three months following the technology deployment. In addition, Lenovo claims that within the first 60 days of the engagement, search engine marketing revenue grew by 175 per cent, while conversions were up 53 per cent.

The cost per click was also down 36 per cent year-on-year.

Lenovo Australia senior manager for Web eCommerce, Christopher Jowsey, said the combination of technologies provided an integrated management system that enabled insight, control and automation for cross-channel campaign management. This allows Lenovo to capture data instantly, analyse ad performance and automatically adjust ad spend and campaign strategies based on what’s delivering the best returns.

“Adobe Digital saw the opportunity to exceed our targets by more than 30 per cent in the initial three months of our relationship and delivered,” Jowsey said.

In one of their first joint activities, Lenovo and Adobe Digital worked on expanding Lenovo’s keyword range up to 50,000 keywords, using automated bidding technology to prioritise investment across these.

“Within six weeks we were seeing an ROI of 20:1 due to the intelligence in the Adobe Media Optimiser for Search bidding algorithm,” Jowsey said.

Lenovo is looking to increase its use of social marketing to further build its brand digitally with a particular focus on its fast-growing ecommerce business, Jowsey told CMO. With the appropriate measurement tools in place, social media is proving its worth as an area of marketing investment and will see the company shift spend away from traditional display advertising. Last year, the PC manufacturer spent 10 per cent of its marketing budget on social spend and 50 per cent on search and ran four social media campaigns locally.

“Having this technology changed our thinking about social – with our ecommerce sites for example, we couldn’t previously see a direct correlation with social media and the value in direct sales was hard to see,” Jowsey explained. “We can now identify the value of social in the purchase process, which we can compare to the performance of campaigns using display advertising.

“We can also see the performance benefits of Facebook, with the result that we’ll be shifting spend from traditional online display advertising to this channel.”

Attribution of the sale to the right media channel is a further area of focus both in terms of social and display.

“We have a number of different digital partners, and the difficulty has been that everyone uses different trending models and tools to determine where the sales are coming from,” Jowsey said. “We now have the majority of our media spend going through the Optimiser offering, which allows us to compare apples to apples.

“It gives us other data points to look at and also gets these different channels onto a level playing field in terms of measurement.”

Adobe Australia MD, Paul Robson, said it was increasingly important for marketers to quantify the impact of social media strategies and justify ad spends.

“Adobe is pleased to be working with Lenovo Australia to help develop the right tools for its social media and marketing team,” he said.

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