How Adobe Does Marketing

In this clip, we're going to talk about how Adobe does marketing. But before we do, before we do, don't forget to hit the subscribe. And if you're on YouTube, hit the bell button because, well, if you enjoy clips on growing, this is it for you. This is it. So Adobe, this is a multi-billion dollar corporation or a publicly traded corporation. So we're doing these teardown videos. Let us know in the comments what you think about these teardown videos. If you want us to see more, what companies you'd like us to do for you. So let's take a look at my screen over here. So with Adobe, You can see this is their website. It's very well designed and you scroll down here and, um, it's very, it's, it's very minimalistic too. So basically I'm looking at one of their pricing pages right now, but if we go to the homepage over here, you can see it's very simple, right? Dream it, make it with Creative Cloud. You know, basically you can buy it students or individual plans. So back in the day, I remember when I was in elementary school, Adobe used to, I was like, I need to have Adobe Photoshop. And I think that was a couple hundred dollars. I was like, man, I like, I didn't need it at the time, but I just really wanted to buy it because it looked, it looked, They always had like really nice, um, you know, ads inside of the computer magazines and I was like, I really need to have it. Right? So the one thing they've always been good at is design. So we're talking about general marketing right now and we'll score this on a scale of 0 through 20. And so when I look at design, I think they do a really good job. And the other thing too is the, when I think about, um, all the other things that they're doing, if you look in the footer right here, um, when it comes to general marketing, there's a couple of things. You can see on their blog and community, they own a magazine, they own cmo.com, they own 99U, um, and they also own Behance, which is a portfolio website. So they own a lot of these different properties and that's a part of their strategy where it's like, let's just go out there and let's acquire things. So they bought, um, Adobe, they bought EchoSign back in the day and I believe it's called eSignatures now. Um, I think that's what it's called. But, um, you know, that guy Jason Lemkin, he, he now is, you know, one of the, kind of prominent thought leaders in the world of software as a service. So SaaS in general, the acquisition play that has worked out really well for them. And the other thing too is Adobe used to sell something, software where it's out of the box and it's, you pay a couple hundred dollars for it. Now what you do is you pay a software as a service fee. So what do I mean by that? When I click on students over here, you can see if I wanted to get on a student plan, uh, or if I wanted to buy any plan at all, you can see I can pay $20 a month or I can pay $10 a month. And that's basically how it works. So they've switched completely from that old software model into software as a service, which is big for a large business, big decision to make. Their design is really good too. And the way they approach buying other properties, um, rather than try— rather than trying to build everything. And they understand that the power of having, uh, you know, media, it kind of goes into content as well and around SEO that just makes their domain authority so much stronger. And then they have all these different business units. That make the machine so much bigger and more effective. So, think about how they do general marketing. They also have conferences. Again, it's very clean, it's not overwhelming. They have a lot of products, but they don't try to throw everything in your face. So, I think that's very powerful. Now, the next thing I wanna bring your attention to, so, in general, I think I'd probably score them like an 18 out of 20 on general marketing, and then I'll take a look at, let's take a look at the SEO side of things. So, this is adobe.com, we're using Ahrefs over here, and their Ahrefs rank is actually number 13. So, they're the 13th largest website Um, in the world. And they have, look at this one, they have 2 million referring domains, meaning 2 million unique kind of backlinks, and they rank for 10 million organic keywords and the traffic value is $47 million. So if you're buying this traffic on Google, you'd be paying $47 million a month to have the level of traffic that they have. So these are a couple of things that I look at now from an organic health perspective. What I also like to look at is how are they trending over time? So you can see this traffic graph over here in blue. Um, it's basically, it's basically flat. It looks like it's trending. Um, yeah, we'll call it flat. And then you can see here on organic keywords, the number of organic keywords they rank for, basically flat. And this year, you know, especially this year, Google's had a lot of algorithm updates. Um, so they, they more or less kind of held where they're at. And when you're a site that's as big as they are, you're not really expecting to go much further out. You're not, you're not going to grow much more. Um, the traffic value has gone down a little bit, but I wouldn't be too worried just based on their size, right? So what I would do here, is take a look at their top pages too. I want to see what they're doing from an SEO perspective from their top pages. So top pages here using this, I can see what they're ranking for, right? So a lot of the things they rank for are brand related. So that's another thing when it comes to SEO. If you can build more brand queries, you are going to be more powerful because Eric Schmidt has said this in the past. We talk a lot about this on the Marketing School Podcast. Um, basically the internet is a cesspool of a lot of different, a lot of junk, right? So it's the brands that are going to arise or rise to the top. At the end of the day because the brands are playing a long-term game. So Adobe, they've been in the game for a long time, so branding has helped them. And a lot of people that link to Adobe, you know, what happens there is, you know, people are mentioning Adobe all the time. Google sees all the signals. Um, it's easier to make that decision. Plus they're getting all the links, right? People link to Adobe Photoshop, they link to, um, you know, all these different Adobe tools. Um, so that's another lesson when it comes to SEO. If you can have amazing products, people are going to link to them at the end of the day. So from an SEO perspective, They're very strong also because they own the other property, cmo.com. So let's take a look at cmo.com over here because from, from my understanding, I don't think CMO was built by them. I think they acquired it. So check this out. So cmo.com, 84 domain rating, but who do they want checking out cmo.com? They want chief marketing officers checking out. So from a content and an SEO play, it makes a lot of sense. And they own behance.net and check it out. They rank for 3.8 million keywords. So their SEO strategy is very strong. It's because they decided let's not try to build everything. Let's just try to, try to use the assets that we have and let's try to buy whatever we can buy. Okay. So from an SEO perspective, I mean, I would probably rate them like an 18 or 19 out of 20. You can probably make the case that it could be a 20 just cause look, Behance, the Ahrefs rank is 107. So it's the top 100, uh, websites in the world. Okay. So, you know, we talk about SEO a little bit and then we talk about content too. If we look at Behance, this is a lot of content over here. Content's getting, you know, they're creating a lot of new content all the time. A lot of it's user generated. So that is a machine. CMO.com, they've got a lot of great content. They're targeting the right people. Um, and they've got their conferences too. That's, that's another form of content. So when I look at it, when I look at their SEO traffic, those two kind of go hand in hand, content and SEO. So I would rate their content probably like an 18 or probably a 20 out of 20, I'd say. Um, just because it's so, the properties that they own are just like, wow, you know, everyone would be drooling over it. It's like usually you'll see a company, buy maybe one or two properties. But the fact that they have the Adobe IO 99U, they have cmo.com, they have other sites, Create Magazine, and then the blog over here is actually really good. This is the Adobe blog and they're teaching you how to do amazing things with, um, with After Effects and it's actually really well done. So people want to come here for, for, for tips. Um, and the design community is actually very rabid. I used to work in that community where it's design and developers. They love this stuff. They eat it up. They're always sharing stuff or collaborating with each other. So content, I think, A+ for them, done really well. From a conversion perspective, just looking at the homepage, they could be adding a chat feature, which is basically using something like Intercom, where Intercom can basically qualify leads for you, because they get a lot of traffic coming to their site. They're one of the top sites on the internet. And so having that in there will help in terms of generating more leads and segmenting them into the right buckets, because, you know, a tool like that can basically say, okay, you know, if you are a certain company size, then you should talk to a sales rep. If not, you should kind of do self-service. So I think that would be helpful. Probably not the best user experience, but ultimately if we're looking to drive more conversions, that's helpful. I think having the exit popup would be helpful as well in terms of driving more email signups, and then they can kind of sell on the backend and then have an email funnel that converts. I think overall though, it's a very simple type of design. Now when I click on start free trial, I think it's great. It gets to the point on the homepage and it's like, hey, start your free 7-day trial. And I like how they segmented it by, you know, individuals, business, students, and teachers. And if we go by business, you know, then there's, they have like a bunch of different pricing plans as well. And so I think that's easy, like it's easy to understand. And then also they have a bunch of free trials for all the different products that they have. It looks like they do have chat on like other, other pages when you land on the pricing page. But look at the homepage too, like just asking a simple question, how can you help? The way their chat is set up, it looks a little confusing, whereas, you know, other ones you can just kind of type in directly. And I think when you go to their blog, Let's see how they do in terms of driving more conversions, micro conversions or free trials. Let's take a look at this blog post over here. And I do like it how it's— they have a very specific product that is tied to that specific blog post, right? So, you know, they can either hit a link or they can hit this call to action at the bottom. So I think that's great because they're trying to focus in everything that they're doing, like everything that they're doing seems to be targeted and seems to be thought through. So overall, I would give them on the conversion side, I would give them an 18 out of 20 just because they know what they're doing when it comes to design. I mean, they're Adobe and they know how to, they know how to intentionally design for conversions. I just think, you know, from a typical marketing perspective around the chat and the popups, they could utilize those. The last thing I want to look at here is how they're doing paid media. So that could be advertising, for example. So Right here we are using Adbeat and, uh, we are looking at Adobe. So what Adbeat does is it gives you a rough idea of how much money they're spending over time. What I would look at here is the trends. So trends over time, you can see the graph over here. It's, it's been pretty consistent in terms of how they spend. In April they ended up ramping up their spend by quite a bit, but I have a good idea of, you know, how they're spending their money. So, you know, 9% of their spend goes into video, uh, 42% is direct, 49% is programmatic. And now you have a good sense of how they do things. Okay. As we scroll down here, we can see, you know, where, where they're spending their money the most. Um, in let's say like Los Angeles, for example, New York, Fort Worth. Um, now we come down here and then we can look at the top ads that they have so we can see what percentage of our ads are whatever dimension. Um, and in general, I mean, again, like they're known well for their design. We can see how they're doing. The good thing about them is you can see the graph over here on the right side. Is this 300 by 600 ad. They ran it for a period of time and then they shut it off. Okay? Same thing with, uh, basically ads number 1 through 3, they shut it off. Okay? So now let's look at, uh, number 5 over here. This one over here, this purple one, guess what? You can see the ad, the spend slowly ramps up and it holds over there over time. That tells us that even though they're a huge company, the attention to detail is really good. They're constantly testing things. They're making sure that they're on top of, well, If the ad's trending in the wrong direction, they're not gonna spend on it anymore, okay? And then we come back over here, we can also see where their ad spend is going by dimension. We can see the newest campaigns that they're running. So they're constantly testing new things, they're shutting off things that don't work, and they're testing on a lot of different channels too. They're doing programmatic, sure, and then they're spending a lot of money on, let's say they're doing money on direct as well. They're spending a lot on Google, they're spending a lot on, a good amount on YouTube, they're spending on Amazon as well. They're very well-rounded across the board. So without being able to see every single campaign that they're running, I mean, sure, we can use Facebook ad library, but you know, just by looking at this, you can tell that they're pretty well-rounded when it comes to the advertising side of things. So 18 out of 20 when it comes to paid media, they're basically an A across the board. And basically we have a total, what is that, like a 92? So 92 out of 100 is what I rate Adobe in terms of how they do marketing. So if you enjoyed clips like this, Let us know what you think. Do you want us to do more like this? Don't forget to check out the next video, and, and don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.