Adobe Announces Marketing Cloud Upgrade, Now With iBeacon Integration

Tuesday at the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit in Salt Lake City, Adobe announced a significant update to their Adobe Marketing Cloud suite which now includes support for Apple's iBeacon hardware. Now marketing campaigns can be directed at mobile users, and the rest of Marketing Cloud will be able to create, measure, and optimize that campaign.

One of the other new offerings in Marketing Cloud is PhoneGap Enterprise, a way to utilize PhoneGap to develop iOS or Android apps quickly and easily without learning mobile app development. Those apps can connect to Adobe Mobile Services, which will deliver the iBeacon data. From the announcement:

Adobe Mobile Services 2.0 allows companies to analyze and act on the users’ location near iBeacons including dwell time, entering or exiting an iBeacon area, navigation of mobile users around iBeacons and more. Marketers can also easily deliver local notifications based on the proximity to an iBeacon. In addition, companies are able to tie app interactions to all other app engagement data in Adobe Analytics.

There are other services available as part of Marketing Cloud, one of the most interesting is called Marketing Mix Planning, which tracks *all* the current marketing campaigns, both online and offline. See if the billboard is doing as well as the Facebook ad, or how the tv spot compares to the Google AdWord. Aggregating all that information in one place is much faster than having to assemble spreadsheets from a variety of sources and keep them maintained.

As of this writing there has been no information released on what the pricing for this new set of tools will cost.