February 20, 2025
Discover the unique features, use cases, and future potential of Adobe's marketing automation tools — Marketo, AJO, and Campaign — to enhance your martech strategy.
Shannon Kelly
With multiple Adobe marketing automation tools on the market, and continual releases coming to each, it can be hard to keep up with new capabilities and plan your future martech stack roadmap. Especially in the race to offer personalization across all channels, marketing leaders are asking themselves what their automation tooling needs are in the short and long run.
In this article, we share the insights our Adobe experts have learned both at Adobe partner events and also from implementing and optimizing tools within the context of broader tech stack and business objectives.
Read on for MERGE’s analysis of the unique capabilities and use cases for Adobe’s marketing automation tools, chiefly Marketo Engage and Journey Optimizer.
Past vs. Present for Adobe Marketing Automation Products
Adobe has been making significant strides in the marketing automation space, reshaping how businesses connect with their audiences through smarter, more personalized tools. By building on its established platforms and introducing new innovations, Adobe is creating solutions that address the evolving needs of both B2B and B2C marketers. Drawing on our experience with two of Adobe’s key marketing automation platforms—Marketo and Adobe Journey Optimizer (both AJO and AJO B2B)—as well as early access to partner previews, we can provide a deeper understanding of this progression.
In this article, we demystify the logic behind Adobe's software evolution, the ideal use cases for each product, and what we see as the future of Adobe Experience Cloud. From the foundational features of Marketo, trusted for lead management and nurturing, to the real-time orchestration capabilities of AJO and the broader possibilities of Adobe Experience Cloud, this is a closer look at how Adobe continues to evolve and refine its approach to marketing automation.
What is the Adobe Experience Platform?
The Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) provides a data foundation that can be leveraged within platforms to deliver content, track, and report on interactions. It’s architecture enables:
Adobe can continuously develop and improve the platform, making updates available to native applications seamlessly. For example, as AI and machine learning have become more prominent, Adobe has developed AI decisioning to identify the optimal pathway for customer journeys, AI learning tools for native platforms, AI content suggestions for customer communications, and AI evaluation of buying group membership (to determine relevant buyers).
What is Adobe Journey Optimizer?
Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO), initially introduced in June 2021 and designed for B2C organizations, leverages AEP to deliver personalized, real-time customer journeys at scale.
With AJO, marketers can manage one-to-one personalized journeys and schedule campaigns for millions of customers from one single application. AJO also includes decisioning capabilities for next-best offer, next-best-action, and more. Customer experiences can be optimized across channels, including email, SMS, in-app notifications, push notifications, direct mail, code-based experiences, and more.
Customer Journeys in Marketo vs AJO
As we know, Marketo can also deliver personalized omnichannel experiences at scale. Marketo’s direct integration with CRM systems enables seamless collaboration between marketing and sales teams by providing tools such as lead scoring, lifecycle management, and automated nurture campaigns.
In contrast, the new capabilities of AJO allow for personalized interactions across devices and channels. AJO can leverage segmentations via Adobe’s AEP Edge Network, allowing faster data processing by minimizing the distance data travels to be processed. This enables instant offer decisioning and reactions within AJO.
For example, updated messaging as a user navigates from one web page to the next. Other common use cases may include:
AJO’s powerful decision engine can catalog, rank, and deliver offers based on personal attributes, such as rewarding loyalty members with exclusive discounts or presenting location-based offers when a user enters a specific area, driving highly tailored and timely customer engagements.
What does this mean from the customer’s point of view? The customer can experience a rich, relevant, and real-time experience tailored to them. It also includes seamless transitions across channels, like continuing a transaction started on their phone to a desktop without interruption, creating a smooth and engaging experience.
For example, when a potential customer adds an item to their cart and creates an account, AEP connects all known identities, consolidating membership details with previously collected data. This unified view enables brands to recognize the customer instantly, tailoring interactions with personalized offers or reminders to complete their purchase, creating a seamless and engaging experience.
To summarize, AJO's benefits include:
What is AJO B2B Edition?
In late 2024, Adobe launched AJO B2B Edition, empowering organizations to engage buying groups within target accounts through personalized, AI-fueled content that drives demand for specific offerings. This solution orchestrates buying group journeys while seamlessly aligning marketing and sales efforts, enabling businesses to enhance pipeline generation and deliver more impactful customer engagements.
For large enterprises that require real-time omnichannel marketing, implementing AJO B2B along with Marketo unlocks a new level of tracking multi-product or multi-department buying groups.
AJO B2B delivers shared insights to both marketing and sales, and features new enablement tools for sales intelligence. AI capabilities assist in identifying Buying Group membership, while allowing and prioritizing direct input from the Sales team.
The intention is to solve for the most complex business use cases in marketing automation, by delivering new capabilities built on a central AEP data model. To take full advantage of AEP's Buying Group capabilities, organizations can consolidate data from multiple systems via Adobe Real-Time CDP.
A B2B Enterprise Use Case
By implementing AJO B2B alongside Marketo, one MERGE enterprise B2B client is able to:
Ultimately, this facilitates targeted interactions with prospects and clients who may have been members of multiple buyer groups and different customer journeys. This streamlined approach not only simplified data management but also unlocked new levels of efficiency, enabling the client to deliver highly personalized, real-time experiences that drive stronger customer engagement and measurable business results.
Unlock the Power of Personalization
Adobe’s architecture for marketing empowers businesses to orchestrate user journeys and deliver real-time, personalized customer engagements at scale. By leveraging these capabilities, organizations can deliver seamless, impactful experiences that drive customer loyalty and measurable business growth.
Need assistance bringing these capabilities to life? Our Adobe experts can help. Get in touch!
