Richard Milne, Global Director of eCommerce and Digital Marketing, Life Technologies Corporation

SuperNova Award Category

Digital Marketing Transformation

The Company 

Life Technologies Corporation is a global biotechnology company that is committed to providing the most innovative products and services to leading customers in the fields of scientific research, genetic analysis and applied sciences. With a presence in more than 180 countries, the company's portfolio of 50,000 end-to-end solutions is secured by more than 5,000 patents and licenses that span the entire biological spectrum -- scientific exploration, molecular diagnostics, 21st century forensics, regenerative medicine and agricultural research. Life Technologies has approximately 10,000 employees and had sales of $3.8 billion in 2012.

The Problem

Life Technologies’ digital properties, including www.lifetech.com, are leading resources for customers searching for biotechnology products and information that already serves more than 2 million visitors per month and drove more than $1 billion in ecommerce last year. The site is a revenue channel for the company that is growing six times faster than traditional revenue channels with demand for the company’s online information and services continues to grow – some of the largest increases coming from customers in Asia where it is growing 100 percent year over.  The problem – keep on the successful growth path with a single instance of the global website while localizing and optimizing content for each region.

The Solution

In order to manage and deliver content across it global sites, the Life Technologies team needed to replace its years’ old complex, fragmented technology stack with an integrated digital marketing solution.  In order to replace the legacy systems with an integrated solution, Life Technologies engaged Adobe to perform a Strategic Value Assessment (SVA). As a result, the team now uses the web content management and digital asset management capabilities in Adobe Experience Manager solution; analyze data with Adobe Analytics; create a social strategy through Adobe Analytics, and track their paid search advertisements with Adobe Media Optimizer - all within Adobe Marketing Cloud to deliver www.lifetech.com. 

The Results

Using Adobe Experience Manager, www.lifetech.com is delivered for nine regional markets with localized languages, product content and pricing information, providing customers worldwide with rapid, reliable access to accurate information. The Adobe solution integrates seamlessly with Cloudwords translation services to make translation of content to different languages easy and fast.

Life Technologies has accelerated the posting of new content for www.lifetech.com, supporting a rate of change that would have been previously impossible without adding headcount. Equally important, there are now fewer broken links and fewer misspellings on its websites, improving the customer experience. For instance, the site has 1,000 pages in Chinese and 1,000 pages in Japanese being served out to local markets, helping to drive new revenue for those key businesses.

To better understand where traffic is coming from and how well it is—or isn’t—converting, Life Technologies uses Adobe Analytics within Adobe Marketing Cloud. The company uses the intelligence it gleans from the solution as the basis for all of its marketing efforts, both on- and off-site. Daily and weekly reports alert the team to any early warnings about where conversion is underperforming or could be improved.  These insights are allowing Life Technologies to optimize portions of its site based on differences in user behavior by geographic region. Local teams can access the data and take action without relying on central IT.

Social media is an ever-increasing part of Life Technologies’ business. To tie social media interactions to business results and give regional marketers the ability to engage their local communities, the company uses Adobe Social within Adobe Marketing Cloud, which integrates with Adobe Analytics. At Life Technologies, social media is often used as a blogging environment during regional trade shows and scientific events, which can be leveraged to drive traffic to www.lifetech.com. The company also actively uses Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to acquire talent and promote new products.

To make the most of its paid search advertising budget on Google, Bing, Yahoo Japan, and eventually Baidu, Life Technologies uses Adobe Media Optimizer for Search, also within Adobe Marketing Cloud. The solution provides a consolidated view of how paid search advertising is performing, along with tools to both accurately forecast and continually optimize paid search advertising spend to deliver peak return on investment. Looking ahead, the Life Technologies team will also deploy Adobe Media Optimizer for Display to improve its display advertising investment and better understand its channel attribution.

The Technology

Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Systems, Inc.

Metrics 

•Grew online traffic by 25 percent in one year
•Increased ecommerce orders by 6.1 percent
•Improved search engine optimization results by 44 percent

Disruptive Factor

The launch of www.lifetech.com leveraging the Adobe Marketing Cloud enables Life Technologies to provide a consistent, relevant digital experience to its customers in its existing markets, and its growth markets such as China and Korea.  The reach and relevance is truly global.  No other company can offer the breadth of products along with the digital experience to connect and engage with its customers as effectively as Life Technologies.

Shining Moment

The ‘Shining Moment’ of the project was beginning to realize the promise of interconnectivity – working across an ecosystem that connects the developers and artists on the desktop, the WCM system, the offsite demand generation and the analytics offers something that is more important and rich with potential than I have experienced before in digital marketing. To be able to have the whole team operating in that interconnected way, both now and into the future will radically improve how we can inform and service our customers.

About Life Technologies 

Life Technologies Corporation (NASDAQ: LIFE) is a global biotechnology company that is committed to providing the most innovative products and services to leading customers in the fields of scientific research, genetic analysis and applied sciences. With a presence in more than 180 countries, the company's portfolio of 50,000 end-to-end solutions is secured by more than 5,000 patents and licenses that span the entire biological spectrum—scientific exploration, molecular diagnostics, 21st century forensics, regenerative medicine and agricultural research. Life Technologies has approximately 10,000 employees and had sales of $3.8 billion in 2012.