7 Modern Marketing Experience Takeaways

Today’s post comes courtesy of Jon Russo, founder of B2B Fusion, an agency that focuses exclusively on modernizing old demand generation practices to new to drive more revenue for clients like Thomson Reuters, Level(3) Communications, and Blackboard, among others. Jon serves on the Board of Directors for MOCCA, the leading enterprise association for Marketing Operations professionals. Prior to founding B2B Fusion, Jon held global CMO roles for 10 years in private and public technology companies in Silicon Valley, NYC, and Luxembourg.

If you are a B2B enterprise digital sales or marketing leader looking to acquire new customers through a modern marketing approach, you likely attended Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience (#MME15) in Las Vegas last week; 3100 of us soaked in the new partner roadmap, strategic architecture and capabilities for Oracle/Eloqua while we also heard from peers on best practices, capped by the traditional Markies award ceremony.

There seemed to be fewer product specific enhancement announcements to Eloqua versus years past. Oracle has over 15,000 products, including a large B2C set led by Responsys, so it is logical that their focus turns more toward integrating inorganic platforms together to form a marketing cloud strategy.

Here are my lucky Vegas 7 B2B enterprise learnings from #MME15:

1. Ecosystem & Partner Integration rises in importance

Oracle unveiled its marketing architecture, of which data management platform (DMP) is the foundation for B2B marketing. The DMP normalizes data and enables retargeting based on first party online and offline networks as well as third party data networks.

2. Nurturing & Segmentation becomes more strategic, personalized, and predictable

Lookalike Modeling expands the target market and improves conversion, thus making lead nurturing a strategic requirement. BlueKai integration enables more effective retargeting campaigns and segmentation. Longer term, it appears predictive elements could be included leveraging the DMP.

3. Through a single sign on in the CloudApp, partners are more readily included in lead nurturing.

On the campaign canvas, partners could be more readily inserted in the workflow of nurtures than in times past– thus enabling a higher probability of successful conversion with calls to partner data sets.

4. An integration with LinkedIn Prospector (formerly Bizo) was presented as part of the Eloqua integration (see previous write up here).

While John Stetic, Group VP of Product for Oracle Marketing Cloud presented a very compelling demo of the LinkedIn Prospector integration, LinkedIn is moving in the opposite direction of limiting their network to outside parties, so a more careful inspection is needed.

5. Integration with Oracle Service Cloud (OSC) is innovative

An innovative step toward the elusive ‘Customer360’ enterprise executives talk about but never quite reach. If an enterprise has OSC, prior to an email nurture campaign reaching out to a customer or prospect, with the newly built OMC-OSC integration, a process check can be made (assuming system configuration is done properly) to make sure there are no customer service issues with the account that would make nurturing communication inappropriate time wise.

6. Oracle has a Mobile Strategy, B2B enterprises do not (yet)

According to Litmus Technologies, 51% of all email is opened on a mobile device. In a breakout session of approximately 100 people, in a show of hands, not one participant claimed they had a mobile strategy. “Classic” Eloqua has mobile measurement weaknesses here that are somewhat overcome by the new unique key approach of BlueKai/DNP. Oracle is starting to paint a solution, few enterprises seem to be investing time to figuring this out.

7. Account Based Marketing and its measurement is in its infancy despite the hype

The most valuable peer company presentation in my opinion was by Jeff Rummer and the Covidien/Metronic team with their Account Based Journey. In addition, Seagate offered three categories of measurement that are developing at the account level.

This event was deep – for those of us who have historically attended Eloqua, we did have to sift through a number of B2C use case content (Responsys) to get to the valuable B2B nuggets as they related to Eloqua. Without question, though, Oracle seems committed to the platform and market.