Oracle announced two new series of initiatives for B2B and B2C users of its marketing cloud at Oracle Modern Marketing Experience in Las Vegas today. John Stetic, Group Vice President for Products, spoke to me about the enhancements, saying “We continue to drive to be the enterprise platform of choice for marketers.” He told me Oracle was continuing to add to its marketing suite portfolio, “both through our own work and through acquisitions.”
Advancing ABM
Among the B2B changes is support for Accounts Based Marketing (ABM), both a currently popular buzz phrase and also, as Stetic said, “a growing trend in the market today.” In the B2B sector, he explained, “it’s not a single person but a group of people who do the buying.” Drawing on Oracle Data Cloud’s records on around one million US companies, and its 60 million anonymized business profiles, the Marketing Cloud will offer one of the industry’s largest sets of curated, accounts based audience data, including online and offline transaction and other behavioral data.
Leveraging the open platform approach, an integration between San Francisco-based targeting and personalization marketing platform Demandbase and Oracle’s Eloqua also advances the ABM approach by automating the recovery of corporate data to lead records when forms are completed.
Users will be now be able to build accounts based audiences in Marketing Cloud, Stetic told me–example: north east-based executives at Amex or CitiGroup. This can be done using the curated data assets, or by building custom audiences. Oracle is also offering a new version of Eloqua Program Builder for creating automated marketing programs.
The B2C Experience
“On the consumer side, it’s really about helping marketers do more with data,” said Stetic. One tactic will be increasing the scope for free-form key word searching while building audiences. Connecting the AddThis audience discovery solution with existing Blue Kai capabilities will allow users to refine audiences by conducting free-form key word searches to identify behavioral attributes. As Stetic told me, “You just type in the words–yoga, healthy eating…” to mine insights from the browsing activities of some two billion unique users of 15 million websites.
Adding Datalogix targeting capabilities to the mix allows modeling of lookalike audiences based on these segments–small and accurate, Stetic said, or less accurate in order to increase reach.
Another acquisition, the Maxymiser testing and optimization solution, will aid marketers to orchestrate web experiences even for first-time visitors through integration with the deep Blue Kai data pool. Integration between Maxymser and Responsys, Oracle’s cross-channel marketing tool, is aimed at distributing the optimized messaging in a consistent way across web, push messaging, in-app messaging and display experiences.
The push, Stetic said, is to continue bringing online commerce and customer service together to create “a great customer experience. We’re really the only vendor which has a full suite of cloud offerings (to do this).”
