Oracle Unveils Enhancements to its Marketing Cloud

Oracle made several additions to its Marketing Cloud this week, including integrations and enhancements designed to improve account-based marketing for B2B marketers and data-driven marketing for B2C companies.

John Stetic, group vice president of products at Oracle Marketing Cloud, said in a statement that B2B marketers would profit from increased simplicity:

"Account-based marketing can be powerful, but it has always been unnecessarily complex for B2B marketers. With the latest enhancements to the Oracle Marketing Cloud, customers will benefit from a simpler and more innovative approach to account-based marketing through new integrations, data services, and expanded capabilities."

To that end, Oracle has made its Data Cloud accessible to users of its Marketing Cloud. Oracle's Data Cloud houses data from more than 1 million U.S. companies, as well as from more than 60 million anonymous business profiles. The integration enables marketers to tap into online and offline behavioral cues, which include account details and past purchases.

"When you're thinking of doing B2B-oriented advertising, it's very helpful to have this extra rich set of data having to do with companies and accounts," explains Steve Krause, group vice president of product management at Oracle Marketing Cloud. If a marketer has captured a lead from a certain company and wishes to launch an ad campaign with other decision makers in the company, additional data allows them to reach them with more personalized content.

Drawing on partnerships with Demandbase and other Marketing AppCloud partners, Oracle has also introduced tools to further personalize the communications within each of a marketer's accounts. Marketers can now enrich data associated with new and existing leads without requiring that leads provide additional information, Krause says. For instance, when prospects sign up for a company webinar or download a white paper, they will often provide their name and email but omit many other details about their company and industry. The technology can work to fill in these gaps and connect marketers with other leads in a company.

In the B2C realm, Oracle has integrated Maxymiser and Responsys to make them work "better together," Krause says. One goal of the integration is to ensure that the messages companies deliver on their Web sites align with the ones they send via email, SMS, MMS, and other channels.

"If you're a (B2C) marketer and you're doing an email campaign, now you can synchronize what's going on on the Web site with what you're doing through mobile messaging," Krause says. "That's one of the big nirvana points for marketers. They want to be able to have consistent and coordinated messaging across channels."

Maxymiser now also integrates with Oracle's Data Management Platform, enabling users to access first-, second-, and third-party data to audience testing and optimization initiatives.

"[Our] whole theory is that modern marketing should be data-driven—meaning you should test and not guess," Krause says. "You shouldn't just throw a home page out there and say, 'This must be the best we can do.' You should test any reasonable element of that page that can be more or less compelling depending on who the audience is."

To help marketers further hone audience data and enable more consistent messaging, Oracle has activated integrations between the Data Cloud and the Marketing Cloud’s Data Management Platform. This integration gives marketers the ability to model online audiences based on offline data, including in-store transactions.

With access to the Add This Audience Discovery tool, marketers can get a better idea of how to target their audiences with relevant paid media campaigns. The data-driven solution uses natural language processing to analyze keywords from billions of Web pages, and converts those keywords into data based on the online activity of 2 billion unique users across more than 15 million Web sites.

Krause says that this tool enables marketing to customers who may be visiting a site for the first time, as it can determine their interest in a specific product without their having had an ongoing relationship with the company.

"If you're starting with no data, that's a problem, so this allows you to get around that by essentially jump-starting the data that you normally wouldn't have by going to the data management platform," Krause says.