A post-pandemic paradigm for marketers

This is a syndicated post; view the original here.

It has become a truism that we live in unprecedented times, and in fact we can now see the impact of digital trends, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, in the way companies make buying decisions.

B2B selling has become increasingly virtual, which means marketers must in turn rely on digital technologies to help them do their jobs and to connect with their customers. The number of digital touchpoints has increased, the number of decision-makers has grown, and buyers are choosing to interact with salespeople later and later in the cycle.

This means that marketers need to react more quickly than ever, target prospects more effectively, and even launch ad campaigns seamlessly with as few points of friction as possible.

As I’ve noted in an earlier piece, the current CRM systems simply don’t work in this context. Fortunately, we've built something that does meet our needs as marketers.

We’ve just introduced a new product called Oracle Fusion Marketing that unifies B2B marketing and sales into a single end-to-end business flow. It automates the process from audience segmentation all the way through to generating a conversation-ready opportunity in your CRM, and in doing so, replaces all the disparate applications we used to have to rely upon for a holistic view of the entire process.

How Oracle Fusion Marketing helped drive our success in cloud ERP

I can tell you how effective this product is because we used it internally for an ERP Cloud campaign that has helped us widen our lead in the ERP market. The results have been pretty impressive: We’ve reduced the time from when a prospect fills out a form to when it becomes a real opportunity from days or even weeks to only minutes. Likewise, we’ve been able to get paid campaigns into the market within days, rather than weeks, and we've designed these campaigns to be far more personalized than ever before.

We were able to target ads to both known and unknown contacts within specific accounts through multiple channels with campaigns launching simultaneously. The algorithms in our new system helped us select the target buying groups that were most likely to engage based on predictive intelligence, then helped us select the right content to display in each channel; and generated and scheduled a campaign based on our pre-set budget and timing needs across paid and owned channels.

Once the system generated those activities, such as paid display banners, emails, and paid social ads, it sent prospects to a landing page that dynamically served them content and relevant customer-win stories—again, all automatically.

AI algorithms scored each lead so we didn’t have to wait for the lead to sit in a queue for scoring, and because it’s automated end to end, the opportunity scoring model worked at the account level, taking into consideration all the people within the same company who have engaged with our marketing campaign. This provided much greater accuracy when qualifying opportunities, compared to manual scoring, which looks only at the individual prospect.

Once the system scored a prospect highly enough, it went straight into our CRM system as an opportunity—no haggling involved and no good opportunity wasted.

Uniting marketing and advertising into a single process

Because the system automates and unifies marketing automation and account-based advertising technologies, we could be sure the personalized reference content was used within emails, in ad creative, and on web landing pages, so that our prospect had a consistent and relevant experience across every channel.

These marketing and advertising processes have been engineered to work together, allowing our marketing team at Oracle to overcome organizational silos and reduce the number of missed opportunities and campaign delays.

Our salespeople have come back to us with comments like, “New contacts were uncovered and engaged to help expand my relationship at Account,” and, “The campaign re-engaged existing opportunity that had stalled out and brought us back to the table.”

As a marketer, this kind of feedback is exactly what you want to hear.

This is the new paradigm we need: automation at the task level so that we can focus on strategy and creating great assets, while an AI-driven system ensures the right creative is going to the right audience in a timely fashion. The world of B2B buying is never going back to the way it was before, and neither should B2B marketing.

To learn more about how Oracle Fusion Marketing helps marketing and sales teams work together seamlessly, sell more, and drive revenue, watch the replay of our virtual summit featuring Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison.

To see Oracle Fusion Marketing in action, check out the brief demo below.