Just when marketers think they have a handle on the best technology and tactics, the consumer changes the rules … again. At Oracle, we’ve come to realize that the demand waterfall no longer works. Consumers have a higher expectation of personalization, so segmentation based on demographics, psychographics, or behavior is no longer enough. We needed to make a change, but instead of tweaking here and there, the Oracle Global Marketing Technology group, our in-house experts on implementing Oracle Marketing cloud applications, decided to rethink our martech stack from the ground up. And power it all with Oracle Cloud.
This wasn’t a revolutionary idea; we’d already done this with other lines of business through a program we call Oracle@Oracle. The program supports the internal use of our technology and helps us learn how to make products better and prove value. And it’s paid off. So, what martech stack could we build with our cloud tools? And how would we do marketing differently so that we could give our customers a truly unique experience?
“It was time for us to take a fresh look at the problem and think about unimagined opportunities,” said Bence Gazdag, vice president of Global Marketing Technology at Oracle, during his presentation at the Forrester B2B Summit.
Our demand generation machine wasn’t working as well as we thought it could. We had legacy on-premises systems that made creating an orchestrated, seamless customer experience impossible. And we had massive data scattered across more than 50 internal and external data sources.
“Our marketing organization has more than 2000 marketers working with a B2B dataset with over 150 million interactions and 1.2 million responses a month,” explained Bence.
Data: the cure and the curse. The data deluge comes from multiple sources in multiple formats: structured and unstructured, demographic data, sales data, intent data, financial data, marketing responses, third-party data, etc. And that’s not all, but you get it.
To be successful, marketing automation technology must connect this data and serve up a single, unified view of the customer.
“When you connect customer data, intelligence, and experiences, you're doing more than improving the delivery of your current experiences; you're enabling real-time CX,” explained Bence. “Real-time CX is going to become the standard in the experience economy.”
We started by consolidating all customer data into Oracle Unity, our central customer data platform (CDP). Then, we adopted an account-based lead flow model that would leverage that data. Finally, we used AI and machine learning to create buying-unit-based lead scoring models that score and rank profile purchase behavior on signal data — 1000s of data points — to identify the best leads for sales to follow up on.
“Today, we are 100% modern cloud-based technology where systems are integrated in real-time and keep up with the changing needs and market conditions,” said Bence.
The team broke the stack into four major components:
We’ve put it all together to provide a customer experience where every interaction matters. Let’s look at the benefits and results:
As I mentioned earlier, we’ve successfully implemented the Oracle@Oracle approach in several other areas of the business. Here are just a few.
We want to be the best deployment of Oracle Cloud ERP and EPM on the planet because we believe that’s how we can help our customers be successful. We will also learn from our customers, so it’s a win-win story.
Maria Smith
Senior Vice President and Corporate Controller, Oracle
Get into the weeds of this marketing transformation project by listening to the recording of Bence’s presentation, Oracle’s Marketing Experience Transformation: Our Journey to the Cloud. Watch the video.
Waynette Tubbs is responsible for content strategy and development for Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience and is Editor of the Modern Marketing Blog. She has developed a comprehensive portfolio of strategic business and marketing communications during her career spanning more than 20 years of magazine, corporate communications, and agency work.
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