Oracle@Oracle: Streamlined martech for real-time, connected customer experience

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.

Previous marketing automation challenges

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.”

The proof is in the pudding

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:

1. Automation and campaign management — this area provides end-to-end orchestration, personalization at scale, and customer engagement using Oracle Eloqua, Oracle Fusion Marketing, Oracle Sales Accelerator, Oracle Infinity IQ, and Oracle CrowdTwist.
2. The front-end — Oracle.com runs on Oracle Content Management. Here we address site search, tag management, and communities. We also gain intelligence on the content our site visitors interact with. And we have an AI and ML framework powered by Oracle Machine Learning.
3. Analytics and data science — using Oracle Analytics Cloud to build reports, dashboards, and visualizations.
4. The back end — data ingestion, management, unification, and activation. “This is truly where the magic happens,” says Bence. “A single place to store and unify our customer and prospect data with Oracle Unity, our autonomous data warehouse, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).”

We’ve put it all together to provide a customer experience where every interaction matters. Let’s look at the benefits and results:

• Automated 70% of the marketing transactions. Faster campaign execution will markedly reduce lead time from weeks to days.
• 33% increase in opportunity size and 10% increase in opportunities generated. The time between a prospect expressing interest to becoming an opportunity has gone from days to minutes.
• Near real-time insights, improved dashboard performance, and a hands-off approach to scaling and tuning with our autonomous database.

More Oracle@Oracle projects

As I mentioned earlier, we’ve successfully implemented the Oracle@Oracle approach in several other areas of the business. Here are just a few.

• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. We run all Oracle applications on OCI. This helps us more rapidly deploy products and resources. We are also improving our technical capabilities and service architecture. We now provide 99.99% uptime across our portfolio with 30% cost savings and 2X – 10X performance.

• Finance. When’s the last time you closed your books and reported earnings within 10 days? Done. That’s faster than any other S&P 500 company.

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

• Human Resources. With Oracle Cloud HCM, we streamlined hiring, onboarding, and development processes. We reduced the talent review time by 71%. This streamlining means our HR teams are now saving 27,000 hours each year.

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.