Over the past couple of years, digital technologies are gunning to improve marketing efficiency. Perhaps one of the last segments to leverage technology and automation, marketers across the globe today, finally, have access to a plethora of marketing technologies that are far advanced and intuitive than the standard CRM and ERP toolsets. Today, technology is enabling marketers capture data to assess customer experiences and related metrics and leverage automation heavily to reduce time spent on manual processes. Email marketing, web analytics, predictive marketing, optimization, tag management etc. today are all a part of the marketer’s toolkit.

However, as marketing technologies are increasing, so is the challenge of identifying where should the marketer’s priorities lie and which technology will be best suited for the job. Given the investments required, there is the additional challenge of conflicting objectives as well that marketing teams need to address; should they focus on leveraging a technology that helps them provide great customer experiences (the Chief Marketing Officer’s perspective) or should they look at one that provides the best ROI (the CEO’s perspective)?

While marketers want to add more technological sophistication to their marketing initiatives, continuously adding more tools only adds to the complexity. What marketers need are tools that provide effective and fast integration with existing tech investments, more control by reducing manual process, increased measurability, access to third party data sources, and allow them to extend their reach to the right customer. To do this, technology redundancy needs to be eliminated and that can be done using the cloud. Having identified this need, Oracle introduced the Oracle Marketing Cloud that aims to provide a single platform to connect the data points across the marketing ecosystem to create elevated customer experiences and also effectively measure the efficacy of their efforts.

So what makes Oracle Marketing Cloud so interesting? “Simplicity, readiness for enterprise use, and customer centricity” are the three key selling points of Marketing Cloud according to Oracle. Here is a look at the six simple solutions of Oracle Marketing Cloud that make it a great marketing investment

Marketing Automation via Oracle Eloqua

Now building highly personalized campaigns across different marketing channels such as email, web, mobile, video, display search etc. becomes intrinsically easier with Oracle Eloqua. With this simple, easy to use and intuitive service, marketing teams can:

• Create simplified data transformation and normalization processes
• Make integration processes and make other workflows faster using the Listener Framework
• Create dynamic campaign journeys using data maps and spot check the campaign for validation errors
• Allow next-gen application integration
• Easily personalize activities and create shortcuts
• View the marketing initiatives using an insightful dashboard
• Cross Channel Orchestration via Oracle Responsys

With Oracle Responsys, marketing teams can easily create impactful, measurable cross channel experiences by leveraging data from disparate sources. Using this data, Responsys helps marketing teams deliver relevant and engaging experiences to a curated audience across devices and marketing channels. Visual segmentation, profile segmentation, intuitive program canvas, and cross channel experiences are some of the benefits delivered by Responsys.

Content Marketing

Just creating content is not enough anymore. The content that organizations create needs to encourage a dialogue and drive strategic conversations. Using Oracle Content Marketing, marketers can now plan and create intelligent messages to the right audience that will generate relevant conversations which will ultimately lead to conversions.

Marketing teams can also localize and translate content with ease to make it available for local regions, utilize the analytics capabilities to measure content success, accelerate content creating productivity by identifying bottlenecks, and ensure that the content has been audited and version controlled.

Oracle’s Content Marketing service also provides a Global Marketing Calendar to integrate cross departmental activities and the ability to design and organize content according to personas.

Social Marketing

With Oracle Social Marketing, marketers gain access to a powerful and comprehensive tool kit that helps them listen to social conversations, push relevant content, analyze social media initiatives and drives, and ensure that their social messaging is in line with the other marketing initiatives. Using the niche and exclusive Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), marketers can cut through the social noise to gain contextual understanding and then craft meaningful content to engage their audience. With Oracle Social Marketing, marketers can:

• Track content engagement to see the kind of content attract greater engagement
• Modify and refine content to suit the audience
• Identify which content to push for specific personas or at which point of a customer journey
• Create, publish and manage content across social channels
• Leverage social channels to create heightened brand awareness
• Create a single point of access for all social channels for uniform and consistent messaging
• Auto label and assign messages for timely action

Data Management with Oracle BlueKai

Oracle BlueKai, Oracle’s data management platform helps marketers explore the wide sea of data that has emerged due to the wide proliferation of connected devices. With Oracle BlueKai, marketers can:

• Create clear audience segmentation and composition by device and usage environment
• Drive conversions by identifying devices that enable this, identify conversion points and bottle necks that lead to wasted impressions
• Create device relevant and personalized campaigns for mature and effective targeting and prospecting
• Give marketers access to audiences across 200 media partners
• Allow flexible and seamless integration across Oracle’s client’s ad/marketing tech ecosystem
• Provide access to third party data stores and allow marketers to combine audience data with this
• Leverage Oracle ID graph to validate connections between ID to facilitate data transport from one ID to another for targeting and measurement easier and faster
• Validate data against subsets of deterministic data for precise targeting

Test Optimization using Oracle Maxymiser

With the Oracle Maxymiser, marketers can now further personalize their campaigns, gain deeper customer insights, analyze customer behaviors across channels, optimize online marketing spends and optimize their web, app and mobile initiatives. Marketers can further integrate Oracle Maxymiser with their existing Data Management platform or web analytics seamlessly and curate more accurate personalizations and predictive insights. They can further scale their optimization initiatives and test more and test as often as they want using the 20 billion unique experiences that are generated each month. Implementation of these optimizations is simple and easy.

Along with the above suite, Oracle recently announced that they also plan to introduce Adaptive Intelligence Apps, a chatbot platform and artificial intelligence (AI) for video, mobile and messaging to enable marketers further refine their marketing initiatives.

With Oracle’s Marketing Cloud, marketers can successfully solve the cross-channel personalization problem and target their customers better, transform customer experiences and deliver tangible Return on Investment.