Top Gear: Useful Internet Marketing Strategies & Tips to Move You Forward: Bridge the Offline and Online Divide with New Oracle Marketing Cloud Features

We still live in a world where nearly 80% customers receive a fragmented experience from companies as they move from marketing channel to marketing channel. While solving this challenge is complicated, the Oracle Marketing Cloud believes it comes down to three fundamental areas: Identify your ideal customer correctly, connect with the right data about that individual, and optimize that experience with relevant content.

Today we’re excited to announce four new features that help marketers make progress in their goal of a more consistent, cross-channel experience. Many of these features are made possible because of key integrations between Oracle products, and we’re excited to bring them to market today at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco.

1. Connect Online and Offline Behavior with “Offline Data Append” from Oracle Datalogix

As digital marketers in industries such as retail, CPG and travel orchestrate new campaigns, they’ve often been in the dark as to whether portions of their individual known customers have purchased products in their key categories. In fact, around 95% of customer purchasing happens offline.

With offline data append, marketers can pull offline transaction data stored in Oracle Datalogix and match it against their customer profiles that reside in the Oracle Marketing Cloud. For example, if a retailer wanted to target customers who have purchased shoes offline in stores, Offline Data Append allows marketers to leverage that information as they build their audience and orchestrate a cross-channel campaign within the Oracle Marketing Cloud. This capability is made possible through an integration between Oracle Datalogix and Oracle’s cross-channel marketing solution for consumer marketers, Oracle Responsys,

Oracle Datalogix accounts for consumer purchase data in 110 million households, and accounts for $2 trillion in consumer spending. This new feature is available first in North America before going broader to global markets.

2. Improve Your Ability to Pinpoint the Right Customer with “Match Multiplier”

Match Multiplier helps solve a very complex challenge companies have with identifying their customers across channels, especially via anonymous channels, such as display advertising. So in order to understand Match Multiplier, you must first understand the concept of the Oracle ID Graph. Announced last March, the Oracle ID Graph is an enabling technology in the Oracle Marketing Cloud’s Data Management Platform that aggregates a variety of identifiers individual end users generate across marketing channels and device types and ties them to an actionable profile.

What types of identifiers do individuals generate? One example would be cookies on your desktop computer. Another example would be device IDs collected from their engagement on mobile phones. The Oracle ID Graph helps tie IDs like these together.

Now comes Match Multiplier. Using Match Multiplier, marketers can target previously unknown prospects by adding their known customer IDs (i.e. email addresses) to a wider pool of anonymous IDs. By creating a larger combined audience, marketers and advertisers can target a wider range of prospects with relevant messaging, products and services and grow their acquisition base effectively. This also provides the ability to identify target audiences across multiple channels and devices.

This is also done in a privacy compliant way that enterprises expect. Oracle Marketing Cloud customers must opt in to Match Multiplier. When marketers join the program, Match Multiplier anonymizes each of their unique identifiers (like email addresses) and replaces it with an anonymous ID. Once IDs are made anonymous, those IDs are then placed into a larger pool of IDs where all participating companies can leverage them for targeting.

What’s an example of Match Multiplier at work? Consumers often have different preferences for which channel they want to consume a relevant message from marketers and advertisers. For example, a customer may never open an email for a promotion about a new line of jeans. However, upon matching that contact via Match Multiplier, we learn they have engaged with display advertising for casual clothing. Now, the marketer knows to orchestrate a display ad for the same product, diversifying their engagement strategy and increasing the chances of conversion.

Match Multiplier is currently in controlled availability and in the United States only to start before getting rolled out to global markets.

3. Enhance Customer Experiences with Oracle Service Cloud Integration

While marketers can orchestrate and control a wide-array of marketing generated interactions, there is a number of ways customers interact with their brand, product or service not in a marketing context. One of the most prime examples is customer service.

Today, we’re announcing integration between the Oracle Marketing Cloud and Oracle Service Cloud. With this integration, marketers can leverage customer service data from Oracle Service Cloud when orchestrating campaigns inside the Oracle Marketing Cloud. For example, when creating a cross-sell or upsell campaign, the marketer can create a rule that removes customers who are currently in a negative customer service situation.

This integration is available for Oracle’s cross-channel solution for B2B marketers, Oracle Eloqua. It follows the Oracle Marketing Cloud’s commitment to integration across the Oracle Customer Experience portfolio. Back in April, we announced integration between Oracle Commerce and the Oracle Marketing Cloud, which you can read about here.

4. Business Units from Oracle Content Marketing

You can identify the right customers and connect the right data, but if you don’t have relevant content, it can be all for naught. Today’s marketers need to think like publishers if they want they want to create the quantity and quality of content they need to keep the modern customer engaged.

To do that at scale, you need to account for all the departments, teams and organizations involved in the content creation process. Today, we’re excited to announce the addition of Business Units. Part of Oracle Content Marketing, business units provide business leaders with a central view of all marketing efforts through a tiered structure.

Here’s how it works:

First, the centralized content team sets the groundwork to ensure brand consistency across business units. This parent team determines the overall Content Strategy in alignment with overall business goals. They set brand guidelines for the organization while also deciding on key themes or topics that should be covered by all divisions. Then, sub business units have their own central content repository, where marketers can easily through existing content in order to locate materials to repurpose and repackage. In some cases, the decentralized teams have more customized plans for publishing and promoting certain content.

We’re excited to share these new features with our customers this week at Oracle OpenWorld. But the digital marketing innovation won’t stop there -- we have Modern Marketing Experience in London in November and new batch of features to announce soon. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, be sure to download the Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Content Marketing and get tips from leading content marketers and thinkers, new content categories to consider and a lot more.