The roles and responsibilities of the B2B marketing function have grown dramatically over the last few years, especially since the pandemic has accelerated digital-first (often, digital-only) customer engagement. Marketing automation vendors such as Oracle have been working hard to provide the technology tools to enable marketers to succeed in a world where customers increasingly expect personalized, omnichannel engagement.
Oracle Eloqua, for instance, has announced a product roadmap for 2023 and beyond that empowers B2B marketers to: (1) deliver personalized customer experiences at scale and across channels, (2) intelligently adapt to evolving customer behaviors, and (3) connect data and systems in order to orchestrate engagement at scale.
Since “doing more with less” is imperative for marketers in 2023 (and always), Oracle is also seeking to automate more tasks around campaigns and data management, so marketers can invest more of their limited time innovating and creating.
Sojourn's December 2022 Oracle Eloqua User Group (virtual, and free on-demand), hosted by Karin “KP” Pindle (Senior Martech Advisor at Sojourn Solutions), was highlighted by a 50-minute presentation by Oracle’s Chris Campbell (Director of Product Management, Oracle Marketing). Campbell basically offered Oracle’s vision for Eloqua and described its product roadmap coming in 2023 and beyond.
The vision guiding Oracle Eloqua’s roadmap
“Marketers need to deliver real-time, connected experiences” across channels, doing so with “contextual relevance,” says Campbell, and Oracle is working to address that need via three key areas of focus:
Personalization at scale: Oracle deeply understands that B2B marketers need to “know their customer” at a granular level in order to drive better personalization, says Campbell. Oracle has therefore created unified customer profiles that pull in data from across the Oracle ecosystem and beyond. Eloqua is also being designed to enable messaging with centralized content and enablement.
Connecting experiences: Oracle is focused on enabling B2B marketers to orchestrate (and automate) digital experiences across channels using intelligent journeys that can adapt to customer behaviors at scale. From a “back end perspective,” unifying data and systems is a key foundation for creating these connected, cross-channel customer experiences.
Differentiating your marketing: Oracle believes that automation and tools such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, embedded in the Oracle ecosystem, can liberate marketers from routine, manual, and data-intensive tasks and thus free them up for more creative work that can truly differentiate them from rivals.
Oracle’s Fusion Marketing, for instance, allows marketers to engineer and orchestrate experiences. Oracle’s AI tools such as Einstein can support cross-channel and predictive experiences based on a unified customer profile and unified content management across the entire Oracle ecosystem.
Highlights of the 2023 roadmap
Having described Oracle’s foundational vision, Campbell went on to highlight some of the specific product enhancements Oracle and Eloqua will be launching in 2023 and beyond.
1. New user experience/UI. Oracle is seeking to provide the same “look and feel,” in terms of user experience/user interface, across its multiple platforms, including its Eloqua MAP. The new Eloqua UI/UX aligns its MAP with the same UI/UX of all Oracle Cloud Applications, based on the award-winning Redwood Design System. Campbell noted that this UI enhancement is scheduled for release in the first half of 2023.
2. SMS enhancements: Segment filters. Campbell notes that mobile SMS is a growing channel for B2B marketers and “we’ve had great interest around our SMS features.” The new “segment filters” enhancement will allow marketers to create customer segments based on SMS-related activities such as: phone number consent, replied to SMS, sent SMS, clicked SMS, and more.
3. Multiple branded domains. “This feature will allow marketers to easily create and manage campaigns for multiple brands within a single Eloqua instance,” says Campbell. It enables marketers to configure up to ten brands within a single MAP instance, as well as select specific brands when creating emails in order to auto-apply images.
4. Subject-line optimization. This enhancement works with Oracle’s AI and ML tools in order to help marketers optimize their email subject lines in order to drive email opens/engagement. It uses AI/ML to identify words and phrases that encourage customer engagement, as well as predicting open rates based on different subject lines offered by marketers.
5. Oracle Fusion Marketing Guided Campaigns. Campbell describes this as a “new guided campaign workflow that allows marketers to build multi-channel campaigns across emails and advertisements targeted to your accounts.” The enhancement will also enable marketers to measure campaign effectiveness and attribute opportunity scores based on engagement, including intelligently scoring leads for potential sales follow-up.
6. Simple campaign enhancements. Campbell says that Eloqua will be adding campaign approval functionality to simple campaigns, allowing marketers to configure approval workflows to prevent campaigns from being activated without the assigned approval.
For more information about Oracle Eloqua’s 2023 roadmap, along with launch dates and details about specific enhancements, visit the Eloqua Release Center in the Topliners Community.
For more information about how implementing and properly managing Oracle Eloqua can help you prove and improve the value of your B2B marketing, reach out to us today.
