Oracle Marketing Cloud is taking on a very customer data platform-like complexion these days.
On Tuesday, OMC unveiled a slew of feature updates designed to grease the wheels between its marketing products and “bring data and intelligence together with orchestration in real time,” said Shashi Seth, SVP of Oracle Marketing Cloud.
Responsys, Oracle’s email marketing solution, for example, will now link up with Oracle’s testing and personalization tool, Maxymiser, to help marketers get a better sense of their conversion funnel.
Eloqua, which provides marketing automation for B2B marketers, is integrating with Oracle Data Cloud and predictive analytics company DataFox, which Oracle acquired in October 2018, to give B2B marketers a better sense of how an account will behave.
Among other things, Oracle is also embedding Infinity, its digital analytics tool for tracking site and app performance, into all of its major products, including Eloqua and Responsys; enabling support for third-party apps within Responsys; rolling out a recommendation engine within Maxymiser to provide next-best action recommendations; and layering machine learning capabilities into Eloqua.
It’s a lot, but there is a theme here, Seth said: “bringing massive amounts of behavioral data into play in real time.”
“Millions and millions of events happen on any website in a given day – what did someone look at, how long did they look at it, what is the price range?” he said. “This is all stuff that you need to know in the moment so you can help customers get to their decision-making quicker, better and faster.”
But activating that data quickly can be a “nightmare” for marketers when systems don’t integrate properly, Seth said.
“First and foremost is making sure that our customers have the wherewithal to bring all of their data together, and we know that’s a hard task,” he said. “So we’re creating connectors and common schemas, and the ability to map to a schema, to change it and make sense of it – but lots of derived data is needed to shape that in real time.”
Smashing silos is one of the differentiators Oracle plans to home in on as the cloud wars enter their umpteenth year – although they’ve heated up recently with multibillion-dollar buying sprees, including Adobe’s purchase of Marketo and Saleforce’s acquisitions of MuleSoft and Datorama.
If the marketing clouds agree on anything, it’s that an integrated solution is the connective tissue marketers need to take full advantage of their data.
“If you have point solutions that are just sitting across your organization working in silos and the data isn’t flowing to your endpoints, you’re not doing yourself any favors,” Seth said.
Sounds quite CDP-like.
But most marketers aren’t actually standardized on a single marketing platform, despite the best collective efforts of the marketing clouds, et al., and they don’t necessarily want to be. That’s OK, Seth said.
“We’re not saying that point solutions will go away, we’re just saying that to maximize your return on investment, it makes sense to bring some together,” he said. “Say you could do with one person what three people do and the tools you need are already integrated into your omnichannel orchestration tools – that’s something that resonates strongly with a lot of marketers.”
