Oracle Eloqua is ramping up its paid media offering to marketers through a partnership with data-driven B2B display ad platform Bizo. And Bizo, in turn, has added marketing automation capabilities from Oracle.
The Oracle Eloqua AdFocus application integrates display advertising into broader multichannel campaigns. Users can target personalized placements through the Bizo ad network, which could be useful for prospecting or extending customer outreach beyond email channels. Bizo works with 4,200 business publishers and has audience demographic data on more than 120 million people.
Oracle Eloqua AdFocus will also integrate with Oracle Social Cloud, bringing Facebook Custom Audiences, right-rail ads and promoted stories to Eloqua marketers.
Coinciding with Oracle’s updated Oracle Eloqua platform today is Bizo’s general release of Bizo for Marketing Automation, allowing joint Eloqua and Bizo customers to sync display and social ads to their email nurture programs. The company began work on an API integration to Eloqua just over a year ago. Beta customers have been using the product since the spring.
One of the core challenges for B2B marketers is connecting the dots from the point in which a site visitor identifies themselves by signing up for a webinar or downloads a white paper, for instance, and the point in which the B2B nurture life cycle begins. When access to that information is “ungated,” anonymous or otherwise not identifiable, nurture programs get a little murkier.
“For B2B websites, 95% of their website traffic still remains anonymous,” said Chris Mann, VP of product management for Bizo. “What if we can hook up display advertising to the marketing automation system and allow Eloqua users to track digital body language and [retarget] visitors who are looking at certain products?”
Bizo has a couple of beta customers already using Bizo for Marketing Automation, including Avid, the video- and audio-production software company. When someone navigates onto Avid’s website and is interested in a certain product, Bizo can put them into an anonymous nurture program, then run display ads to reach them through its RTB ecosystem.
Avid was able to bring those anonymous visitors into a two-step nurture program, which started with a trial and ended with a chance to buy the product. Existing customers were prompted to upgrade to a new version of a product. “We did that for two of their product lines and they had a 250% return on their investment,” Mann said. “There were nice additional conversions from [turning] anonymous folks into the known nurture.”
Next, Eloqua and Bizo plan to build out attribution modeling where for every ad impression. “[Y]ou’ll be able to look at the Eloqua customer record and see [that] maybe they didn’t click on an ad, but they saw 10 ads and when they were part of an anonymous program, they saw 15 and their email open rates or average order values went up because of that,” Mann added. “All of that analysis will be available inside of Eloqua.”
In addition to AdFocus, Oracle Eloqua has added 20 new partners to the Eloqua AppCloud, totaling 100 apps now. That has brought more partner-enabled functionality to marketers using the system. Two examples are Vidyard, which enables video tracking for marketing and sales enablement, and Dunn & Bradstreet.
Dunn & Bradstreet’s data augmentation app “allows marketers to draw data from their DMP repositories to augment with data in their Eloqua database,” said John Stetic, VP of products at Oracle Eloqua.
In terms of Oracle Eloqua’s future, Kevin Akeroyd, SVP and GM of the Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud, stressed that B2B will not be its sole focus.
“This doesn’t mean we’re going to abandon [our] B2B [heritage] but we want to scale out [the Marketing Cloud capabilities] to satisfy B2B, B2C and even the people who rely heavily on channel distribution,” he said. “We think Oracle Eloqua can aspire to do more for CMOs.”
Oracle acquired Eloqua in December for $871 million.
