You’re in B2B Marketing Operations, and you know that connecting your contacts to the right companies is fundamental. It’s the bedrock for effective segmentation and targeted marketing. Get it wrong, and your sales and marketing efforts can suffer. That’s why mastering contact-to-account matching, or Company Matching as it’s often called, within a platform like Oracle Eloqua isn’t just a nice-to-have – it’s essential for building better relationships and achieving the results you’re aiming for.

What is Company Matching?

At its core, Company Matching is the process of accurately linking individual contact records in your marketing automation and CRM systems to their respective company or account records. Think of it as building the organizational chart for your leads. Whether these contacts enter your Oracle Eloqua database through online forms, sales interactions, or imported lists, it aims to establish a clear relationship between the person and the business they represent.

One of the most common and straightforward methods involves using the contact’s email domain. For instance, if a new contact signs up with an email address ending in @example-inc.com, the system can look for an existing company record with the same domain, example-inc.com, and associate the contact accordingly.

Company Matching can be approached in two primary ways:

• Manual Company Matching: This involves manually searching for the correct company record and updating the necessary field to link the contact. While offering greater control, this method is often time-consuming and less scalable, especially with a growing database.
• Automatic Company Matching: This leverages the capabilities within your marketing automation platform, such as Oracle Eloqua, to automatically identify and link contacts to companies based on predefined rules and data points. This significantly improves efficiency and accuracy at scale.

By establishing a solid foundation, B2B marketers can unlock a wealth of opportunities to engage more effectively with their target audience.

Why Accurate Company Matching Matters

Enhanced Segmentation and Personalization

Accurate company matching in Oracle Eloqua is the key to moving beyond basic segmentation. By correctly linking contacts to their companies, you unlock the ability to segment based on crucial firmographic data like industry and size, enabling highly targeted campaigns. This company-level understanding also fuels impactful personalization, allowing you to tailor your messaging with company-specific details, ultimately increasing engagement and strengthening relationships with potential customers.

Improved Lead Scoring and Prioritization

Instead of solely evaluating individual contact behavior, you can attribute engagement and activities to the entire company. This provides a more holistic view of an account’s interest level, allowing you to prioritize outreach to companies showing strong collective engagement. By understanding which organizations are actively interacting with your marketing content, your sales team can focus their efforts on the most promising accounts, leading to more efficient resource allocation and higher conversion rates.

Streamlined Reporting and Analytics

Instead of sifting through individual contact data, you can analyze marketing performance at the account level. This provides a clearer picture of which companies are engaging with your campaigns, the effectiveness of your ABM strategies, and the overall ROI of your marketing efforts in relation to specific organizations. This company-centric view enables more informed decision-making and a better understanding of your impact on key accounts.

Effective Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Enablement

Robust company matching is the foundational pillar for successful Account-Based Marketing (ABM) within Oracle Eloqua. By accurately identifying and grouping contacts within target accounts, you can orchestrate highly personalized and coordinated campaigns directed at multiple organizational stakeholders. This ensures that your messaging resonates with the entire account’s specific needs and pain points, fostering stronger relationships and increasing your chances of winning high-value deals. Without accurate company matching, executing effective ABM strategies becomes significantly more challenging.

Enhanced Data Quality and Governance

Implementing a strong company matching process in Oracle Eloqua directly contributes to improved data quality and governance. By accurately linking contacts to their respective companies, you reduce the occurrence of orphaned contact records and create a more unified and reliable database. This enhanced data integrity ensures that your segmentation, personalization, lead scoring, and reporting are based on precise information, minimizing errors and maximizing the effectiveness of your marketing operations. Ultimately, cleaner company data leads to more trustworthy insights and better decision-making across your marketing and sales teams.

Demystifying Company Matching in Oracle Eloqua: How It Works

Data Points Leveraged for Matching

Oracle Eloqua employs various data points to accurately link contacts to companies, with the email domain being a primary identifier. It can also leverage domain lookup services to enrich data based on the email domain. Information captured in form data, such as company name and website, also plays a crucial role. Additionally, IP address mapping can provide clues about a contact’s organization, and integrations with third-party data providers can further enhance the matching accuracy by bringing in more comprehensive company information.

Matching Rules and Configuration

The power of company matching in Oracle Eloqua lies in its flexible matching rules. Marketers can configure these rules based on the data points mentioned above, prioritizing certain fields and defining the matching logic (e.g., exact match, fuzzy match). Setting up effective deduplication rules at the company level is also critical to maintain data integrity. By carefully configuring these rules, you can tailor Eloqua’s matching engine to align with your specific data landscape and accuracy requirements.

Manual vs. Automated Matching Processes

While manual company matching involves individual searching and linking of contacts to accounts, offering direct control, Oracle Eloqua excels in automated company matching. This automated approach uses the configured rules to efficiently and scalable link records as they enter the system, significantly saving time and reducing errors. While manual review might still be necessary in some complex cases, automation is the key to effectively managing company matching at scale within Eloqua.

Eloqua’s Company Matching Features and Functionality

Oracle Eloqua provides specific features and functionalities to facilitate company matching. The company object serves as the central record for company information. Eloqua’s matching engine, configurable through the platform’s settings, automates the linking process based on defined rules. Furthermore, integrations with Data as a Service (DaaS) offerings and apps from the Eloqua App Cloud can enhance data quality and matching accuracy by providing access to external company data and specialized matching algorithms.

Conclusion

The goal is clear: B2B marketing excellence and strong revenue growth come from engaging the right accounts with personalized approaches. Company matching in Oracle Eloqua is key to making this happen through better segmentation and ABM. However, many struggle with messy data, making it hard to see the full picture of their prospects. This leads to wasted effort and missed chances. Focusing on mastering company matching in Oracle Eloqua is essential. By understanding accounts and using Eloqua’s features well, you can gain a clear view of your market and boost revenue. Want to improve your Oracle Eloqua results? A strong company matching strategy is the answer, and we can help.