Email marketing: all marketers use it and it’s at the core of Eloqua functionality. You can get even more from your Oracle Eloqua instance when you include all your marketing channels. Just make sure you integrate, automate and measure them to better understand the full ROI impact of your campaigns.

3 Powerful Non-Email Marketing Channels to Integrate, Automate and Measure with Oracle Eloqua

1. Social Media and Paid Ads

You know how important your presence on the web is. Apart from having your content read, what’s most important is to track those interactions in Oracle Eloqua. Here are some ideas to help you prove the value of your Social Media and paid campaigns:

Integrate

Capture which content people are interacting with. It is easier said than done, but the effort is worth it. These Oracle Eloqua tools may help you capture specific interactions:

• Enable content sharing on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Facebook and Google+
• Capture data from Facebook lead ads and later push it to Oracle Eloqua
• Use Facebook and Twitter widgets (Likes, Follows, etc.) to promote audience engagement
• Use LinkedIn Form Autofill features for better conversion
• Re-target Oracle Eloqua contacts with digital LinkedIn advertisements

Once you are able to associate social media and paid ads engagement to contacts and track their interactions in Oracle Eloqua, you’ll be in a better position to understand and influence your customers’ journey.

Automate

Verify that Oracle Eloqua is configured to take advantage of the data flowing in from social media and paid ads. Use this input to adjust Lead Scoring and nurture campaigns. Also think about how to get these contacts commenting, sharing and liking more. Once you have that working without manual intervention all you need to do is measure the effectiveness.

Keep in mind that your Social Media outreach shouldn’t be limited to just new leads. Existing customers are a great source of shared content, comments and likes. Be sure to mix your campaigns to provide and benefit from good customer experiences with your product of service.

Measure

Measurement is where we feel many companies are weak in their Oracle Eloqua setup. Social Media and paid ads are there to help you match people’s needs with your products and services. A lot of time and effort goes into setting up these campaigns, so make sure you’re measuring effectiveness in Oracle Eloqua. If a contact interacts with a social media post first, and a week later submits a Contact-Us form, do you attribute that social media campaign with the lead? Or at least consider the social media post’s influence? If not, take a look at our Tracking Campaign Engagement for Unknown Visitors video, it will open your eyes to what is possible.

Social Media and paid ads are, more often than not, the very start of a customer’s journey. If you are not integrating, automating and measuring it, how can you know if your overall strategy is working? This is too important to be left to guesswork, so it’s important to measure everything correctly.

2. Video marketing

In a Google-dominated world, using video to get your brand, product or services out to the world is key. Here are tips for working with video and Oracle Eloqua:

Integrate

If you are able to, capture the viewer’s interaction with your video in Eloqua. Tools like Vidyard can offer this sort of integration.

Set up a Custom Object to track important data like the name of the video watched, how long the viewer stayed engaged, and geographically where they watched the video from. This will help you with segmentation, lead scoring and give you measurable feedback on how to improve your videos for the future.

When creating your video, include interactions throughout to capture additional information. Find points in the video where you can encourage the viewer to get a demonstration or more detailed information of the product or service and configure these prompts to go directly into Eloqua. These points of interaction will not only help harvest new leads, they can prompt you to score and target those leads with the right follow-up message.

Automate

Making a good video takes time and effort. When you have a great video and people are watching it with interest… don’t just sit there and pat yourself on the back. Follow up – the sooner the better!

Use the information flowing in from your video interactions to automate your next actions. For example, if a person watches past a point where the video discusses an important product or service related feature, create logic that qualifies them to get follow-up communication. If they watched to the end or watched multiple times, assign them to a segment to follow up with more product- or service- related content. If a they watched the video and are located in an area where you are having an event in the near future, tell them about it right away, don’t wait until the next scheduled email.

Remember to score leads accordingly. It is all about qualifying your leads and video viewing data is just as important – if not more – as email clicks and landing page visits.

Measure

Once you’ve integrated and automated, find out what impact video had on your ROI. Depending on the product or service, it can take many interactions with an individual to convert them into a lead or an opportunity. You know the investment it took to create the video and get it out there, so you should know how many leads need to be created to justify that cost, or what contribution this video campaign had on creating leads. Did it live up to your needs? If not, what can you do differently in your next video? If it exceeded expectations, do more of them! If you are not measuring your ROI, you will only be guessing.

3. SMS communication

Phone messaging is pervasive in our personal world, so why not think about getting business information out there via SMS? Here are tips to help you work with SMS in Oracle Eloqua:

Integrate

There are important laws around marketing with SMS, just as there are with email. Plan how you will capture consent and which data needs to be shared to be sure you are operating legally at all times.

When choosing an SMS tool, pick one that can easily integrate with Oracle Eloqua. Make sure you integrate and capture these data in Eloqua: title of the message sent, date message was sent, and responses.

Automate

Much of the automation for SMS communication needs to take place before you start. You can have the greatest SMS tool in the world, but if you are not capturing the phone number in the right format, then you simply can’t use it. We suggest implementing progressive profiling on your forms so you’re not immediately asking for a mobile number. When you do ask, also request their consent to receive SMS. If they agree, plan to automatically send an SMS response to re-affirm and acknowledge that their form was received.

Getting the right telephone format is also tricky, we recommend setting up a data normalization program in Eloqua for mobile phone, as well as many other fields. For mobile phone data, you’ll need to use the phone number and country fields to obtain the country code and phone number format to send SMS correctly. A phone formatting app may help you simplify this process.

Once you have completed your preparation, be careful when you segment. Only target contacts with SMS for specific types of communication. Things to consider are:

• Form submission follow-ups – if you know they used a mobile device, send an SMS to thank them or send them additional information.
• Contacts that abandon a form or application – try following up with an SMS, as it may get you a quicker response and motivates them to continue.
• Did the contact register for an upcoming event? Send them an SMS to remind them.

Measure

With the integrated and automated data above, you can start tracking the success of your SMS campaigns. Along with campaign attributions, remember to track the volume of SMS sent. This will help you identify if you are over- or under-communicating with this channel.

Step out of your comfort zone – go beyond email marketing

We probably haven’t provided ideas that you, as a modern marketer, don’t already know. However, in numerous reports, studies, and from our own experience, we see companies that use Oracle Eloqua primarily, and sometimes solely, as an email marketing platform.

Many companies use multiple marketing channels very well, but have nothing tying them together to create a unified version of the ROI truth. Oracle Eloqua is a great tool to do this, and the good news is: it’s never too late to get started!