In the form of BlueKai, Oracle’s been sitting on a treasure trove of customer information, and today at Oracle Open World, it’s announcing some highly effective ways for marketers to put it to use.
Starting in October, Oracle will offer the integration of its Data Management Platform (formerly BlueKai) with its Marketing Cloud. That means all the different customer engagement channels within Oracle’s marketing solutions will now be able to feed, and utilize customer data hosted within the Data Management Platform. Previously, this integration only extended to a few features in Oracle’s Eloqua marketing automation platform, but it now extends to the rest of the products in its Marketing Cloud as well.
“True customer centricity only happens when companies can unify their marketing data with the execution of messaging with that data under one umbrella,” says John Stetic, group vice president of products, Oracle Marketing Cloud. “This integration allows marketers to better understand the attributes and behaviors of their ideal customers and orchestrate an experience tailored to each one of them. By delivering more-relevant experiences, marketers can build long-term relationships with their customers that drive revenue and better lifetime value.”
By accessing a central data repository that houses customer profile and behavioral data, marketer’s using Oracle’s solutions will now have the following capabilities:
Engage and retarget customers across multiple channels:
Marketers can centralize customer data and behavior gained from different engagement channels (e.g. email, mobile, website) and then use it to retarget customers through search, display, site optimization, and mobile advertising.
Gain richer audience insights:
The data platform goes further than just collecting website analytics, it will be able to match gathered data to the already huge cache of third party customer information available in the BlueKai platform. This means better understanding of consumer behavior and prospect profiles.
Find and target new customers based on “look-alike” modelling:
Marketers can use the thousands of attributes, behaviors and preferences collected in the Data Management Platform to create an ‘ideal customer.” Once that profile is identified, marketers can target customers who exactly match or display similiar attributes to it, maximizing chances of engagement.
If last year was all about consolidation of their marketing products, this year the enterprise marketing clouds are all about the data. The biggest problem with having multiple marketing platforms, (one for each digital channel) is that the data from each one gets siloed. Valuable customer information gained from one channel isn’t easily shared across to another, which means the marketer has to wait till the same customer engages on the other channel to build their profile again.
A central data repository that houses customer data gained from across all the engagement touchpoints, whether its mobile, social, email or the web is the new Holy Grail of marketing, and right now, it’s Oracle’s trump card in the marketing cloud competition. Acquiring BlueKai, which was already providing third-party customer data to hundreds of agencies and ad targeting platforms, and integrating it into its marketing cloud was probably Oracle’s smartest move. Currently only IBM and Experian Marketing Services can match it with similiar cross-channel data management platforms.
However with Adobe adding more capabilities to its Analytics platform and Salesforce rumored to be coming out with a unified data platform of its own at Dreamforce, we could see the competition in this space heating up even more over the next few months.
