The days of the company website being the most important online marketing asset are long over. No matter how sexy/compelling/brilliant a website is it now represents just a small fraction of a customer’s journey. While still important, the website is just one piece of the online puzzle that needs to be addressed. And this brings us to the Oracle stack. The fact is, the various touchpoints on a customer’s journey need to be addressed by entirely different software tools. As such, to complete and end-to-end managed journey we need multiple specialized tools deployed in a side-by-side manner. One tool cannot possible address all the needs of managing a customer’s journey throughout all the various online and offline properties. Consequently, it is important for clients, sales reps, partners, and consultants to accept that deploying a stack of SaaS and on-prem apps is currently the best practice so that all marketing bases are covered.
The standard way of describing a customer’s journey is as a “sales funnel” where thousands or even millions of potential customers are filtered down, nurtured, and finally guided towards consummating a sale. In an online retail environment this maps quite well to to the following stack of Oracle tools:
- Oracle Marketing Cloud
- Oracle Content Marketing
- WebCenter Sites
- Oracle Commerce
The above stack can be best shown in relation to the sales funnel in the following diagram:
Also available as a pptx file for inclusion into your presentations: sales funnel
Note that being able to manage videos and placed ads (as well as analyzing their effectiveness) are a key part of the overall marketing funnel these days. Integrating these into Oracle Marketing Cloud is a key deliverable and is typically done with 3rd party plugins. The other key thing is making all content appropriate for each persona and locale. The combination of Oracle Content Marketing with WebCenter Sites addresses this requirement nicely and provides for a single source of all such content which can then be repurposed for both OMC as well as Commerce.
You will notice that “page layout” is not discussed in this blog post. The reason is that while still important, having all the touchpoints managed end-to-end is MORE important these days. That is what “Modern Marketing” is all about.
Notes:
- WebCenter Sites Eloqua integration is included in 11.1.1.8.0 Patch 10 and it is now available as GA.
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