After attending the Eloqua Experience conference in Orlando last week, I got warm fuzzies that demand generation marketers are getting more social. After all, if the leader in the space is pushing social, then the rest of the industry will be soon to follow.
Eloqua is a marketing automation and revenue performance management software provider. The main engine of the platform primarily performs outbound marketing that pushes emails offering webinar invitations or content pieces (whitepapers, e-books, presentations) to a company’s client and prospect database. When clients or prospects open emails, click on links, visit landing pages, or use ‘digital body language,’ Eloqua captures and tabulates such behavior, prompting others in an organization — i.e., sales — to take action when and if need be.
I’ve quibbled for years that demand generation marketing needs to incorporate more social marketing and listening into their campaigns. I don’t place the shortfall on Eloqua or other vendors, but rather on the marketers themselves, mostly B2B marketers who see social as cluttered, unfiltered and unmeasurable — and falling outside their domain.
Here is a slideshow I created for CMO.com earlier this year, 6 Ways to Supply a Social Boost to Demand Generation.
Eloqua has had Social Suite for some time now, which includes social content apps, for pulling external social content right into the Eloqua landing page editor; social data apps, for accessing and unifying social data; and social reports and dashboards, for measuring conversions. These are all available in Eloqua’s AppCloud.
A capability which apparently has been available since December 2011 but only recently has been gaining traction is Social Login, whereby customers can now add social login – those ubiquitous Sign in with Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn prompts – to their landing pages and other content. This is a tremendous benefit, as marketers can allow prospects to skip the long forms required for gated content and the marketer can have a deeper view of the prospect. Such user data as associations, skills, and connections or followers (except a user’s email, I learned) can be used to tailor future campaigns. I’ve covered social login earlier this year for Social Media Today and am happy to learn that Eloqua has integrated this feature. Even CEO Joe Payne made mention of Social Login during the morning keynote.
In a nod to the social enterprise, Payne also announced Chatter Inside Eloqua, a capability to use Salesforce.com’s free enterprise social tool Chatter so teams can collaborate on campaigns and content right within the Eloqua instance.
This makes perfect sense, as Eloqua is being used by more than just the marketing department, and additional professionals within an organization control or have access to the instance.
‘Eloqua is not just for power users anymore,’ noted Payne in his keynote.
Meanwhile, tweets including the conference hashtag #ee12 were coming in quickly and furiously — I could hardly keep up. There had to have been at least 10,000 tweets sent during the 3-day event. Not bad.
Keep up the social work, Eloqua, I’m liking it.
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