What is Eloqua All About?

What business problems does Eloqua solve?
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Slightly more advanced marketing organisations have realised that they need to adopt a customer-driven approach to their marketing. They often begin by analysing their customer data. They undertake research to develop buyer personas. Then, from these efforts they organise the people in their marketing database into "segments" with the intention of doing better at targeting the right message (or experience) with the right group of people. Sadly, what these efforts typically means in practice is the marketing function maintains the "batch and blast approach" but to 3-6 groupings of contacts instead of the entire database all at once.

The Eloqua solution helps marketers move beyond the constraints outlined above. Since the platform holds "buyer profiles" for each individual contact in the database and this data includes "behavioural information" it is possible to implement "behavioural-driven" marketing practices. In other words, the Eloqua platform listens to the behaviour of each individual person and a particular behaviour can then be the trigger for a marketing action to occur automatically. Organisations that implement these practices effectively realise the promise of "one-to-one" marketing.

Buyer Behaviour Has Changed
The buying process has changed. Research and our own personal experience shows that buyers undertake Web research as part of finding, selecting, and purchasing products and services.

As a result, customers often engage with a company via digital interactions long before they speak to a person or enter a store. We call this online behaviour Digital Body Language. Eloqua acts as the "marketing database" capturing data about online behaviour from many different sources in order to build "buyer profiles" for each individual person in the database. Today, the Eloqua platform holds close to 2 billion buyer profiles.There is a Shift Towards "Buyer Enablement"
Since people are searching and researching their purchases online companies are trying to figure out how to transform their marketing and sales practices. At Eloqua, we have a simple "maturity model" that we use to explain this (see image to the right). Most companies when surveyed place themselves in the bottom half of the pyramid.

The least sophisticated marketing organisations fall in the "batch and blast" or "product driven" level. These marketing organisations plan campaigns on their calendar and on those dates they push their message selling select products or services to the masses. This approach is seriously flawed. Such organisations face poor conversion rates, high marketing costs, high opt-out rates, and issues with ROI.

The Next Wave of Opportunity
In 1999 Eloqua pioneered the concept of Marketing Automation based on the ideas explained above. Over the last 12 years we have led the creation and maturation of this emergent technology category. We follow closely behind the CRM revolution most notably represented by the rapid growth of another one of our strategic partners Salesforce.com. Organisations that have adopted CRM have invested heavily in technology, process definition, and automation to optimise the performance of their sales and service departments. As Sales Force Automation (SFA) initiatives reach a level of maturity it is reasonable to ask "what next?"
Ask any marketing professional what they view to be the nirvana of marketing and they will describe the notion of "true personalisation" - the ability to only deliver the right message to the right person at the right time via the right (or preferred) channel. The Eloqua platform makes this possible.
Marketing is going through a transformation. Executives are demanding to see measurable results from CMOs to prove the output from marketing expenditures. Furthermore, companies are aspiring to operate from a "360 degree" view of their customers. With these pressures in play the next steps in a company's maturation involve adopting Marketing Automation, achieving "One View of the Truth" shared across the business, and then implementing a Revenue Performance Management business strategy.

Eloqua represents the next wave of technology adoption, organisational change, and consulting. That is why we are excited about the future of our business and our alliance.Listen to customers talk.