Clear vision and creativity key to unlocking marketing automation benefits: Oracle

In an interview with Campaign Asia-Pacific, Will Griffith, regional vice president, APAC for Oracle Marketing Cloud said marketers were often ill-prepared for the engagement potential from content.

He said content marketing was about how you identify your target persona’s and match the right content to them according to the stage in your relationship – in their buying process, loyalty or advocacy.

“Most marketers are not ready for the massive explosion outcomes when you map out the permutations of content / persona / stage in lifecycle,” he added. “Technology can help you automate, but marketers need a clear vision and carefully thought out engagement strategy.”

The second challenge of optimization, is about refining small incremental steps on how that content is displayed across the different channels you use. These might be very subtle changes to do with layout or colour, or more significant ones like a price versus non-price offer.

“Marketers face a similar challenge here with the potentially vast range of optimization options,” said Griffith. “Technology can bring certain advantages but the marketer ultimately needs to drive the creativity in the first place.”

He shared that in conversations with customers across the region, a few topics have dominated engagements, with the first being siloed marketing automation which remains is a major issue with many companies using separate solutions for email and mobile efforts.

Another issue is ease of use, as many organizations don’t have a large team and high bandwidth to spend time working technology to achieve their goals.

“They are looking for ways to template and automate so they can set up once and leave to run, giving them more time to plan new campaigns and analyse results,” Griffith added.

Will Griffith

He reported that more sophisticated marketers want help with the testing process and that most marketers acknowledge they don’t do enough testing.

“The holy grail is how to automate this and have the technology optimize marketing by learning what kind of message, call to action, layout or product drives the strongest outcome,” he said.

One area enjoying a surge in interest from marketers, fuelled by the growth in digital advertising, centres on Data Management Platforms (DMPs) and how deploying such a system can aid the marketing function.

“We’re getting a huge amount of interest from marketers to understand more about the Ad Tech world, and how they can be smarter with data to drive ROI and reduce wastage in online advertising,” said Griffith. “Marketers and their agencies want to learn about how they can use first, second and third party data.”

Research firm MarketsandMarkets forecasts the global marketing automation software market to grow from US$3.65 billion in 2014 to US$5.5 billion in 2019, at a CAGR of 8.55 percent.

Griffith reported that Oracle Marketing Cloud (OMC), a cloud-based marketing platform launched in 2014, has seen the most traction in retail ecommerce, travel and financial services in Asia.

The take up has been particularly prevalent with organizations that have or are planning to launch omni-channel marketing activity (email and mobile app for example), and organizations investing in paid digital advertising (display, search, social etc).

Asked for tips for brand marketers looking to build up or upgrade their marketing technology stack, Griffith shared the following:

• Have a clear vision of what you want to achieve from any marketing technology investment.
• Don’t think too big – small gains can be very important in your transformation journey.
• Look for solutions that are open and will work with other platforms – there is no such thing as a one size fits all.
• Think about how ready your team is to take on this new challenge; invest in your people and take as much support from your chosen partner to train, transfer knowledge and skills as you can.

“And lastly, have fun! Marketing is the only department in an organisation who are paid to experiment and not penalized for failing,” said Griffith. “So be creative, be prepared to try out new and innovative ways to engage your audience.”