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Eloqua Experience 2012

Date: 13 November 2012

Joe Payne and team put on another great event! This is the first time it was in Orlando (and probably the last) but the place sure was gorgeous. In his keynote speech, Joe Payne kicked off by observing, “Now is a great time to be a Marketer.”

Marketing is playing a more important part in the modern enterprise, Payne explained.  At the same time, it is more and more driven by technology and the people that understand how to leverage it.  Marketing budgets are now larger than IT budgets and marketers must learn how to master new marketing technologies.  It’s this leveraging of technology that led to Eloqua’s new tag phrase, “How Modern Marketing works”.

Joe went on to say that Modern Marketers understand digital body language, are social and mobile, use apps, focus on data and analytics, and collaborate with Sales.  And as he went, he showed different features of Eloqua or its apps that allow you to do those things.  These included social scoring, executive dashboards for iPads, emails automatically formatting and fitting on your mobile device, apps to clean your data, Chatter inside Eloqua, Discover, Profile, and Engage tools for Sales.

Many of the sessions involved Eloqua customers outlining the ways that they are using this versatile tool, including:

  • How to use Eloqua to do account based lead scoring by adding up the contact score of each individual engaged
  • How to leverage customer data in a finance system and data from a SaaS application to create highly customized emails to service, up-sell, and cross-sell customers throughout the entire length of the customer lifecycle.
  • When using hidden form submissions in emails how email click through can trigger all sorts of customized activities

Steve Woods made an interesting point about social data, saying that the more open the data is (think Twitter) the less structured and useful it will be, whilst the more closed it is (think LinkedIn), the more structured and useful it will be.  The challenge for Modern Marketers is to figure out when they need which and how to take advantage of the full spectrum of data available.

And I saw one of the funniest ‘talks’ (if you can call it that) from Jeffrey Hayzlett, author of “Running the Gauntlet”.  He told some hilarious stories about being the CMO of Kodak, trying to become a cowboy, failing tragically at raising pheasants, and in general being an agent of change and disruption in everything he did.  He said Modern Marketers are change agents in their companies and need to take risks to push a new way of doing things.  And he got a huge laugh when he issued this simple warning to others:  we will beat you!

The highlight of the event is always the Markie awards, where 20 awards are given away to the world’s best marketers.  I was proud to see that MarketOne customers were nominated for 18 of the 20 awards.  I always knew we kept good company.  Even more exciting, 5 of our clients won:  Ariba, Eaton, Rockwell Automation, McAffee and D&B.

Congratulations to all our customers!  Look forward to seeing you at EE ’13!