Event: Eloqua Experience '09
Earlier this month, Marketing Automation industry leader Eloqua held its second annual user conference at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco's Union Square, and I had the privilege of representing IntraLinks at the event. This two-day conference contained a great deal of information about Marketing Automation and the challenges marketers are facing today.
Social media was a very large part of this event, and they even leveraged the uber-cool idea of a "TweetBoard". Tweets using the #EE09 hashtag ended up live on the large LCD monitor outside the grand ballroom 32 seconds later, according to my test results.
The conference itself had a great deal of information, which I'll try to condense here. Eloqua has actually been around for a decade now, so it is the "inventor of the category" according to Laura Ramos of Forrester. Amazingly, Marketing Automation is still in the early adopter phase of the cumulative adoption curve, with only 2%-5% adoption according to IDC, Gartner and Forrester.
Joe Payne, CEO and Brian Kardon, CMO, kicked off the session, with a few highlights below:
- Marketing budgets were cut 30% in 2008, and headcount down 15%, according to Forrester
- Eloqua is now focused on the 5 big changes driving marketing:
- Marketing is driving Sales. Best-in-class companies use marketing to drive sales.
- Marketing is drowning in Data. Too much data is coming too fast, and where are the actionable insights?
- "Message Control" is dead due to the rise of social media.
- Is Marketing ROI provable?
- Technology
One of the major challenges Eloqua has had over the years is how to build an incredibly powerful program with a simple and elegant interface. (Okay, this is a problem most companies have, but Eloqua feels the pain quite a bit.) The centerpiece was a sneak peek at the Summer 2010 release of Eloqua's platform, which appears to be a strong foray into the elegance that marketing users are looking for from Eloqua.
As usual, at these conferences, you have to decide between two or three excellent presentations being held in different rooms. I've always found this extremely frustrating as an attendee, but eventually settled on listening to Tony Jaros from SiriusDecisions, Kimberley Kelly from NIIT, before joining back with the general session with Gail Ennis and Mikel Chertudi from Omniture. Tony Jaros mentioned some really incredible nuggets of wisdom about B-to-B marketing, namely:
- B-to-B marketing over the past 10 years has dramatically changed in function
- B-to-B marketers have few - if any - chances to learn without impacting results
- Improving the performance of marketing to meet today's challenges requires a multi-faceted approach
- 85% of B-to-B marketers describe themselves as self-taught professionals
- Only 25% of organizations that have purchased marketing automation are utilizing it to its fullest
- By 2015, 50% of B-to-B companies will deploy marketing automation (a far cry from the 2%-5% today)
Kimberley Kelly analyzed the way that NIIT is leveraging Eloqua to improve their Blog success. Naturally, a point of interest for us at the IntraLinks Blog, and the folks at Omniture went over how they're strongly impacting the bottom line using the data that Eloqua provides.
Day 2 started with Eloqua CTO Steve Woods showing off his now best-selling book "Digital Body Language", and hitting up the 5 trends to pay attention to in marketing:
- How buyers find information is changing
- The relationship with Sales has fundamentally changed
- The data we need is rapidly becoming free and available
- Marketing is regaining a seat at the table
- A new generation of marketers is growing
After Steve, the ever popular David Meerman Scott showed how user behavior is consistent worldwide. Users are going to Google or other Search Engines, and leveraging their peer-to-peer networks to make buying decisions, not via mainstream media, the yellow pages, or direct mail. Somehow, despite all this evidence, many organizations are focusing on the latter three as serious marketing channels in the 21st century. David also championed the power of video by highlighting the use he has gotten out of the Flip Camera.
The rest of the day consisted of listening to Mike MacFarlane and Jocelyn Brown of Eloqua discussing some ways to leverage a "Contact Washing Machine" within Eloqua to standardize contact data within Eloqua, Doug Sechrist of Taleo discussed how they implemented an integrated system for lead scoring, rating, distributing and nurturing to drive better targeting and improved response rates, and Scott Marshall of Omniture showed how Omniture is leveraging social media with the help of Eloqua.
After that was a deeper look at the new product strategy for Eloqua into 2010, and the summer release, as a marketer, looks quite cool. With that, the conference ended, and we'll have to wait for #EE10 to come around next year to see what is going on in Demand Generation and Marketing Automation in the new decade.