B2C marketing automation battle heats up with latest Oracle updates

Just because your marketing is automated doesn’t mean it needs to feel that way.

Today, Oracle announced updates to “Program Orchestration” B2C cross-channel marketing product that will help it be more adaptive to customer interactions rather than planned out in advance. The direction recognizes that customer journeys are complex, and should help your marketing feel less staged, preplanned, and … well … automated.

Program Orchestration as a product is based on Responsys, which Oracle bought for $1.5 billion at the very end of 2013, and it’s getting four primary updates.

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First, “event switches” allow marketers to input data and conditions to establish (very nearly) real-time behavior triggers. With many competing automation tools, there are periodic updates to synchronize data — rather than it being immediate and ongoing — meaning delays in reacting to customer actions. Event switches will help avoid this problem.

Second, “advanced targeting” is Oracle Marketing Cloud’s new lookalike audience modeling capability. The feature enables marketers to define custom segments in existing clients, and then find prospects with similar characteristics among Oracle Data Cloud’s massive database of profiles. This capability is enabled primarily through Oracle’s acquisition of DataLogix for over $1.2 billion in February.

The third major update is what Oracle calls “Comprehensive Customer Insights,” a way of unifying customer data.

VB Insight’s new research shows that data unification is the top need to increase marketing automation ROI. By offering the ability to coalesce customer insights from the Data Cloud, Oracle Commerce, and Marketing Cloud, Program Orchestration creates an opportunity to address this significant challenge.

Oracle is also adding social advertising capabilities by way of integration with its Social Marketing offering. Although this feature already exists as part of that product, the integration means marketers will be able to include targeted social ads as part of their broader customer journey mapping strategy.

Fourth and finally, an integration with Oracle’s content marketing product, which comes via its Compendium acquisition, provides an easy set of tools to create and map content to personas in Program Orchestration.

(Oracle acquired Compenduim in October 2013 for an undisclosed price.)

Don’t call it B2C marketing automation
Oracle only refers to Eloqua, which it acquired for $871 million almost exactly a year prior to Responsys, as marketing automation. Responsys became Program Orchestration on the B2C side, however, and the company specifically does not refer to as marketing automation.

Marketing automation has traditionally been a technology used by B2B businesses. Yet B2C companies are increasingly adopting technologies to automate and personalize campaigns, for which they are turning to marketing automation.

Because of significant differences in the selling process between B2B and B2C businesses, most marketing automation vendors — especially on the enterprise side — focus on one or the other. B2B companies are usually centered on CRM and its sales force, whereas most B2C companies are more often centered on e-commerce.

To avoid confusion, many B2C marketing automation vendors aren’t calling themselves that at all.

Similar to Oracle, Salesforce refers to B2B-focused Pardot as marketing automation, but not its B2C-focused Journey Builder. Even Adobe Campaign (what was Neolane and also has mostly B2C customers) product information talks about campaign “orchestration,” a term both Oracle and Salesforce also use on the B2C side, rather than marketing automation.

Today’s announcements individually are not revolutionary, but taken together mark important progress in the formalization of a true marketing cloud, rather than a series of siloed technologies.

Call it what you want, but the fight is on to grab market share early in an increasingly important marketing technology category.