Situation
Agencies must stay at the forefront of technology and trends to lead their clients into new spaces. When marketing automation became more popular, Simantel, a marketing agency I worked for, had to expand its offerings beyond marketing automation strategy to include execution. The company needed to be able to build marketing automation campaigns in-house.
In addition to better understanding the entire marketing automation landscape, the company wanted to achieve Eloqua certifications. Not only was this the technology that our largest client chose to implement, but it also offered enterprise-scale capabilities that could be leveraged by other clients.
Action
My journey to learning marketing automation with Oracle Eloqua can best be summarized in three phases.
Phase One: Learn the platform inside-and-out
- I will always remember 2014 by the number of dummy campaigns I created in Eloqua (113 to be exact).
- After 100s of hours of Oracle University training courses, live bootcamps and hands-on work in the system, I became something of a marketing automation guru (in my mind).
Phase Two: Earn some credentials
- As I started to realize the true power of marketing automation, I decided to complete even more training courses earning several Eloqua certifications along the way.
- With these credentials behind me, I was primed to build master marketing automation campaigns within my company’s Eloqua instance.
Phase Three: Improve agency-wide marketing automation
- Not content to keep this newfound knowledge to myself, I joined forces with co-workers to improve the internal processes for conceiving and managing marketing automation campaigns throughout the agency.
- This ambitious undertaking resulted in a set of in-house training documents and one-page briefs designed to supplement the Oracle training materials with agency-specific guidelines.
Results
Armed with a new understanding of Oracle Eloqua and its capabilities in the marketing automation space, we were able to:
- Create an entirely new department and product offering
- Identify the people and skillsets needed to power our new offering
- Become a Certified Oracle Eloqua partner