Situation
Agencies have to stay on the cutting edge of technology and trends, leading their clients leading into new spaces. When marketing automation became more popular, the agency that I worked needed to expand their offering beyond marketing automation strategy to include execution. The company needed to be able to build the marketing automation campaigns that they built in-house.
In addition to better understanding the entire marketing automation landscape, the company wanted to achieve Eloqua certifications. Not only was this was the technology that our largest client choose to implement, 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
- Phase Two: Earn some credentials
- Phase Three: Improve agency-wide marketing automation in the Eloqua space
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
Additional Details
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 in the Eloqua space
- 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.