Oracle’s Marketing Cloud adds account-based marketing and boosts AddThis interest targeting

New capabilities build on what the company sees as its biggest competitive asset: data.

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Oracle’s Marketing Cloud is today offering account-based marketing (ABM) lead acquisition, and a deeper integration with topic-based data from its January acquisition of social insights platform AddThis.

The Audience Data Marketplace in Oracle’s Data Cloud has been “consumer-focused with a bit of business data,” Group Vice President of Products John Stetic told me. Targeting was available at an industry level so that you could target “computer companies” but not, say, IBM.

Now, he said, business data is enhanced so that marketers can target specific companies in an industry and individuals within those companies. This is being made possible by the direct integration of B2B data from Oracle’s data management platform (DMP), BlueKai, into the Marketing Cloud.

Oracle describes the BlueKai assets as “one of the industry’s largest set of curated B2B account audience data” for paid media targeting, representing over a million US companies and more than 60 million anonymized business profiles for individuals.

Marketers can now also search by specific online behaviors or offline/online purchases. The idea, Oracle said, is to help boost account-based lead-gen and conversion and to shorten sales cycles.

In addition to BlueKai, there is also a new integration with account-based marketer Demandbase, which is providing Marketing Cloud-specific info. Also new: additional functions for scoring, nurturing, tracking and messaging accounts and an ability for B2B marketers to more easily check the completeness and validity of incoming data.

On the B2C side…

Over on the B2C side, there’s a new integration with AddThis’s Audience Discovery tool, which employs natural language processing (NLP) to track and target website visitors by their interests. The Discovery tool tracks the interests of about two billion users visiting more than 15 million sites.

Stetic noted that AddThis functionality was previously much more structured. For instance, a high-end athletic brand could search for people who had shown an interest in “yoga” by viewing pages containing that word in the last seven days.

A search on “yoga” would return related topics, but now a search also returns topics for related keywords. “Yoga,” for instance, now also returns searches for, say, “healthy eating,” utilizing AddThis’s machine learning ability to recognize similar content.

There’s also a deeper integration between Oracle Maxymiser (which the tech giant bought last year), the DMP and the Marketing Cloud’s B2C marketing automation platform, Responsys, to better personalize online experiences through multi-variant testing.

This new capability, Stetic said, can be used to solve the “cold start”problem: “If my website has never encountered this person before, how can I personalize for this person?”

Now, the platform can determine if the DMP has data on this visitor, even if anonymous, and/or if there are enough “look-alike” profiles so that personalized content can be inferred for this person and tested. Maxymiser can also now be utilized for multi-variant testing of email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging and display ads.

The Oracle Marketing Cloud’s deeper integration with its data sources, Stetic said, emphasizes its key competitive advantage of having what he described as “the richest data set” in the industry, including both Oracle’s and its data partners’, like Demandbase.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Barry Levine
Contributor
Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.

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