This is the fifth blog post in a 5-part series. View part 1: Targeting, part 2: Engagement, part 3: Conversion and part 4: Analytics.

Tenet 5: Marketing Technology

The terms Marketing and Technology seem to be inseparable these days. The technology available to marketers is vast – marketing automation, event management, web analytics, SEO/SEM, CRM, social listening, data intelligence…and the list keeps going. Just take a look at this Gartner Digital Marketing Transit Map, which illustrates how the digital landscape is a wide, complex territory. The map shows the shows the relationships among business functions, application services and solution providers. Building your marketing technology stack, and the people and processes to support it, is critical to the success of the modern marketer.

Integrating your marketing automation and event management technology allows you to unify customer data, engage the right audience, and analyze performance of your event marketing efforts. Using providers that have pre-integrated technology like the companies on the Oracle AppCloud is going to save you a lot of time and resources. It will increase the speed in which you can respond to your event attendees because you will not be spending hours manually downloading, mapping, and uploading data across systems. Many of today’s event management technology applications, like On24 and Certain, allow you to map various data points across systems – from profile information collected at registration, to event activity data such as engagement and interest scores.

Think about it - technology allows marketers to create a unique and personalized brand experience for events at every stage of the process: to build pre-event hype, to drive registrations, to engage attendees, to extend post event conversations, and to measure results. All of this robust information can be used in your marketing automation system to target, score, and nurture your contacts along the event and buyer’s journey. The right mix of technology will provide the most comprehensive view of customer interactions with your company. You can then take that information to orchestrate the right experience for each individual customer and prospect, helping to attract and engage the most ideal customers that spend more and stay loyal over time.

Applying the best practices and principles of the five tenets of modern marketing will ensure that you are creating highly engaged and better qualified leads, maximizing the impact of your events to both your customers and your business. Start by targeting a specific segment of your database, and use personalization techniques to engage your audience throughout the entire event journey. Then make sure you are measuring the conversion in terms of your event KPIs and the funnel. Depending on who your stakeholders are, you’ll want to provide the right metrics based on what they care about. Think about the metrics that matter to each internal stakeholder and then leverage the power of the technology to provide those metrics.

If you are just getting started with marketing automation technology, or want to further develop your knowledge, request to have the Communicating Through a Modern Marketing Transformation Facilitated Discussion with a marketing advisor today! Have a look at our complete listing of  Facilitated Discussions that are available at no cost to Oracle Marketing Cloud customers.