Whether it’s an online event, webinar, virtual trade show, in-person networking session, or old-fashioned booth and exhibit, event marketing continues to be an important piece of the marketing puzzle. Although events have changed significantly over the past decade, the importance of them has not. They are a proven way to meet new prospects, network with existing clients, meet with friends and colleagues, and perhaps most importantly, drive and accelerate pipeline revenue.

There are lots of great resources and guides on how to make events work for you. A simple Google search will bring hundreds of articles, books, and best practices to help you plan and manage your events. One such e-book, which I highly recommend, is Making Rain with Events, written by Relationship One’s Scott Ingram. You can find it on Amazon, and I promise it will be worth your time to read.

With that said, this post is different. Although best practices are implied, the main focus is on harnessing the power of Oracle Eloqua and its many integrations and applications. After reading, I hope you will walk away with a few unique and interesting ways to boost the success of your next event.

Event Preparation

Targeting

One of the most critical parts of event marketing is making sure you engage the right audience. Segmentation best practices are paramount, and Oracle Eloqua filters can help you find the contacts most likely to attend and engage with your team. Standard segmentation principles apply; you should be encouraged to use all of your available data to match location, interest, and behavioral criteria to the audience you are targeting.

If you find that certain information is lacking in your database, whether demographic-based, location-based, or other, consider investigating a 3rd party solution that can append data to your contact list. Companies such as Netprospex, D&B, and Oceanos offer fully integrated applications with Oracle Eloqua that can add rich data to your contact records. Depending on the completeness and cleanliness of your data, these solutions may help build your target list more precisely.

You should also consider broadening your outreach by researching look-alike audiences — individuals that have similar profiles to the contacts you have segmented within Eloqua. You can use these look-alike audiences to run retargeting campaigns seamlessly. For example, there is a native connection with Facebook that will market directly to look-alike audiences if you are using Oracle’s Social Relationship Management (SRM) platform. Other applications and solutions, such as Kwanzoo, integrate directly with Eloqua to give you re-targeting and banner ad capabilities based on look-alike profiling.

Messaging

Getting the right message to your audience sets the stage for the success of your event. Your content should drive your audience to a specific action – whether it’s registering, visiting your booth, sharing your content, etc. Once you have the right data (see above!), harness it to provide personalized content to your target audience. Perhaps your message will vary depending on a person’s location, behavior, interest, or product-usage. Test various messages and content to see what drives the greatest result and use dynamic content in Eloqua to make personalizing content efficient.

Social media has become such a critical component of events, don’t forget to use it in your marketing! Encourage your audience to share content and invite their peers and colleagues to your event. There are lots of great ways to connect Eloqua to social channels. If you’re using SRM, you have a built-in way to stage communications through email as well as social. You should also consider utilizing the Eloqua applications that give your target audience the ability to share content. Oracle’s Social Sharing application makes it easy to add a social sharing call-to-action to landing pages and emails. This gives your readers the ability to share on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Facebook and Google+.

Oh, and don’t forget about mobile messaging. Assuming you have permission to contact your audience through their mobile devices, consider using SMS as part of your marketing automation campaigns. Eloqua has integrations with a number of SMS providers. A simple search for “SMS” in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace will return a number of available applications, including Relationship One’s Twilio SMS App. Once installed, this application shows up as an action on the canvas giving you the power to incorporate SMS into your overall campaign flow.

Last, but certainly not least, utilize advocacy marketing as much as you can. If you haven’t utilized advocacy marketing to its fullest, now is a great time to start. After all, your advocates are your best marketers. In addition to leveraging their power for reach and relevancy for your events,they will gladly share your content, provide beneficial recommendations, and spread the essence of your brand. The benefits of advocacy marketing are outside the scope of this post, but companies like Influitive are hitting this out of the park. Influitive offers a native application for Eloqua, ensuring your marketing automation and advocacy marketing are tied together.

Registration

It goes without saying that marketing automation can greatly improve your ability to capture and manage registrants. Whether you are using Eloqua’s built-in event module, the campaign canvas, or an integration with a 3rd party event platform, you can use the registration experience to your benefit.

Make the most of your registration pages by capturing information that will be most useful later – data that can be used for segmentation, personalization, and/or lead scoring. Make sure to validate the data capture in some way. Many email and data verification services offer standard application integrations with Oracle Eloqua, including Experian, ReachForce, BriteVerify, and Social123. You should also consider a data-cleansing machine within your marketing automation tool, ensuring data is consistent with your standardized practices. This is especially important if you are importing registration data from a 3rd party system.

Once you have your registration data requirements, you’ll be in a better position to begin building your nurturing campaigns and processes. It’s always a good idea to build messages that are personalized to the specific needs and interests of your various target audiences. If you have your segments built in Eloqua, you have all the necessary data points handy. If not, and registration data is stored elsewhere, investigate whether that event management tool has a native integration with Eloqua. Platforms such as INXPO, Citrix, Eventbrite, On24, and many others offer integrations that will import registration data into Eloqua.

For example, Relationship One has launched an application for Eventbrite that will feed registrants directly into an Eloqua campaign or program canvas. Leverage Eventbrite for all its glorious attributes (easy setup, increase reach, registration management, check-in, ticketing, etc.) with the power of Eloqua (I assume if you are reading this, that you know the robustness of the platform) to create a seamless and delightful event experience.

During the Event

There are lots of ways marketers capitalize on their presence at an event – whether they are exhibiting, speaking, sponsoring, or planning the event themselves. Although this post won’t go into detail about the various ways you can best market yourself and engage clients during an event, it will highlight a few interesting ways you can use marketing automation for lead capture and data transfer.

Whether you are attending an industry event or hosting your own online event or webinar, many platforms integrate with Eloqua and will give you the ability to import attendee information along with session data (such as how long they attended). For example, many popular event and conference platforms (think GotoMeeting, Cvent, WebEx, etc.) have applications offering cloud actions for campaign canvas. These cloud actions can be used directly in you canvas to register a contact for an event. This is invaluable if you are managing a webinar or event using an Eloqua form, but still need to register the attendee within the event management platform.

If you are attending an in-person event or trade show, you’ll typically use a lead capture machine or device of some sort. Although in many cases you’ll simply upload your spreadsheet into Eloqua as appropriate, there are other options you can explore. For example, here are solutions available that will connect a show’s lead system so you can use your own mobile or tablet device to scan badges and load information directly into Eloqua in real-time. Or, if it is a business card-heavy event, Relationship One’s Lead Capture App gives your the ability to email vCards or scanned business cards (turned into vCards) to an application that then imports the contact data into Eloqua.

Post Event

Your event is over, you’re back at your desk, and now you can finally relax. Right? Wrong! Now is when the fun begins. Now is when you get to follow-up with everyone that attended (and those that registered but did not), share all of the insights you garnered from the event, and engage leads down a follow-up nurture path.

Applications like Eventbrite for Oracle Eloqua can be can be instrumental in passing lead data into Eloqua for segmentation, nurturing, and scoring. Make sure you investigate every option for gathering attendee data post-event, especially if you have options to directly feed information into your instance. With Relationship One’s Eventbrite application mentioned previously, you have the ability to feed attendee information or use a decision step to route contacts appropriately depending on their attendee data.

As you follow-up with event content, remember all of the content applications available to you. Bolster your follow-up efforts with content management applications like Lookbook HQ, which allows for personalized content experiences across multiple channels. Look for unique applications, like SnapApp, to create engaging and interactive content that will get your leads deeper into your messaging and, most importantly, your funnel.

There are plenty of other fun and interesting ways to share your event content. Look into packaging webinar or in-person presentations through presentation sharing applications like SlideShare. Consider publishing recorded webinars or seminars on YouTube, Brightcove, Vidyard, or one of the many platforms that will sync data back into Eloqua for further analysis. There is no “one size fits all” approach, but there are lots of options for you to consider when building your drip campaigns.

Wrapping Up

At its very core, marketing automation is built to help marketers be more efficient, effective, and engaging with audiences. The Oracle Eloqua platform is built with an immense amount of flexibility and scalability, in a large part thanks to the ever-expanding suite of applications available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. Many of these applications are free to use while others require a license fee or cost. I encourage you to think creatively about how you can best utilize Oracle Eloqua and its many applications to harness the power of events. Please share the creative ways you utilize marketing automation to boost your success. We’d love to hear them!

Disclaimer: Applications referenced in this blog post are not the only solutions available for events. There are many apps and integrated platforms; the list is always growing! Check out Oracle’s Marketplace of apps that have been reviewed and approved by the Oracle Marketing Cloud to find the solution that meets your specific business needs. If you’re curious of my point-of-view on a particular app, contact me via the Comments.