1. Marketing Automation:
The Secret Sauce to Marketing-Driven Sales Growth
and Empowerment
A Cross-Industry Analysis

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Introduction.................................................................................................................................... 3
Marketing Today: Coming to Terms with a New World Reality................................................. 3
Unstructured and Low-Quality Data.......................................................................................... 3
Siloed Marketing and Sales Organizations................................................................................ 4
Overhead Costs Hemorrhaging the Bottom Line...................................................................... 4
Prolonged Sales Cycle.................................................................................................................. 4
Marketing 2.0: A Necessary Reboot for an Aging Model........................................................... 5
Marketing Automation to the Rescue.......................................................................................... 7
Healthcare.................................................................................................................................... 7
Insurance and Financial Services................................................................................................ 7
Manufacturing.............................................................................................................................. 8
Eloqua: A Solution Brief................................................................................................................ 8
The Bottom Line............................................................................................................................ 9
contents

3. Marketing Automation: The Secret Sauce to Marketing-Driven Sales Growth and Empowerment
Introduction
Technology has toppled barriers to the global marketplace and geographic boundaries are no longer an
obstacle to identify and reach sales prospects. Increasing global access to the Internet; proliferation of social
media networks; and the widespread use of smartphones, tablets, and gaming consoles offer customers new
ways to collect information and make purchases. In addition, they provide companies large and small with new
and exciting channels to market their products and services.
Yet the benefits of technology present a globalizing company with marketing challenges and process pitfalls.
Though marketers today have access to a lot of data, for the most part they are challenged to understand
what part of that data is actually meaningful. Data on its own is just bits and bytes of zeros and ones.
Understanding behaviors that influence the customer decision-making process while leveraging real-time data
empowers marketers to find and monetize opportunities. Analytics makes data come to life and unlocks its
potential. It enables marketers to overcome the complexity of their data and find valuable insights. It is the
“secret sauce” that when done well, makes marketing a hero and wins you a seat at the revenue table.
Additionally, marketers must be prepared to address increased workflow complexity and campaign
management across multiple borders, leveraging multiple different channels (out-bound and in-bound, online
and off-line) and using social media platforms effectively. With so many tools available to marketers today,
deciding what would be the best fit is a daunting task.
The role of the marketer is changing rapidly, and digital marketers today have doubled up as data scientists and
technocrats as well. With marketing budgets constantly under pressure, marketers are held more accountable
than ever before to show tangible growth. The ability to identify potential sales engagements, embrace
behavior-based nurturing of prospects, and measure messaging effectiveness and customer conversion are
critical factors for marketing and business success.
This white paper is the first of a series exploring the diverse capabilities that Marketing Automation Solutions
(MAS) bring to companies worldwide to meet established growth objectives and improve sales efficacy.
This paper will show how marketing automation helps drive trigger-based marketing across different verticals
and enhances the value proposition of complementary solutions such as Customer Relationship Management
(CRM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM).
Marketing Today: Coming to Terms with a New World Reality
The business world today moves at the speed of the Internet and many companies have deployed myriad
point solutions in marketing and sales to address operational and market demands that fuel business growth.
Solutions like CRM, ECM, Marketing Process Optimization, and other digital marketing tools have significantly
helped companies, but they’ve also opened a Pandora’s box of new challenges that, when left un-tackled, lead
to marketing and sales inefficiencies.
Frost & Sullivan has surveyed marketers across several verticals to understand the challenges they face. The
next part of this paper summarizes some of the key challenges plaguing marketing organizations today:
Unstructured and Low-Quality Data
In a typical organization, most marketers are forced to work with siloed systems such as the company’s social
media outreach programs or event marketing programs. They have unorganized data sets with outdated
content in their systems. Social media, especially, generates massive amounts of data, but marketers have no
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way of leveraging the insights that can be gleaned from that rich data. Though social media is part of their
marketing campaign strategy, they typically do not have access to tools that would stitch their disparate
systems together and automatically integrate the technology platforms for centralized access to real-time
information. The prevalence of basic analytics in most organizations today also gives a false sense of security
where marketers believe that they have their bases covered.
Although marketers believe they have the right tools to engage the customer community, there is no
accountability. Many times there is no tangible measurement of performance or a way to find the really
valuable prospects that are worth pursuing. Critical marketing processes such as content marketing, campaign
building, drip campaign management, and measuring campaign results are spread across different employees
and loosely tied together with sporadic communication. The end result is frequently a busy and unusable
data set that defeats the purpose of behavioral marketing. The unstructured and noisy set of data is a classic
problem that gives rise to ineffective messaging in marketing campaigns.
Siloed Marketing and Sales Organizations
Frost & Sullivan research further revealed that for most organizations, sales and marketing are rarely in sync
with each other. Organizations are most efficient closing an engagement when the sales organization has
prospects that have been vetted and there is tangible information about the prospect’s interest. In contrast,
marketing campaigns are more focused on getting the maximum possible leads regardless of quality, rather
than identifying qualified engagements worth pursuing. This causes the sales team to spend valuable time
separating the chaff from potential high-value engagements instead of working together with marketing from
the very start. It distracts them from focusing their efforts on high-quality prospects.
Overhead Costs Hemorrhaging the Bottom Line
Another challenging area for marketers is when employees work in isolation on intensive manual tasks.
These tasks range from building landing pages to creating, developing, and launching campaigns that could
include off-line mailers. Add to this the resources for everyday marketing activities such as maintaining
existing marketing programs, customer segmentation, acquisition, reporting, email creation, updating content,
qualifying leads, among various other activities, and marketing costs can quickly spiral out of control.
All of these activities are critical; however, marketers have struggled with efficiency and have overextended
themselves trying to make these processes manageable. This has made it difficult to measure the return on
investment for marketing campaigns as costs are spread across many different touch points. The result is that
companies are rethinking their marketing investments and are jeopardizing the efficacy of their sales organization.
Prolonged Sales Cycle
A challenge echoed by marketers is the lack of integration of their digital marketing tools with other solutions
critical for business success. In an ideal scenario, prospect engagement information, sourced through print-based
PURLs, social media campaigns, contact center interaction, and all other out-bound and in-bound online activity,
should be automatically ingested into sales tools like CRM systems that account executives access daily. What
actually occurs, however, is that sales executives have little or no visibility into marketing campaign data. This
seriously hampers effective conversations with potential clients and prolongs sales cycles.
In the world of digital marketing and eCommerce, milliseconds count. The time that it takes for a visitor
to find a site, to form an opinion of whether or not it meets their expectations, and then to commit to or
bounce off the site can be quick. As companies invest more in online channels, search engine marketing, social
media and mobile marketing, and programs that can validate their efforts, such connections can be lost in the
blink of an eye.
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5. Marketing Automation: The Secret Sauce to Marketing-Driven Sales Growth and Empowerment
When the success or failure of customer engagement moves so rapidly, old marketing rules no longer apply.
The ability to track visitors on a company’s Web property and create profiles for unknown visitors based
on how they interact with the website—and engage them at the peak of their interest—shortens sales cycles
and increases the probability of success. Unfortunately, a lack of internal communication and integration with
marketing systems can inhibit potential sales.
As companies try to proactively engage with customers, their ability to reinforce brand equity, create a
competitive edge with growth potential and, in some cases, their ability to survive is at stake. However,
there is light at the end of the tunnel as Marketing Automation provides a solution that overcomes all of the
aforementioned challenges.
Marketing 2.0: A Necessary Reboot for an Aging Model
The role of marketing is being redefined in the 21st century. Companies expect accountability from marketing
organizations and need marketing to be a flagship department that builds brand awareness and leads the way
to sales success. Today’s marketer needs to empower the sales organization by running marketing campaigns
that develop high-quality engagements that also have a high probability of conversion. All marketing activities
should produce quantifiable business opportunities in an efficient manner that stays within budgetary
restraints; this is where marketing automation helps.
Marketing Automation Software (MAS) automates marketing and sales activities to drive revenue growth
and empower organizations to make data-driven decisions. MAS solutions have emerged to align with the
evolving customer engagement lifecycle. A customer engagement lifecycle is viewed as an ecosystem that
comprises of generating interactive content to create awareness of a company’s offerings in order to engage,
nurture, acquire, and build relationships with customers, eventually enabling them to become advocates and/
or influencers of a brand.
CONTENT MARKETING ENABLEMENT
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Source: Frost & Sullivan
A Frost & Sullivan survey of marketers provided insight on experiences after deploying Marketing Automation
Solutions in their organizations. The survey revealed a dramatic difference in marketing operations by using
these solutions.
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Before the introduction of MAS, marketers did not have metrics to measure efficacy of marketing campaigns;
today they report the ability to measure not just click-through rates, website visits and brand impressions, but
also customer conversion rates and detailed customer behaviors. Importantly, campaigns can be improvised
on the go based on the quality of interaction with prospects that drives the overall success of campaigns, with
minimal growth in expenses and overhead.
Having suffered marketing process fragmentation and silos, marketers reported they can now organize
everything in one place—marketing content, previous campaigns, all of the collected metrics, quality leads,
customer profiles, customer conversions—which makes them more productive and efficient.
Marketers have also used MAS to control their cost structure. Everyday activities such as customer
segmentation, marketing campaign process flow, campaign statistics, content marketing, and trigger or
behavior-based nurturing can be automated. This allows marketers to focus on result-oriented tasks that
show tangible ROI on campaigns with metrics that include number of engagements generated and converted,
number of new site visitors, interaction with prospects and automating outgoing messages. This has made
manual intervention an exception rather than the rule.
With Marketing Automation, companies can leverage data that helps them maintain information of prospects
with important historical data. Because of this, marketers can now identify key interests and send relevant
content to generate demand for products and services, while also nurturing relationships. This provides an
advantage over competitors who do not have granular information about their customer base.
For example, today marketers can use MAS to create profiles of visitors based on triggers such as downloading
content, website interaction, PURL activation or an interaction through social media, as these triggers can
now be monitored and reported and used to convert unknown visitors to “knowns” at the peak of their
interest. Subsequently, marketers are alerted at an opportune time to engage with prospects and help them
with their purchase or inquiry.
A sales organization’s typical frustration stemming from a lack of customer information via marketing
campaigns evaporates as companies deploying Marketing Automation integrate it with their existing CRM
systems. It now gives them the ability to leverage big data and analytics for their sales cycle. This allows
marketers to extract intelligence and empowers them to effectively triangulate the imperfect nature of
various data streams, such as print-based PURLs, social media, online and offline channel interactivity, among
others. Using the power of analytics to mine for the most relevant data, marketers can successfully nurture
customer relationships. With MAS integration, sales executives have access to historical information on each
engagement through a single dashboard, which enables relevant and timely communication with the customer
necessary to accelerate sales cycles.
Metrics such as number of engagements generated, trigger or behavior-based customer qualification, and
number of opportunities created help monitor productivity and performance of sales and marketing teams to
create accountability that can be measured.
The increasing amount of customer data gathered through multi-channel marketing has compelled marketers
to do a better job organizing these disparate pieces. Marketing Automation has become the preferred platform,
as it allows data management and viewing of individual customer information in a centralized location.
Marketing Automation allows marketing and sales teams to coordinate effectively and streamlines
communications. Now marketing and sales can work together toward common goals and complement each
other to achieve business success based on well-defined metrics.
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7. Marketing Automation: The Secret Sauce to Marketing-Driven Sales Growth and Empowerment
Marketing Automation to the Rescue
The benefits of a Marketing Automation solution are relevant for any industry or market vertical. As an
example of how Marketing Automation vendors are empowering marketers globally, let us see how Eloqua
(now part of the Oracle family) brings to bear its value proposition to marketing organizations within several
specific industries.
These are just a few examples of how different verticals, many of whom share similar characteristics in their
marketing channels, have benefited from Marketing Automation. As a part of Frost & Sullivan’s coverage of
the Marketing Automation market, we have a follow-up series of papers that go into vertical-specific usecases and will discuss, in detail and using real-life case studies, how Marketing Automation was able to make
a tremendous impact on business performance and sales growth for companies within diverse industries.
Healthcare
As competition continues to intensify across the healthcare ecosystem, companies across the value
chain have struggled to understand how best to market to their respective constituents. For example, a
healthcare provider depends on its insured patient pool to provide the revenues to stay in business and
provide services. As the market has become more competitive, other healthcare providers within the
same area are trying to attract the same pool of patients, putting a strain on the revenue model for all.
All things even, healthcare providers then have to find a way to differentiate themselves from competition
and develop a brand—something few have had the need to even consider doing in the past. Add to
this the intangibles that have a severe impact on a provider’s bottom line, such as the cost of ER visits.
Factors such as this have not been top-of-mind for the provider community’s marketing department,
which is now increasingly being put under microscope and being held more accountable. In today’s
world it is the marketing department that can be of the greatest benefit to the organization to not
only help create brand awareness and differentiation, but also ease the pressure of the bottom line and
become a profit center instead of an organizational burden.
Marketing automation software such as Eloqua can help healthcare and pharmaceutical companies reduce
compliance costs, collateral generation and maintenance overhead, while increasing sales conversions.
Insurance and Financial Services
The case of Zurich NA, an insurance company, is an example of how MAS helps within the financial
services market.The company’s specific challenge was the many hours being spent on manually tracking
spreadsheets related to broker events. The company automated this process using a combination
of Eloqua’s Engage, Profiler and Analyzer products. Salesforce and Eloqua were integrated, allowing
industry-specific campaign execution.
Further, event management tasks were significantly simplified to an easy three-step process: set up a
dashboard report, pull the results, and pass these on to the company’s business partners. In addition
to the time and cost-savings Zurich NA realized from a single integrated platform, the company also
benefited from up to 10% higher renewal rates.
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Manufacturing
The manufacturing industry can also reap tremendous benefits, as is illustrated through the deployment
of Eloqua at Balluff GmbH. The company was challenged by sales and marketing teams that were not
communicating effectively with each other. The result was that sales had to make do with very little
insight into customer and lead activity from the company website. The company also suffered from the
inability to effectively tackle these challenges due to a lack of experience with Marketing Automation.
By leveraging Eloqua’s Lead Management along with Eloqua forms, hypersites, landing pages and
reporting, Balluff has improved the alignment between its marketing and sales teams. Furthermore, by
leveraging Digital Body Language, which provides crucial insight into visitor activity, Balluff can tailor
content to customer and visitor interest, thus boosting sales and customer loyalty, while making sales
and marketing work together toward a common goal of company growth.
Eloqua: A Solution Brief
Eloqua offers advanced campaign execution, email marketing, social media marketing, and behavioral marketing
capabilities for B2B and B2C organizations. All repeatable tasks are automated, while users focus on measuring
the impact of their campaigns. With numerous email templates in their repository, Eloqua offers multiple ways
to communicate with customers. Trigger-based nurturing capabilities ensure that the customers stay engaged,
while customer segmentation features facilitates personalized customer engagement.
While the software captures and tracks relevant data, users can study individual profiles, inbound referrals,
and information about their prospects’ behaviors. Lead scoring identifies strong leads that can be assigned to
sales people at the right time.
Eloqua also provides a comprehensive set of applications and services to complement their marketing
automation platform. These applications save time and eliminate all the heavy lifting that goes into content
and data management activities. The Oracle Eloqua AppCloud consists of more than 80 in-house and thirdparty applications such as channel management systems, content management systems, social landing page
tools, and webinar and event marketing tools that help their end user centralize all the data in one place.
The AppCloud unlocks the real potential of marketers by helping them be more efficient at their daily tasks
and focus on driving revenue for their company.
Eloqua’s Social Suite features a social sign-on feature that prompts customers to login to their Facebook,
Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts. This way, the platform collects email addresses and ties in the customers’
social identities to their existing profile information. The platform builds awareness on social media, engages
customers and tracks the impact of the company’s social media on its marketing campaigns through inbound
referrals and Web analytics.
Further, as part of the Oracle family, Eloqua has the added capability to tap into larger enterprise IT ecosystems
and bring Oracle’s deep vertical expertise to the table.
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9. Marketing Automation: The Secret Sauce to Marketing-Driven Sales Growth and Empowerment
The Bottom Line
Today, the success or failure of a marketing campaign is measured at the level of individual consumers,
experiences, engagement, and engagement conversions. For too long marketers have been bogged down with
siloed tasks that prevent the generation of effective, actionable data-sharing with sales executives. Siloed tasks
can now be automated and made more intelligent, and connected in a way that springboards companies to
improved sales.
Companies like Eloqua have forged ahead to put marketers on a path leading to business growth as their
role is redefined in the today’s global business environment. The benefits that Marketing Automation brings
to organizations are well-documented and are business-critical for proactive organizations that are serious
about breaking down the walls between sales and marketing departments, while focusing on becoming more
personalized and targeted with their digital marketing strategy. In doing so, companies are positioned for
success in transforming customer dialogues to relationships that can be nurtured.
The follow-up series of papers takes a deeper dive into the unique way Marketing Automation provides very
tangible benefits to diverse markets such as healthcare, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and telecommunications.
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