Previously we’ve talked about using Pardot to create an effective content strategy, but Pardot is not the only marketing automation tool on the block. Did you know that you can also use Eloqua for content marketing to create and leverage a content strategy?
Content marketing — and subsequently, content strategy — is an invaluable component of your overall marketing plan. Content has a wide variety of uses, such as positioning you as a thought leader and subject matter expert in your field, engaging with your audience, and ultimately, driving marketing qualified leads to your sales team.
It’s a tall order, and managing so many pieces at once can be overwhelming. But fortunately, there are many tools available to help you manage your content marketing strategies, and one such tool is Eloqua.
As marketing automation platforms evolve, many are producing updated product features specific to content marketing and streamlining that process. Eloqua definitely has one of the more robust integrations.
This post will discuss how you can use Eloqua for content marketing and how it can be a beneficial tool in leveraging your content.
Why Use Eloqua for Content Marketing?
If you are an Eloqua user — or considering switching marketing automation platforms to Eloqua — using Eloqua for content marketing is a no-brainer. Oracle, which acquired Eloqua in 2012, offers a robust feature called — simply enough — Oracle Content Marketing, a cloud-based solution designed to streamline your content marketing strategy and process.
The team behind Oracle Content Marketing created an in-depth user guide that details how to best use the platform — however, at 574 pages, it can be quite cumbersome. Hence, we pulled out the most pertinent information to share how you can best use Eloqua for content marketing.
The Oracle content marketing integration is useful to marketing teams as they ideate, strategize, develop, and then deliver content in an omnichannel approach across the customer life cycle. Such features include:
- An Oracle Marketing Calendar app. This marketing calendar app lists your upcoming Eloqua campaigns (including drafts) and emails and makes it easy to review campaigns.
- A Dynamic Content app: The Dynamic Content app allows marketers to pull content from their Oracle Content Marketing platform to insert into emails and landing pages, creating a personalized end-user experience to drive engagement.
- Publishing Content to Eloqua: With this feature, you can automatically push content to Eloqua once it has been approved through a workflow as well as into the Shared Content folder.
The Oracle Content Marketing integration also makes it easy to use Eloqua for content marketing by following the “5 Principles of Content Marketing,” which are:
- Plan: Ideating and creating a solid strategy; can be done in tandem with a content calendar.
- Produce: Oracle says to produce is to “make it easy to use so everyone in the organization can participate;” for FeedOtter, producing means the output of your plan, i.e., a blog post or an ebook.
- Publish: Disseminate content by adding it to your website, blog, social channels, and marketing automation platform.
- Promote: Schedule and promote content through your social channels, a paid campaign, and/or through partnerships.
- Prove: Track your KPIs and show your content marketing ROI through reports. Eloqua makes this easy through their content marketing dashboard.
You can use these “5 P’s” as you optimize your Eloqua instance for your content marketing strategy.
Optimizing Your Eloqua Instance for Content Marketing
If you use Eloqua for content marketing, a crucial step is optimizing and configuring your account. Some of the most important to have for content marketing are:
- Personas: Within Oracle Content Marketing, you can create Personas based on your ideal audience and customer lifecycles. By setting up this field, you can help your marketing team keep track of the target audience and to keep in mind as they create content. This feature in Eloqua allows you to segment your audience by personas, ensuring that your pipeline receives the most relevant content to them.
- Content Type: Like WordPress, you can designate your different content types when you use Eloqua for content marketing and as a content management system. For example, text, page, or email blocks are the content types that come automatically within your Eloqua instance. The text content types are what you use for blogs and similar content, page content types are landing pages, and email blocks are used to create emails.
- Keyword Suggestions: SEO is a huge driver in content strategy and creation. The Oracle Content Marketing solution recognizes this and offers a keyword suggestion feature. The Keyword Suggestion recommends keywords to you as you write and develop your content to help you and your team create SEO-friendly content aligned to your brand’s messaging.
- Marketing Calendar: Marketing calendars are great to use for many reasons: to create visibility across teams, to show planned content, and to make sure teams are aligned and aware of what lies ahead. When you use Eloqua for content marketing, the calendar is built-in. It automatically lists your upcoming email campaigns — and you can modify if to feature all content strategies, not only email.
It’s worth noting that these are only four of the features you can optimize when you use Eloqua for content marketing — there are others, such as topic and idea planning, that you can dive deeper into within your Eloqua instance.
Leveraging Your Content Strategy
Now that you’ve done the legwork and have your content marketing foundations built, you can take that information stored within Eloqua and leverage it in your content strategy.
For this example, one of the easiest ways to leverage this information is by designing your next email campaign accordingly. Build out the approved workflow we talked about towards the top of this post with smart rules that send your prospects down different paths based on their tags and/or personas.
To do this, select your best content pieces in each subject area, and promote them to prospects that are tagged with those subjects. Then, follow up with similar content pieces that the prospect may be interested in. These emails should be personal in nature — something the Dynamic Content app can help you with — and come from a specific sender rather than just the company name.
Some other ways to leverage your content strategy with email include:
- Sending weekly blog digests or newsletters to the prospects that have shown previous engagement with your blog page or have subscribed to your blog. FeedOtter is a great tool to layer onto your Eloqua instance to enhance your RSS emails and automate this process.
- Using content pieces as the main focus of one of the first touches in your nurture campaigns. Be sure to link to your strongest performing pieces, like an ebook or guide, or one of your most popular blog articles.
- Creating a re-engagement email drip series to an inactive audience. We recommend sending this group a piece of content that encourages them to take action, like an ebook or whitepaper.
Final Thoughts
We hope you found this introduction to how you can use Eloqua for content marketing to be helpful. As you progress into an Eloqua content expert, be sure to check out the vast library Oracle/Eloqua has available to guide your learnings.
Not sure where to start with curating content for your emails? The most efficient, automated process for curating content is through the use of RSS feeds. To learn about enhancing your Eloqua instance with RSS blog digests and newsletter, schedule a demo with FeedOtter.
