One of the things we love most about Eloqua is its incredibly supportive community of staff and users. If you’ve ever visited Topliners, Eloqua’s own social media community, you’ve felt the buzz and excitement that this user group generates over marketing automation.
Once a year, this community comes out from behind the computer screens and engages face-to-face at Eloqua’s annual user conference. From novices seeking to understand more about the Eloqua platform to super-users sharing their successes and pain points, Eloqua enthusiasts around the country gather with one goal in mind: to enhance their marketing automation skills.
We recently had the privilege of speaking with Autumn Coleman, Senior Marketing Operations Manager at Manhattan Associates, a best-in-class global solutions provider for supply chain leaders out of Atlanta, Georgia. She shared with us how her team is using Eloqua and what she’s hoping to accomplish at this year’s user conference.
Can you provide us with an understanding of how Manhattan Associates uses Eloqua?
We’re getting more and more advanced by the day as we use Eloqua for a variety of projects and tasks. We use Eloqua for small, tactical projects like internal emails and landing pages, as well as larger projects like event automation and database segmentation. We’ve had great success using Eloqua cloud connectors to drive registrations for webinars and other events.
We’re also working towards nurturing a database of ideal “buyer personas” for our business. Eloqua is especially great for lead nurturing and getting the right content in front of the right people at the right time based on the person’s behavior and how engaged they are with us.
Can you talk a little about how your team goes about crafting content?
At Manhattan Associates, crafting content is a collaborative approach among a variety of different people across the organization and Eloqua is the technology that supports the distribution process. Using the intelligence we can gather from Eloqua, we craft white papers, case studies and webinars, and manage our corporate websites with up-to-date SEO.
We also like to re-purpose content that we’ve found to be successful in the past based on web and email click-through activity that we’ve been able to gather using Eloqua reporting. Testing engagement with subject lines and sample segmentation is a good marketing automation best practice as well.
The first step towards effective lead nurturing is to flesh out the buyer personas for our ideal customer. Having a complete picture of our ideal customer by gathering demographic information like industry, title and role has helped us create workflows that will send the person through Eloqua derived from their activity with Manhattan. Using this information, we can intelligently craft content based on the needs and pain points of our target customer base.
How will you determine if your time at Eloqua Experience has been successful?
Being that this is my second year attending the user conference and having upgraded to the new version of the Eloqua system, I’m definitely going into the conference with a few goals I’d like to accomplish.
First of all, I’m always on the lookout for any tips, training or best practices I can pick up about how to leverage the cloud for automation and operational efficiency, improve and maintain data quality, and anything else that allows me to show the value of Eloqua’s system.
Second, I’ll definitely be looking for information and training to further enhance the reporting of the system to the C-suite. The new version of Eloqua comes with a new business intelligence tool that offers deeper insights and metrics. I’m hoping to pick up some additional training and best practices on reporting at the executive level.
Lastly, I’m really excited to network with my Eloqua peers and meet other enterprise B2B customers and learn how they’re using the system. It’s easy to feel like you’re all alone in the world of marketing automation, but Eloqua has an amazing user group with a great sense of community. They want everyone to be successful. I really enjoy engaging in Topliners and building relationships with other Eloqua users who can be a great resource for information.
If there was one piece of advice you could share with Eloqua, what would it be?
I think training is key. Being in operations, developing my team’s training all the way down the line is important to me. The more training we can have from a beginner to an advanced level, the better. Make the best use of your clients’ time with training and availability.
