This chapter covers the following topics:
Oracle Marketing provides the tools necessary to automate the planning, budgeting, execution, and tracking of your marketing initiatives. By automating these processes your marketing strategy is cost effective and intelligent.
Oracle Marketing enables you to accomplish the following:
Create and manage demand
Establish and maintain product, service, and brand awareness
Track and analyze leads and sales activities
Route leads to the “best” channel
Improve customer profitability
Understand customer behavior
Decrease customer acquisition cost
Reduce customer attrition
Automate marketing processes
Create and maintain best practices templates
Expedite time to market
Keep marketing aligned with the overall organization
Align leads, sales, marketing efforts and objectives
Distribute marketing information and collateral company wide
Provide the marketing team with relevant visibility into other parts of the organization
Measure marketing performance
Track spending
Provide performance measurements for leads, responses, and revenue
Understand the competitive landscape
Provide insight into competitor differentiation
Enable price point competition insight
The Oracle Marketing application is composed of several functional areas. The implementation and use of each functional area depends on your business requirements.
Core Marketing
Oracle Marketing's “core” functionality includes Programs, Budgets, Events, Metrics and Analysis, Deliverables and Price Lists.
For more information about core Oracle Marketing functionality, see the Oracle Marketing User Guide.
Campaign Workbench
The Campaign Workbench provides a streamlined user interface that enables you to create and execute campaign activities through various marketing channels (E-mail, direct mail, fax, telemarketing, advertising and Web. The Campaign Workbench also allows you to plan, budget, execute and track your campaigns. Data mining functionality is available to mine the customer database.
Audience Workbench
The Audience Workbench provides you with an intuitive interface to create and manage lists. This workbench displays customer information that is relevant, logical and easy for you to use.
Marketing Intelligence
The Marketing Intelligence component within Oracle Marketing provides comprehensive reports for the purpose of:
Planning
Performance monitoring
Analysis
During the planning cycle, marketing organizations should carefully study the results of their past activities. This provides the basis for any changes they will make to the upcoming activities, as well as the benchmark on which they can forecast their returns in the future. During the execution stage, monitoring performance on a daily basis enables marketing professionals to react to their market needs, test their forecast assumptions and make changes if necessary. Throughout all business cycles, analysis needs to be conducted and analysis always starts with reports that contain accurate, timely data.
Data Mining
Data Mining provides the ability to create predictive models of customer and prospective customer behavior based on historical data. Using these models, you can predict which segments to target for future marketing campaigns. By intelligently targeting only prospective customers with a high propensity to exhibit a desired behavior (e.g., respond to a marketing campaign), you can increase marketing ROI by decreasing the number of contacts and increasing the response rate.