Most Modern Marketers are working to enhance engagement via increased personalisation with a variety of martech solutions.
Earlier this year, Stephen App – ecityinteractive posted a blog looking at 2017 Marketing Trends in the context of Higher Education.
I’d like to take his thoughts and put an additional angle on those observations. We’ve looked at the areas App refers to and then put an Oracle CX Marketing Eloqua filter on them.
In his original blog post “Five 2017 Marketing Trends, and What They Mean for Higher Education” App highlights 5 trends:
- Invest in video marketing
- Influencer marketing takes off
- Email is back
- It’s Reachpocolypse and
- Messaging will become more niche
One: Invest in Video Marketing
It’s hard to dispute that video content is where all marketers need to head and even more so for Higher Education. Although, as App points out in his post:
“Conversely, research by mStoner, in partnership with Chegg, reveals that 64 percent of teens say they prefer to consume college website content through text and articles, while only 40 percent of teens said they preferred video content.”
How can Eloqua help you with Video Marketing?
Initially, it’s worth considering where your video content “lives”. e.g., is it on YouTube, is it managed by a corporate solution like Vidyard or Brightcove? Each of these three video content management platforms, plus others, integrate with Eloqua in a variety of ways.
One example – YouTube is a great tool and heavily viewed, however most marketers dislike how YouTube will present the viewer with other videos it thinks they may like to watch at the end. Eloqua users can easily add YouTube content to an Eloqua Landing Page and adjust the experience to ensure your competitors videos aren’t recommended at the end of the play.
2: Influencer Marketing Takes Off
Do you have a UGC (user generated content) strategy in place? Are you making it easy for students to like, share and engage with your content?
“Consumers today, and especially young consumers, are intrinsically wary of branded content. Conversely, they are quick to relate and trust influencers who look like them.”
How can Eloqua help you with Influencer Marketing?
Eloqua users can easily add Social Share capability to emails and landing pages, making it easy for your cohorts to share your content in their social accounts.
Social Marketing – Eloqua provides simple integration via apps from the Oracle Cloud Marketplace for solutions like the Facebook Lead Ads app as well as the Facebook Sign On app enabling your contacts to use their Facebook Profile to access content that you might normally present them with an online form.
The Oracle Marketing Cloud Eloqua integrates with the Oracle Social Cloud, a solution that offers Listening & Engagement capability as well as Social Marketing. Learn More.
Additional apps are available for Twitter, Linkedin and a growing list of social networking platforms.
Millennials are spending five hours per day (30 percent of their media time) engaged with UGC (user generated content).
Not only do millennials trust UGC 50 percent more than any other media, they find it 35 percent more memorable.
Seventy-one percent of millennials engage in social media activity, making social media the group’s preferred type of digital media and a trusted channel to deliver brand messages.
SOURCE: AdWeek.com
3: Email Is Back
Maybe I’m living in a bubble, but I wasn’t aware email had gone away. I do confess to being aware that some higher education bodies were not issuing email accounts to students, but it appears the pendulum of radical non-email assignment, is swinging back.
Email provides a way to gain a more intimate understanding of a person’s Digital Body Language allowing you to personalise communications better than social marketing.
How can Eloqua help you with your Email Marketing?
Eloqua is a Marketing Automation platform, however some marketers don’t really understand the difference between that and email marketing. It’s more than “spin”, I assure you. Read an earlier blog post of mine, “Email Marketing is not Marketing Automation“.
As a stand alone solution, Eloqua provides powerful automation, personalisation and tracking capability across your various digital platforms, building a consolidated view of your student cohort.
If you choose to integrate Eloqua with a CRM e.g. Oracle Service Cloud (RightNow), Oracle Sales Cloud, Salesforce etc, you will begin to see even greater possibilities especially around trigger based campaigns and increased ability to segment your data without the need to engage external data washing/scrubbing services.
4: It’s Reachpocolypse
App suggests this means you need to use your analytics to maximise your paid media budget.
You will generally want more than just Google Analytics. If your’e struggling for budget to do more paid ads on social, it’s unlikely you’ve invested in middleware for an analytics big picture.
Where’s the best place to start?
How can Eloqua help you extend your reach?
From a social media perspective, Eloqua is more a syndication tool. It enables you to make it very easy for people to take your content and share it in their channels, as outlined above in point two.
Eloqua contains rich analytics reporting as well as a range of powerful dashboards across campaigns, emails, forms, landing pages, your website and more.
TIP: As a general observation, analytics taken from Eloqua and merged with analytics from your CRM/student database can become a powerful addition to your strategy planning sessions. Combing student enrolment data, interests, general profile data mixed with Eloqua’s Digital Body Language, provides an unprecedented level of insight for the organisation and the marketing team,
5: Messaging Will Become More Niche
“It’s 2017, and we are officially in information overload territory. There are seemingly hundreds of articles available for every google search. That means competition is fierce for many of the surface-level content topics that you might be considering. So how should you adjust to this new reality? According to esteemed blogger and whiteboard artist Rand Fishkin, marketers need to go niche.” – Stephen App
How can Eloqua help you go more Niche?
Once you decide to go niche, you will need some way to manage that process. As basic as it may sound, compliance around opt-in and opt-out along with subscriptions and preference management will be the key to your success.
Eloqua provides a robust and thorough way to manage subscriptions and preferences. The built-in process is standard with all levels of Eloqua, Basic, Standard and Enterprise. It can be as basic or as complex as you need it to be.
Just make certain you’re student experience (CX) is at the centre of your subscription management process and not the other way around.
Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know
A careful review of Eloqua’s Dashboards, Insight Analytics and Google Analytics can often reveal information about your cohort that you may not be aware of and in turn uncover niche behaviour.
There have been numerous times where I’ve created campaigns based on insight gained from Eloqua data. If we fail to make the time to review campaign performance, we may miss opportunities.
