Compendium Content Marketing Platform Coming In

You have probably read some posts about the marketing automation project within Exact. One of the main assets which is mandatory to enable ourselves to really make it work is the availability of compelling content. With new countries kicking in we changed the organisation at the beginning of this year. Central Marketing teams who take care of content and automation for all the countries and field marketing organisations who take care of the execution for local demand generation and awareness programs. A major effort to make this really work. Creating an organisation on paper and describing responsibilities for central and local is step 1. The next step to drive people to practice what has been written and thought about is an even tougher step. But we are getting there and teams are more and more aligned with each other. Trust and mutual respect are pre-requisites for starting with the 3rd step: making the processes more efficient.

Content Marketing

I can say that we are practicing content marketing now for some time. The pieces of content created by the Central Content Creation team are improving every month. It needs to be appealing, compelling, cool and the message that we bring across needs to be consistent. In all 5 countries where we are active now, for all 5 product suites that we deliver in all 3 life cycle phases that we defined. Theoretically we need 5 x 5 x 3 = 75 different types of for instance whitepapers to serve everybody at best.Theoretically we need 5 x 5 x 3 = 75 different types of for instance whitepapers to serve everybody at best. Theoretically because we decided for now to use whitepapers only for 1 certain life cycle phase. Still 25 versions of white papers are left.

Managing the process

The more you start to practice the ideas, visions and plans that have been worked out the better you start to understand the needs around the marketing automation platform, in our case Eloqua. We try to keep our websites as light as possible by building all intelligence and business rules in the back end, the Eloqua system. Webforms, dynamic content, lead scoring, behavioral targettig is all done from the backend system. I want to be able to change the front end quickly since this is part is subject to change frequently. Our Central Content Creation team consists of copywriters, content managers and art directors. They are responsible for the creation and production of marketing materials from whitepapers to digital product brochures to animations to infographics. With the number if content pieces being delivered the team starts to realize the lack of having a system that truly support the content creation process. With the number if content pieces being delivered the team starts to realize the lack of having a system that truly support the content creation process.Many people are involved, inside the company but also outside the company, from customers to suppliers, from colleagues to freelance journalists. Also the central storage and distribution of these marketing assets become a challenge. Right now our content is at many places stored. Wouldn’t it be nice when you are able within Eloqua to select a variety of marketing assets right from the digital canvas board?

Compendium, Vidyard and Kapost

This is the moment where you start to search for some additional tools. Best starting point for that is the appcloud of Eloqua. Knowing that the products published in this list are integrated to a certain extend with the marketing automation system. Very useful to see which other processes are ready for optimization. This is how I discovered Allocadia, a cloud based financial monitoring tool for tracking budget, actuals and forecasting of marketing spend. This is how I discovered Allocadia, a cloud based financial monitoring tool for tracking budget, actuals and forecasting of marketing spend.We found out that Vidyard could help us with central storage and distribution of video content and for some time we were looking at content management platform like Kapost and Compendium. So for us it was no surprise and even a relief that Eloqua, currently owned by Oracle, announced this week to acquire Compendium. For us this is great news because this will help to accelerate the optimization of our international marketing organisation with tools that are fully integrated, in the cloud. Very curious to see how this will evolve in the next few months. One of the team members is visiting the Eloqua Experience this week and hopefully he is able to found out more. Our next step in ‘champions league’ marketing.