Marketing Campaigns vs. Sales Campaigns in Oracle Sales & Marketing Cloud

It's important for those looking into running their campaigns on Oracle Sales and/or Marketing Cloud to understand the differences between the marketing capabilities of the two systems.

Depending on the complexity of their marketing requirements, some of our clients use Oracle Marketing Cloud (aka Eloqua), some of them use Oracle Sales Cloud (Fusion CRM) and some of them use both to fulfil them. It is important for those who are looking into running their campaigns on Oracle Sales and/or Marketing Cloud to understand the differences between the marketing capabilities of the two systems and when to leverage each. Let’s look into the marketing capabilities of the two systems in more detail.

Oracle Marketing Cloud provides state-of-art campaign design, management and execution capabilities with its well-known Campaign Canvas tool.

Figure 1 - Campaign Canvas in Oracle Marketing Cloud

For example, if you have a series of product launches globally or are running a complex multi-stage campaign, Marketing Campaigns in Oracle Marketing Cloud can surely simplify the process of putting together the campaign flow and run it efficiently.

But, what if your Sales reps want to run a one-off, highly personalised, mini-campaign that is fully managed by them?

Delegating this task to the Marketing Department is an option. However, there are two challenges here:

• Your marketing team might already be stretched and this request from the sales team might not be picked up as quickly as your sales team wants (we all know that Salespeople often need to act quickly)
• Your Salespeople might have a closer relationship with the target audience and can actually get a more personalised message out there

If your company is using Oracle Sales Cloud along with Oracle Marketing Cloud, you have another option. You might want to consider empowering your own Sales Team to run their personal campaigns by utilising the Sales Campaigns functionality of Oracle Sales Cloud.

Figure 2 - Sales Campaigns Homepage in Oracle Sales Cloud

Your Sales reps can use Sales Campaigns to:

• Supplement marketing efforts
• Engage, educate & nurture their accounts
• Promote territory-specific and account-specific offers & promotions
• Reach out to specific contacts at specific accounts in order to complement the corporate messaging pushed out by your Marketing Campaigns

Sales Campaigns can be built in 4 easy steps:

1. Select the target audience
   1. From your list of Contacts
   2. Copy from a previous Sales Campaign
2. Design & send personalised emails to Contacts
3. Capture user responses
   1. View Click-through rate of Campaigns
4. Define follow up actions

Here is an example of a Sales Campaign being built:

Figure 3 - Building a Sales Campaign in Oracle Sales Cloud

In order to be able to visualise where the two products stand (Oracle Marketing Cloud – Marketing Campaigns & Oracle Sales Cloud – Sales Campaigns) in terms of functionality and where they fit, you may want to have a look at the table below:

Even though Sales Campaigns are easy to build and execute, it is important to keep them aligned with your overall messaging. Therefore, you may wish to consider a (light touch) approval process in order to manage the consistency of the messages being sent out from your Sales Department.

To sum up, Sales Campaigns cannot be seen as a replacement for your Marketing Campaigns but it can be used as a great way to complement your overall Marketing Strategy, relieve the pressure on your Marketing Team and bring the two often - so distant departments closer.

Table 1 - Marketing Campaigns vs. Sales Campaigns

If you would like to know more about the marketing capabilities of Oracle Sales Cloud & Oracle Marketing Cloud, please give us a call or contact us here.