How I delivered the merger of Eloqua and Oracle CX marketing content on Oracle.com

The problem from Oracle's perspective

Oracle's marketing leadership wanted to launch a marketing campaign during Oracle OpenWorld 2018, highlighting the combined Eloqua and Oracle CX product suite’s capabilities. 

In late 2012, Oracle bought Eloqua for $810M. Eloqua continued to operate as an independent website within the Oracle.com ecosystem until 2017. Then, the Oracle marketing executive leadership decided to merge Eloqua marketing content with Oracle CX products’ marketing content and form one overarching marketing site for prospective customers interested in Oracle CX products. However, the Eloqua website remained dormant within the Oracle ecosystem.  

Merging the Oracle customer experience (CX) marketing content would be organizationally complex and architecturally challenging.

• Identify CX orphan webpages and merge them into the Oracle.com CX website.

• Redesign responsive product, solutions, what-is, and family web page templates for US and international audiences. 

Customer research

Besides the Herculean effort it would take to merge the Eloqua marketing content with Oracle.com's website and its marketing structure, I couldn't lose sight of our customers’ needs. 

Quotes from customer: 

• “I’m confused by what you’re trying to sell. Can you simplify your website so I can understand where I need to go to learn more?” 

• “Sometimes, I start looking first for the answer to a question and the company that can answer my question best. That’s where I’ll look first.” 

• “I don’t even know what marketing product can solve my problem. I need to look at the big picture.” 

• “I’m looking for a solution to my problem. All I see is a bunch of products.” 

These quotes propelled me to dive deeply into everything related to customer experience at Oracle and its competitors. 

Competitive analysis

I created a competitive analysis comparing Oracle's CX products against Hubspot, Marketo, and Salesforce to get a quick snapshot of what products other companies were offering. I wanted to understand who they were targeting specifically. The competitive analysis created an information baseline that we measured against our business units' preconceptions and my biases to determine what content we would need to create for the redesign. 

Insights:

• The ability to drive customers to our web pages hinges on several factors. Other competitors had great SEO; their web pages featured much more copy than the Oracle web pages. We had to account for this issue when wireframing later in our design process. 

• The team noticed that our competitors’ websites had user-friendly customer navigation abilities. At the time, the Oracle.com website had a rigid navigation hierarchy that made it cumbersome for some of our users to navigate to their desired endpoints. We had to focus on creating simple user journeys to entice the user to dive deeply into our Oracle CX products. 

Personas

The CX marketing teams focused primarily on B2B personas. However, the Oracle Marketing team targeted both B2B and B2C personas, and multiple personas increased the complexity of creating a well-thought-out sitemap and a straightforward navigation structure. 

Insights:

• Personas look for solutions. However, Oracle sells products, so there was ongoing friction between selling a solution versus selling a product. 

• Solutions were categorized into various segments: industry verticals, roles, specific challenges, and general solutions. This content targeted all the different personas but made the navigation more complex. More choice equals more complexity in selling value to our customers. 

Content mapping

I captured content from Oracle's competitors to ensure our marketing pages would be similar or better. Our content would target very specific marketing personas, and I had to ensure that the new page templates I would design could accommodate the content requirements. 

Sitemap

I created a sitemap from various sources, with input from the CX marketing teams. I mapped the current site, incorporated new content, and collaborated with stakeholders from various teams. Building a sitemap of this size was challenging. In addition, the stakeholders presented me with changing requirements throughout the project. These changes were based on dynamic business decisions based on product releases and scheduled product conferences. 

Insights:

• Building the sitemap provided a 360-degree view of the entire project and gave me time to think through the information architecture. This information allowed me to steer the stakeholders in the direction that met their business requirements and still yielded a nominal user experience. 

User flow diagrams

Creating a user flow helped me understand how we might want to pull users through the CX website. 

Insights:

• The user flow highlighted the difficulty some users would have navigating the CX website. We had to create different global web page templates to simplify our customers' user flow. 

• I shared the user flow with members of cross-functional teams associated with this project, which allowed me to focus the stakeholders on what could be possible in terms of creating desired user experiences and acquisition loops. 

Research synthesis

I broadened my understanding of the customers and their problems by talking with stakeholders, deep diving into the Oracle marketing research repositories, reviewing Eloqua competitors, and breaking down their content and marketing tactics.  

The combined information helped shape my understanding of what customers wanted us to improve during this merger of marketing content. 

A Note about Architecture Insights 

• A lot of outdated information on the CX domain needed to be removed and replaced with more current content. 

• We needed to overhaul the content and how customers view it by introducing solutions and new product pages. 

The marketing pages needed scalability and flexibility for international markets. 

• The product marketing teams required flexibility in messaging their business customers. 

• We needed a solutions template that could scale to handle complex solution bundles with a large variety of different products. 

The what-is web pages needed a dramatic overhaul to accommodate new content and effectively compete with competitors. 

• We were unable to draw in would-be customers to Oracle.com
  via our “what is” web pages. We needed to increase organic traffic
  to them. 

• We needed the ability to put a lot more keywords on our pages
  and build out our SEO capability to draw in would-be customers
  via our “what is” pages. 

Proposed capabilities

Based on my customer research, some key capabilities needed to be designed to meet customer requirements: 

• I needed to design a template for the different CX solutions that Oracle could offer its customers. 

• I would need to craft a design that could handle more copy for the SEO team. 

• I would have to structure the what-is page to make it easy to read and render the complex subjects comprehensible. 

• I would have to work hard to make it easier for customers browsing Oracle.com to learn more about the Oracle Customer Experience Applications software. 

• I had to think globally; everything I would design would be translated into many different languages and had to meet international standards on Oracle.com. 

• The information architecture would have to be flawless to accommodate the vast amount of content for each CX application that Oracle was marketing to its prospective customers. 

Wireframing

As a designer, I knew if I could create a new pattern or an entire web page template on Oracle.com, it would be an impressive result by any standard. During the merger of marketing content, I crafted five entirely new web page templates for the site. 

Oracle.com comprises web page templates created to serve a specific purpose. The project stakeholders had many different business requirements for us to meet, and each template was designed to be used by international teams and meet stringent brand and marketing requirements. 

Insights: 

• I designed a new category page that simplified access for Oracle customers who wanted to browse Oracle CX products and solutions. 

• I created a new product page that could display all the complex CX product features. 

Visual design

I worked with a visual designer who would complete the visual designs for this project. The Brand team used the OCOM design library. 

Insights: 

• Working with a design system speeds up the work exponentially, and speed is essential. 

• Having a design language in place creates a well-rounded experience. 

Usability testing

During Oracle OpenWorld 2018, my team and I conducted usability testing to gather qualitative insights from customers using Customer Experience (CX) products. This was an opportunity to test newly-designed responsive web page templates such as what-is, product, solution, and others.  

Insights: 

• Our customers provided vital feedback, specifically regarding the what-is web page template. That template was key in the upper marketing funnel and directing customers to our Oracle website. Their feedback allowed me to optimize the designs further and make our user experience more effective. 

• The initial design of the “what-is” web page created a lift of 20 percent in organic traffic and allowed the SEO team to place more keywords in this critical web page template. 

Project completion

Merging product marketing content from one company site into Oracle.com was a challenging process. My information architecture decisions paved the way for the merger to be successful.

Reflections and details

• This design project took 12 months to complete. Working with a key stakeholder who had a deep understanding of the business requirements helped me focus on the user and look for alignment. Getting to that place took three months of building relationships. I can expand on this experience, take what I learned, and apply it wherever I go. 

• This project had between 20 and 30 people attached to it and around ten key stakeholders who played an essential role every week. Working in such a large cross-functional team taught me the importance of all represented functions—copywriters, marketing, tech solutions, etc. 

• I spent much time interfacing with VPs and key senior figures in the Oracle Brand and marketing organizations. This allowed me to present my work to senior leaders regularly.

Summary

The updated Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience (CX) applications marketing website was launched on time in the fall of 2018.

The marketing team launched their "CX Unity" campaign during Oracle OpenWorld 2018.

Although this was one of the most organizationally complex projects I've ever led from a design perspective. Ultimately, all stakeholders were satisfied with this project, knowing we hit our targets. 

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