Thursday, May 7, 2009

Experts in the Field: DemandGen


I’m continually amazed at the creative ways I see Eloqua being used. The most common use, in external marketing campaigns, can still be very interesting, but many creative marketers are applying the automation, data, and communication aspects of the platform to various other uses with great effect. A great example of this came up the other day when I was talking with Dave Lewis and Patrice Greene at DemandGen.

They had worked with Accela on an interesting campaign that educated and engaged internal employees rather than external prospects, and in doing so garnered awards and recognition for the campaign's creativeness.

We all wrestle with the challenge of bringing new employees up to speed, educating them on our companies and brands, and getting them focused on core objectives. Accela decided to apply the techniques of nurture marketing to this challenge, and was successful in engaging 90% of their employee base.

The design of the program was quite simple:

- Over 10 weeks, each person in the company received a quiz about one of the 10 internal departments, with questions contributed by the execs in that department

- Each week followed the same pattern, with a Monday invitation, Wednesday reminder, and Thursday announcement of the week’s winner and overall leader board

- A real-time dashboard showed both results and overall participation

Automation allowed the program to smoothly run over the 10 week period with minimal involvement of the marketing team, and the continuous engagement led to 63% of the workforce playing every week.

As with many marketing concepts that show success, this quickly resulted in a copy of the campaign being used, with some modifications, by human resources to onboard new employees.

DemandGen’s work with Accela is a great example of how the capabilities that a marketing team has with Eloqua can be extended into novel and interesting areas. The goals, techniques, and approaches of nurture marketing are just as valuable with internal marketing campaigns that drive employee engagement as they are with external marketing campaigns that increase engagement within a prospect base.

The details of the Accela case study are available here on the DemandGen site.

1 comments:

Amit Varshneya said...

This is a brilliant idea. Really innovative use of the product. I think I'll contact Patrice to do something like this for Hexaware too :)