Marketing automation is a hot topic today, but can be very confusing. There have been a lot of entrants to the market in the last few years, with lots of features coming online daily. In addition, marketing tools rarely stand alone and need to be integrated into your website, your portal, your social communities and other systems. If you are interested in digital marketing, you may feel overwhelmed by the amount of content and vast number of products available to you.
One excellent marketing automation system is Oracle Eloqua. Eloqua provides many, many features for marketers, including campaign management, targeting, tracking, etc. Eloqua also has app store with hundreds of applications that can add on to Eloqua or enable Eloqua to integrate with other systems. Even if you are working just with Eloqua, it can be daunting to understand all that you can do in this area.
This is where a Community can come to your rescue. Traditional in-person communities are all about sharing experiences, tips, techniques and best practices. But getting masses of people together is hard and happens infrequently. Online communities are supposed to solve that problem, but often online communities tend to be confusing to navigate and don’t have enough content to truly help out.
Topliners, a community for Eloqua users, is an excellent example of an online community. When you go to Topliners, you are immediately presented with five main tabs: Imagine It, See It, Do It, Code It and Know It. These tabs make it pretty clear what content is available in the community; its not just about posting and responding to comments. You understand that you will be able to get help with ideas, execution, and knowledge.
Topliners navigation
This community is not just about how to use Eloqua, either. For example, on the main page you can see how to get started with the community by asking marketing strategy questions, which jumps you into the Imagine It section. If you are not sure about what rookie mistakes to avoid, someone started a topic on that. If you want help with figuring out the best way to score leads, there are many people who have responded to that topic. These are not necessarily Eloqua topics, but marketing topics in general.
Of course, this is an Eloqua community, so there are plenty of how-to’s specific to Eloqua, including videos, code samples, etc. Eloqua recently moved their app store to Topliners to provide a more seamless experience. So while you are looking for advice and viewing help videos, why not explore the app store to see what else is available for Eloqua? And Oracle wants to sell you more Eloqua, so there are bits of marketing there too, but not too much.
If you are looking at building a community for your product, your services, and your business, take a look at Topliners and learn from their example. I suspect that Topliners is helping Eloqua expand and gain customers.
Mark – thanks for your kind words about our community. We love it and the people on it, so we’re always happy to see nice things from other people, too.
I wonder if the author actually used Topline. On the positive side, yes Elouqa encourages people to share their experience on how to use the tool. On the negative side: it is very cumbersome and difficult to find what we need. The site structure is not user friendly, menu labels not quite helpful, search doesn’t work appropriately to make our search fast. It takes very long time to find what you need on Topliners. On top of it Eloqua is using it to replace the actual product documentation since their training is very very basic and to replace training on product enhancements/updates. Because it is not used by the company just as a social media tool where people can share their experience it doesn’t help its users much. There is a lot of content but the search doesn’t work properly, more is not necessarily better if it takes us a lot of time just to find something. I applaud the idea but the execution lacks.
Hi Gabriela, I have used Topline, however it now has been a while since I’ve had to get onto that site. Maybe they have made updates that make it harder to use now for you? I do appreciate you reading our blog and providing feedback, though.