• by Jess Nelson , April 20, 2016

The Marketing Cloud arms race continued Tuesday as Oracle announced a series of partnerships and acquisitions to boost its Marketing AppCloud offerings.

A partnership with Demandbase, a cloud-based marketing platform for personalized advertising and marketing, adds an automated Account Based Marketing (ABM) solution for Eloqua users.

Marketers and sales professionals can now target specific individuals and known decision makers with Oracle’s Marketing Automation Software. 

“Not everyone in the universe is a potential customer for you, but there are specific accounts out there that are more likely to be interested in engaging with you and evaluating your solution,” says Peter Isaacson, CMO at Demandbase.

Technology has allowed B2B marketers to scale ABM efforts, says Isaacson. For example, some companies may focus on specific verticals, such as healthcare or finance, while others may focus on companies who have a specific set of regulatory requirements.

Demandbase leverages predictive technology and machine learning algorithms to identify common attributes between potential customers, connecting the dots between specific companies and data points such as size, industry or location.

Eloqua users can now append their marketing automation campaigns with this data and view an account interest score of every potential business partner.

Ranked from 1-100, the account score is an aggregated view of account website activity and engagement, such as unique Web site views and visitors, to pinpoint potential account interest and opportunities for conversions.

Bounce Exchange, a software company, also joined Oracle’s PartnerNetwork on Tuesday by launching an email list growth and engagement application on the Oracle Marketing AppCloud.

The automated email solution enables Oracle Responsys users to accelerate their email list growth by targeting potential readers, optimize opt-ins and automatically adding new subscribers in real-time.

In addition, Oracle also announced the acquisition of Crosswire, a cross-channel analytics platform, for a reported $50 million. The machine-learning solution helps marketers track cross-device marketing content to understand how users are engaging with marketing and advertising.  

Considering more than half of all emails are now read on a mobile device, the importance of linking cross-device, online and offline customer behavior is self-evident. 

The acquisition news also comes after Adobe recently unveiled its Cross-Device Co-Op, a new device linkage application planned for release later this year.