Enter the giants. For several years, the content marketing space has been growing and evolving rapidly. To date, the leaders at the center of this space have been rapidly scaling, young companies. That all changed. Oracle announced that it had completed the acquisition of Compendium, helping fill a gap in the Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud. Before you Google "What did Oracle pay for Compendium?" or "Compendium deal price," let me save you some time. Neither party has disclosed the terms of the deal, other than to say it has been completed.
What Oracle did share, however, is telling:
1. Oracle shared that shopping behavior is changing. Consumers now enter a sales funnel later in their buying process, armed with far more information than ever before. They do significant research, most of it online, learning about their needs and how potential solutions might or might not meet them. Brands now recognize this change and seek to understand their customers' information needs and provide them with the necessary insight to make informed decisions about what to buy.
2. They also explained that original content fuels all digital marketing. Marketers now use different kinds of content to drive brand awareness, to develop relationships with prospects and customers, and to accelerate conversion.
3. Accordingly, the Compendium acquisition helps fill an important gap in Oracle's marketing cloud solution. Oracle intends to closely integrate the Compendium solution with other elements of the Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud. For brands that like adopting the entire Oracle stack, the acquisition means they have a more complete marketing solution. For marketers that don't like being confined to the Oracle universe, this might mean they want to consider alternatives.
Our space is still emerging and growing. What's unsaid in Oracle's analysis is that content marketing platforms, properly constructed, can play a critical role in unifying the ecosystem. Remember that content sits at the core of all kinds of marketing (search, social, email, marketing automation campaigns, etc.). Accordingly, the workflow that platforms like Skyword or Compendium provide have the potential to connect companies focused on content strategy, creation, publishing, amplification, and measurement spaces. We have created this SlideShare to show where the giants in the space (Salesforce, Oracle, Adobe, IBM, Marketo) have been investing and how workflow platforms can bridge those different spaces.
Our strategy will diverge from Compendium's after today. As Compendium focuses on integrating more tightly into the Oracle stack, Skyword is opening-up APIs that will enable us to connect with best-of-breed partners across the ecosystem. We seek and are building nonexclusive partnerships, so that we can allow marketers to choose which search analytics or social listening platforms best suit their needs. We will let them choose where to publish and how to amplify their content. At the same time, we will leverage these connections to ensure a seamless workflow for marketing teams, and to provide them with data capture and analytics that are unparalleled in the content marketing space.
This work is already underway. Skyword has integrated our platform with more than a dozen different CMS/content hosting platforms. We allow content creators to promote their content across leading social platforms. And, just yesterday, we announced our first amplification partner, Outbrain, a content discovery network that will let marketers increase their content reach many times over.
Our goal is to allow marketers to pick the marketing stack that's right for them, while not having to compromise on the benefits of integrated workflows or analytics. We have a lot of work to do to make that vision a reality. We encourage potential partners to reach out to us. We encourage our customers to share which partnerships would be most valuable. And we invite your counsel and questions as we continue down the path toward building an interconnected content marketing ecosystem together.
We're still at the start of very exciting times in content marketing. We look forward to working with many of you as the space grows and changes in the years to come.