Flight Centre sees B2B sales opportunities take off by connecting Oracle Eloqua and LinkedIn

• By automating their ambitious LinkedIn marketing campaigns through Oracle Eloqua, Flight Centre has unlocked new levels of sophistication and success in their marketing efforts.
  
  
• “Five years ago we were doing a lot more batch- and-blast type of list-targeted campaigns,” says Aldridge, “whereas now we’re targeting specific industries and certain persona types, and our messaging is very much tailored to the size of the customer that we’re targeting and the industry they’re in, resulting in improved lead scores.”

• This approach has yielded noticeable improvements in efficiency, which benefits both customers and the company itself. “Our deliverability has improved,” he shares. “We are sending a lot less but generating more leads. We’re going after more quality than quantity and then making sure that our sales teams know who to target first, basically.”

Managing a complex global marketing program

• On the B2B side of its business, Flight Centre has various sub-brands targeting distinct customer segments all around the world, ranging from five-person startups to multinational enterprises. These audiences have different needs, different sales cycles, and require different nurture sequences.

• For Flight Centre, keeping all of their marketing activities and sales opportunities in order, while properly prioritizing the right actions, can prove difficult with all of these moving parts.

• As travel came to a global standstill during COVID, they saw their marketing database stagnate. This led to an increased focus on relationship-building and customer retention to complement their acquisition strategies.

• “Obviously we want to win more business, but also we want to keep the business we have and remind our customers why they picked that Flight Centre brand in the first place,” says Malcolm Aldridge, Global Marketing Automation Manager.

Snappy integrations bring scalable simplicity

• About five years ago, Flight Centre adopted Eloqua as their primary marketing automation platform. “We switched to Eloqua,” says Aldridge, “because we wanted something more B2B- focused and something that was more scalableto work complex campaigns across multiple  countries ... we now use a lot of dynamic content and personalization.” Aldridge estimates that the company has about 60 marketing users on Eloqua and more than 800 sales users.
  
  
• As an approved marketing partner, Eloqua’s purpose-built connection with LinkedIn helped bring simplicity to the marketing team’s activities and processes, creating a smooth flow of information between sales and marketing.
  
  
• Aldridge values the way LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms make it easy for members to download content and automatically provide contact information, while Flight Centre’s complementary array of tools can automate how that form-fill data is channeled on the back end. Information-sharing across platforms enables collaborative nurturing.

• “It makes that whole experience really quick and easy for the customers, which is good for us,” he explains. “And then behind the scenes, once they hit submit, that passes the data across to Eloqua, which triggers the whole process flow where we will then ultimately push them across to Salesforce.”

Helpful content during hard times

• Flight Centre faced major business challenges as the COVID pandemic struck and largely halted travel. Recognizing this was also a hard time for their customers, they flipped this tough situation into an opportunity to make a difference with their content.
  
  
• Specifically, they leaned on their expertise to keep travelers informed and safe. “We created high-value content to help customers make decisions on where and how their people can travel, what documents and such they need to be able to travel, how they can manage their duty of care,” says Aldridge. “a lot of companies are now updating their travel policies. So we help them with that.”