Cutting Edge Content Marketing Strategies B2B businesses are rapidly adopting marketing automation platforms, and content marketing remains a critical comp

Marketo, the fastest-growing provider of Revenue Performance Management (RPM) solutions, today announced the finalists for its second annual Revenue Performance Excellence Awards.

I was asked the other day what I would do without marketing automation software.  The answer is, distinctly, the same thing I’m doing right now.  I’m doing roughly the same things today as I was 10 years ago, in theory.  I want to entice buyers by engaging them in highly effective communication.  I want to track that interaction, score it, and respond to it again and again with messaging that increases demand for my services…

Many marketers think marketing automation will be the magic wand that solves all their marketing problems. Marketers believe it will allow them to better communicate with buyers and to stimulate interest in their products or services. But MA is not a solution, it is a software platform–out of the box, it will do absolutely nothing.

This is a blog post I did for our vendor Ubiquity PR.  Posting it here as a commentary on more traditional marketing spends but how to capitalize on them in a less traditional way.

If I had just one prospect, I would give them a hell of a lot of attention. Every message would be spot on and tailored to their needs. If they downloaded a whitepaper on ROI, I would immediately send them a link to our ROI calculator and then track to see if they used it. Once they became a customer I would treat them like gold. They would hear from me once per week, maybe more, with helpful hints and tricks to be a better customer.  I would deliver extraordinary customer service and notify them of changes and issues IMMEDIATELY.

Lead scoring enables marketers to precisely measure the warmth of leads before passing them to Sales, thereby increasing conversion rates. But that can be tricky. Learn how to smooth out …

Stratus Payment Solutions decided to outsource lead generation and qualification, leaving the sales team to focus on contacting truly qualified leads, while the Stratus account team was able to concentrate on retaining existing customers rather than tryin

Leads are the lifeblood of the B2B complex sale. But if Marketing directly passes volumes of harvested leads to Sales, many promising prospects may not be ready to become customers. In fact, 73% of B2B leads are not sales-ready, according to our 2012 B2B Benchmark Report.

One answer is to implement lead scoring to help determine when prospects are actually ready to speak with Sales. See how LeadMD customer and HR consultancy Bersin & associates added lead scoring to its existing marketing automation and CRM environment, and in less than one year, decreased leads sent to Sales by 52% while increasing revenue by 41%.

Metrics. It just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Analytics. That sounds good too. At the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter what you call it. Marketers and sales professionals are facing a constant ROI battle, and this has trained us to rely on numbers as if we were junkies.  Justin Gray from LeadMD sits down with Destination CRM to discuss how not make these mistakes.

We are well passed the assumptive phase that that the majority of businesses choose to include a social media strategy as part of their overall marketing. According to an EConsultancy study, 64 percent of businesses now see social as a major part of their programs and consider themselves past the “experimental phase.” A large percentage of these businesses, especially ones that have bigger marketing budgets and people to support each individual marketing initiative, will actually hire someone just to manage the social aspects of each campaign.