Of course, the classic pay-per-click medium is paid search, and above all Google AdWords. It's no accident that LeadPAC resembles AdWords in both function and appearance. True Influence CEO Brian Giese said the goal with LeadPAC is to give marketers a way to create real leads quickly, using AdWords as a model. Like AdWords, LeadPAC lets clients set a target cost per name and a weekly budget for their spending. Again like AdWords, the system keeps sending promotions – in this case, emails – until the budget is reached. That's worth some excitement. MORE >>

Also can capture results of Google Adwords campaigns and has a URL-shortener to track traffic from social media. Summary: Alsa Marketing is a late entry to small business marketing automation. They support multiple languages, which should gain them some business. Otherwise, though, it will be tough for them to compete with better-established players. It’s harder every day for a new company to enter the business-to-business marketing automation industry. This leaves unique features as the only viable strategy for a new firm.* Alsa has some other unusual features. MORE >>

Beyond the usual outbound email and Web forms, the system provides: - Web analytics to support search engine optimization and Web advertising, - API-level integration with Google AdWords to support paid keyword campaigns, - IP-address lookup to identify the company and location of anonymous Web visitors (and send rule-based alerts to salespeople), - personalized URLs (PURLs) to tie in responses from offline campaigns. Summary: SalesFusion combines all channels within marketing, and merges marketing automation with CRM as well. Look, I know online marketing is important. MORE >>

My little tour of demand generation vendors landed at Pardot just before Thanksgiving. As you’ll recall from my post on Web activity statistics , Pardot is one of the higher-ranked vendors not already in the Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems. So I was quite curious to see what they had to offer. What I found was intriguing. While last week’s post found that Marketbright aims at more sophisticated clients, Pardot explicitly targets small and midsize businesses (or SMBs as we fondly acronymize them [yes, that’s a word, at least according to [link] ]). Back to Pardot. MORE >>

Certainly there is a list of hot items right now: Webinar integration, digital asset management, dedicated IP addresses for outbound email, APIs to post data from external forms, integration with Google Adwords, providing contact names from external databases when a visiting company is recognized by its IP address, pulling data from social networks to flesh out a prospect’s profile, and interacting through social media in addition to traditional channels. Summary: basic demand generation features are close to a commodity. This brings us back to features. It could destroy your company. MORE >>