by Dayna Rothman IDC recently released their 2012 CMO Advisory Service Best Practices Series: Realizing the Vision of the 21st Century Lead Management. The study surveys marketing professionals and demand generation executives at Avaya, CA Technologies, CSC, Datacore, Dell, Fairchild Semiconductor, HP, Juniper Networks,MathWorks, NetApp, PerkinElmer, Rackspace, Red Hat, Taleo, and VMware, to help provide best practices to help marketing professionals examine and refine their lead management practices. Service Level Agreements are a best practice here. MORE >>

However, if you are a B2B company dedicated to quality lead generation, a one-page hit won’t do you much good. Follow this primer on what bounce rates are and how you can use marketing analytics to see how low you can go. This is where marketing analytics comes in. By using such tools as such as Google Analytics, you can keep those bounce rates low by: Understanding bounce rates for overall site versus specific landing pages can help track if traffic to your site rose or declined over specific time periods (perhaps when you changed ad campaigns, for example). MORE >>

Followeronk - The hard ROI of social media is still to be determined, but this tool provides analytics for Twitter so marketers can understand the key attributes of followers, including their location and timing of tweets, as well as topical preferences. It also enables you to customize links to optimize SEO, as well as track clicks and activity. Check out the B2B Marketing Best Practice Toolkit. 13 Free Marketing Tools: Optimize Efficiency Without Breaking the Bank is from Eloqua’s It’s All About Revenue, a Blog Covering Business To Business Marketing. MORE >>

One of the most valuable features of Google Analytics is the ability to drill into detail on traffic sources; not just how much traffic came from search or social media, but how much came from each specific search engine or social networking site. But for most b2b websites, one of the top three sources of traffic—and often the largest single source—is “direct” visits. The segment of direct traffic worth optimizing for is of course prospective buyers. Optimizing for direct traffic then requires a mix of online and offline tactics. Vendors. Investors. MORE >>

The B2B demand generation and global marketing firm Find New Customers wishes to congratulate Hubspot on this important new capability. To learn more about Ifbyphone’s suite of voice-based marketing automation services, including lead capture , lead response , lead scoring , lead nurturing , and lead analytics , visit  ifbyphone.com. Applications in the software platform include website management, blogging, search engine optimization, lead management, marketing analytics, email marketing, landing pages, and social media monitoring. About Ifbyphone ®. MORE >>