salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM), so why do I need marketing automation ”? Architecture of Marketing Automation versus CRM. CRM systems are designed and optimized for a very different purpose, which is what creates the whitespace for marketing automation vendors (like Marketo). Marketing Automation. Develop customer relationships, automate marketing programs, measure marketing ROI. Features and Capabilities of Marketing Automation versus CRM. Marketing Automation. Features of marketing automation systems. Business Goal. MORE >>

Some have even suggested that marketing automation market is floundering , but it is such a new market and offering that is innevitable to have doubts, especially with these many vendors in the space. With time, a shake out is likely (in fact, the recent acquisition of Unica and Aprimo may point to consolidation ) and the evolution of solutions will ensure marketing automation has a place in most marketing organizations, much like CRM is now standard for sales departments. Just a few marketing automation companies have already raised over $170 million dollars combined. MORE >>

This week there was a discussion about Social Media and Marketing Automation in the LinkedIn Group of the Marketing Automation Association. Around the same time I got an email announcing Marketo’s Chatter for Sales Insight , integrating sales notifications in the Facebook-like interface of Salesforce.com Chatter. asked myself: Does Marketing Automation Get Social? How can Social Media be integrated with Marketing Automation? started researching this, and I found five ways to add Social Media features to Marketing Automation: Share to Social. MORE >>

A year ago, the #Nifty50 honored 50 remarkable men and women on Twitter. We’re proud to acknowledge these 50 women from 41 different organizations as the top #Nifty50 women of technology on Twitter for 2012. She also hosts the talent chat (#TChat) on Twitter Wednesdays from 7-8pm eastern time. She’s a rock star on Twitter and also speaks French. Boston’s amazing Laura Fitton is an inbound marketing evangelist for HubSpot, founder of @oneforty, and co-author of the best-selling Twitter For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)). Stacey Acevero. MORE >>

What’s needed to fully exploit this resource is technology that automates the end-to-end process of assembling the information, identifying opportunities, and delivering the results to sales and marketing systems. The company also monitors Twitter, Facebook company pages, Quora, and LinkedIn profiles of people within each sales person’s network. Results can be exported to a marketing automation system or appear within the sales person’s CRM interface. But the Internet has exponentially grown the amount of data available and made it easily accessible. MORE >>