As predicted last year, marketing automation has gone mainstream in 2011 as companies are taking their online campaigns, lead scoring, and email automation to the next level. Happy New Year! It is time again for our annual B2B Marketing "predictions". As every year, I asked the 25,000 marketing professionals in the B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn about their B2B marketing priorities for 2012. And here are the results: 1 - Integration of social media Social media remains the #1 topic in 2012. 2 – Content marketing Content marketing went mainstream in 2011. MORE >>

Early majority buyers will want to see references from companies just like them to reduce risk and ensure economic and technical success. 8) Address SaaS related concerns proactively Cloud applications often face objections regarding data privacy (for example with companies in Europe), regulatory compliance, legal concerns, service availability, and other issues (especially with prospects in the late majority segment). The cloud is all the rage these days. This is a significant tipping point, after which adoption of cloud services is expected to further accelerate. Here is why. MORE >>

Today's prospects filter out most attempts by companies to interrupt them with vendor and product focused marketing messages and sales pitches. This intersection of content marketing, social media, and automation is where innovative marketing teams can help their companies gain traction and develop ongoing relationships and customer engagements. Profiling of ideal companies and everything else follows from here. Your B2B markets are changing rapidly. It is now harder than ever for B2B vendors to get the attention of our audiences. How do they impact the buying process? MORE >>

This supports the observation that companies are increasingly using content marketing to influence and guide prospects through the buying cycle. Last week, we talked about the changing B2B marketing mix (" Is Traditional B2B Marketing Dead? which caused a heated debate about whether these changes are real and consequential). Let's take a look at some data. We are currently conducting a social media survey among B2B marketing professionals, and one of the questions is aimed at better understanding what activities marketing teams are doing more or less of than 3 years ago. MORE >>

It looks like we are bouncing back from the recession compared to last year when tech companies slashed marketing budgets by over 8%. This year, IDC says, tech companies will allocate 19.3% Within digital marketing, the largest share of the budget will go toward company websites (26.7%), followed by display ads (21.0%), email marketing (18.6%), search ads (13.6%), search engine optimization (7.6%), digital events (7.1%) and social networks (5.4%). MarketingSherpa asked more than 900 B2B marketers how they expect their marketing budgets to change for 2011. last year. MORE >>