To summarize, the drivers of this shift are: Buyers want content of real value: They’re out there researching solutions. Having been in the business of Marketing Automation for the past five years or so, I’ve witnessed a rapid growth in adoption. It’s clear that we are beginning to emerge from a state of early adopters to general market interest and need. Last week I had the opportunity to co-host a webinar with Jen Doyle , who’s the analyst responsible for the research and development of the 2011 MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Benchmark Report. 3.    Align with your sales team. MORE >>

He covers the building of a database, segmentation, content creation, analytics and more. Wrapping up my series on email marketing I wanted to leave you with my list of individuals who are defining the space with leading edge thinking and practices. While not exhaustive, here are five folks that I look to as leaders: Mark Brownlow ( @MarkatEMR ). Mark Brownlow publishes the Email Marketing Reports , a great collection of email marketing best practices. Simms Jenkins ( @SimmsJenkins ). Tamara Gielen ( @tamaragielen ). Chris Baggott ( @chrisbaggott ). Stephanie Miller ( @StephanieSAM ). MORE >>

If you are creating content, it helps to get your story straight.”. Fast forward to today, when marketers aren’t only generating data sheets but are also publishers themselves, managing an array of content aimed at attracting buyers.  For more on the topic, Albee will be discussing how storytelling is core to developing contagious content during the Marketing Profs workshop , June 13th in Boston and will join Genius for a webinar in July. Genius.com content marketing b2bWhich makes sense, right? This resonated with me.  The first rule?  Tweet This! Digg this! MORE >>

The ultimate goal of Lead Nurturing is to match your content to the needs of your prospective buyers. That partly depends on the personas of the buyers, so you can match the content to the buyer’s role and their interests. In addition to persona-based content, you also want to match content with the phase in the buying process to ensure that buyers receive the right content at the right time. In this early phase of the buying process, it’s best to focus on fairly high-level content. The 5 Stages of the Buying Process. information search. MORE >>

Far from it, Social Media takes up lots of time of at least one (if not many) team members and involves the extremely important art and science of content creation. Social media drives traffic, and, if your website is effectively converting traffic, you better be able to tell which content and channel is most effective. B2B marketers are still getting their arms around measuring the impact of Social Media. Everyone’s doing it, but few are able to attach hard metrics. Social Media drives high quality leads. Social Media is in constant flux. So, how do you get there from here? MORE >>