If your marketing automation program sends your buyers information that is off-target, they will ignore your messages. Imagine how this targeted information can educate your leads and convert more of them into customers. This detailed information makes it easier for your sales team to reach their quotas. Marketing automation is becoming a vital tool in today’s B2B space, as more marketers need to gain a better understanding of their customers’ buying cycles and increase their ROI from every campaign. Define buyer personas. Create interesting and relevant content. MORE >>

Currently, they don’t collect contact information for those businesses, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to apply the same model to acquire that data. Obviously, Google has been working on this problem too, from a different angle, by allowing business owners to update their own information on Google Maps. Recently, I’ve been playing around with foursquare to get a better understanding of it, and think about how it might have a significant impact on B2B marketers. Considering that foursquare only launched a year ago at SXSW 2009, this is clearly a phenomenon worth looking at. MORE >>

Are we going to ask prospects for every piece of information we need? The market for marketing automation software is doing very well these days. This has lead to an unprecedented variety of options for marketers to choose from, and the range of options can be dizzying. While many of the discussions can focus on software and feature/function comparisons, this is only one element of success. To be truly successful, you need focus on the people, process, and technology changes with equal energy. The people and process elements of the investment are often the most interesting. Area code? MORE >>

dashboard comparison of both the number of searches being performed on each search phrase (the search engines' webmaster tools provide this information quite readily), and the number of visitors to your content based on those main terms gives a very good understanding of if you are successfully being discovered through this avenue. One of the most valuable areas to gain an understanding of is the current state of how your prospects actively discover your company and your solutions. These are the main search terms that would ideally lead prospective buyers to your web properties. MORE >>

By using advertising to broaden the discovery of the information , Accenture and American Express are just fast-tracking the process. Content has long been a key driver of success for great B2B marketers in today's world. That's nothing new, and we've talked about related topics such as the content gap and the need to get more subject matter experts involved. However, one challenge that remains is how to draw attention to your content. That's a great way to build an audience, but it is NOT a fast way. It is, however, a turbo-charging of it. Did it work? MORE >>