1 - Integration of social media into lead generation programs 2011 will be the year social media evolves from the experimental stage to become an established marketing tactic. 4 - Focus on lead quality In the past, marketing focus has often been on generating increasing quantities of leads. It was difficult to tell lead quality and impact on sales pipeline, so in the absence of real quality indicators, more was considered better. This flood of leads overwhelmed sales and distracted from the selling part of their jobs. Happy New Year! MORE >>

Social media has clearly evolved from the experimental stage to become an established marketing tactic and lead generator in 2011. 3 - Focus on lead quality In the past, it was difficult to gauge lead quality and lead gen's impact on sales pipeline, so in the absence of real quality indicators, more leads were considered better. This flood of leads overwhelmed sales and distracted from the selling part of the job. And marketing received the blame for creating poor leads and wasting valuable selling time. Happy New Year! MORE >>

With powerful content assets that lead, just like breadcrumbs, from problem to solution. 4) Simplify content marketing Content marketing (combined with robust marketing automation) allows you to scale and put much of your inbound marketing efforts on "auto pilot", and "cherry pick" the leads you want to engage with directly, when they are ready to talk to you. 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. But let's take a closer look. Also, be aware of IT pushback. MORE >>

This new world is at the intersection of (1) valuable content that carries your message to the prospect, (2) the social and online media that prospects are increasingly using to find information and ask peers for their opinion, and (3) the marketing automation platforms to manage all of this complexity (campaigns, content , leads, etc) without losing your mind. What we need in this new environment are ongoing, parallel conversations with target audiences that lead to engagements with qualified prospects which in turn lead to value exchanges between both parties. MORE >>

We sure see this trend in the marketing automation platforms we use on a daily basis – webcasts, email campaigns, lead management, and many more. The next phase I see is that SaaS vendors are partnering to provide end-to-end solutions that span multiple platforms so you can basically run all of your marketing automation in the cloud through a single interface (Salesforce.com is leading the way here with a myriad of 3rd party apps linked into the Salesforce.com ecosystem that expand the value chain step by step). One of the interesting topics that came up was outsourcing. MORE >>