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. Cutting to the point, these practices are: 1.    Know your marketing mix. 2.    Close the loop with sound marketing analytics. 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. Mark Brownlow publishes the Email Marketing Reports , a great collection of email marketing best practices. On his site you’ll find an intro to email marketing, an email marketing blog, and many articles ranging from mobile email marketing to email deliverability. Simms Jenkins is author of The Truth About Email Marketing , founder of Email Stat Center and the CEO of BrightWave Marketing. MORE >>

Tags: Lead nurturing content development content marketing MORE >>

Salesforce’s purchase of radian6 raises fascinating, hard questions, way beyond just whether it’s the beginning of the “marketing cloud&#. It represents a deep existential question about whether marketing makes sense as a separate category from sales/services at all and whether the “marketing automation&# category is toast. Marc benioff has predicted the “end of email&# , which may account for why he hasn’t bought an email based marketing company.  But what do these trends really mean for marketers? movement. Tweet This! MORE >>

content map is paramount when developing a long-term content strategy for your website, blog, direct marketing, nurturing, sales materials or other communications and content. Tags: Communication best practices buying cycle content audit content development content mapping content marketing content strategy information architechture nurturing personas Content means web copy, blog posts, videos, interactive presentations, social elements, diagrams or other pieces of information used to engaged users / visitors. Tweet This! Share this on Linkedin. Share this on Facebook. Digg this! MORE >>