Last year, the top four industry vendors (Eloqua, Marketo, HubSpot, and Infusionsoft) added 49% more employees, compared with just 21% for the rest of the industry. Let me start by saying that the 50% revenue increase I’m projecting for B2B marketing automation in 2013 is a very healthy one. In actual dollars, the $250 million gain is much larger than the $175 million growth in 2012. So if you’re working in the industry, don’t circulate that resume just yet. The most notable is Eloqua, which as a public company has to report its results. million) but just 28% in the second half ($50.7 MORE >>

We classify industry vendors into four groups: - micro business vendors (Infusionsoft and OfficeAutoPilot) - HubSpot (a category of its own because it’s not quite standard marketing automation and is big enough to treat separately) - enterprise vendors (Neolane, Aprimo, Silverpop, and Oracle) - core B2B marketing automation (everybody else: Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, Genius, Act-On, et, al.) year ago, the three largest core vendors were Eloqua, Marketo, and Genius, and Act-On was an also-ran. For those of us who don’t get out much, that’s downright exciting. Myth busted. MORE >>

Marketo , in its Webinar Secret Sauce for Demand Generation , generously revealed its own results comparing nurtured vs. non-nurtured leads. Summary: So you want some hard numbers to prove the value of marketing automation? Here's a bunch. client asked yesterday if I had some benchmark information to justify the cost of her marketing automation project. This set off an hour-long scavenger hunt through my hard drive, followed by sporadic afterthoughts later in the day. Since this is a question that comes up pretty often, I figured I’d share some of the more useful results. MORE >>

It's applied by Marketo , Pardot , Act-On Software , Genius , Net-Results , and many others. The marketing automation industry continues to grow quickly, with many vendors announcing their client bases have more than doubled in 2011. But there’s also a growing realization that many marketing automation systems are used for only simple tasks – often no more than email, landing pages, and CRM integration. For example, LoopFuse found that nearly twice as many used email and web landing pages as lead scoring. Surveys, like this one from IBM , show many obstacles to successful deployment. MORE >>

You probably saw ExactTarget ’s June 13 announcement of its strategic partnership with Marketo and Eloqua ’s June 21 announcement of its new AppCloud marketplace for connectors with other systems. In fact, the real head scratcher was why ExactTarget would deal with Marketo if it had ambitions to occupy the same central turf. Marketo’s motivation is obvious: to gain broader distribution.) ExactTarget also sees Marketo as the first of many partner applications for IMH, further clarifying that they see it in the central position. So did I. Oh well. So it’s all good. MORE >>