In today’s crowded marketplace, it’s no longer good enough to just be customer-centric. In order to win the market, organizations need to leverage their customers not only to inform their business strategy, but also to fuel it. Leveraging customers to enhance all aspects of your business strategy will accelerate sales, reduce churn, and increase customer lifetime value.

Fully engaged customers spend more and stay around longer. Ultimately, if you treat them right, they’ll turn into advocates for your brand. As more companies turn their focus away from short-lived marketing campaigns, and toward building ongoing relationships with customers, the role of the customer marketer is changing—and becoming more important than ever.

Influitive's annual BAMMIES - Best Advocate Marketing Awards - eBook has been read by 2,000+ savvy B2B marketers and business leaders. In this year’s edition, advocacy leaders from companies like ADP, Cisco, and Ceridian reveal how to harness the power of advocates to drive growth across every area of an organization. These 9 short, easy-to-read success stories will teach you new strategies to mobilize your advocate community to drive ROI.

We surveyed 2016's content marketing leaders on their biggest issues, hurdles, and goals.

If you're concerned that your organization's content marketing isn't as effective as it could be, this report is for you.

745 marketers told us how effective their content marketing is. Between November 5 and November 17, we surveyed 601 marketers with an 18-question online survey. A few weeks later, Adweek sent the questionnaire to 144 additional marketers. As the survey was answered by nearly our entire population target, the calculated margin of error was approximately 1 percent.

Brand voice? Editorial calendar? Approval workflow? Learn how to craft the crucial parts of a content marketing program. In the third installment of our five-part playbook series, discover the necessary steps to execute a content marketing program.

Every brand’s content roadmap is different; each path to success is unique to that brand’s story, perspective, assets, and goals. But there is an overarching approach that’s proven to work—one we’ve refined after helping hundreds of brands reach their content marketing goals and after speaking with some of the brightest minds in the industry.

The first installment of a five-part guide to becoming an elite content marketer. Use this Playbook to learn how to evangelize a content marketing program in your company.

Understanding the audiences you serve will enable you to craft a content strategy that delivers the right mix of content types (including articles, blogs, videos, and infographics) to their preferred channels. Customer data is the key. If you don't have it, get it. Because only when you have a keen sense of your audience can you develop content that delivers measureable results.

Social advertising challenges a brand to think differently about both social engagement and advertising. It requires marketers to appeal to the prospect in new ways. Of course, the primary objective of most social advertisements is to trigger an action-- a purchase, a download, a "Like", Share, or a +1. But the secondary objective, of permeating the viewer's social network via friend-to-friend recommendations, is just as important.

You're committed to a content marketing program and you've been given a budget. No matter how big or small the amount, you'll want to maximize the milage of every dollar spent. One smart way to do that is by repurposing content.

The process of defining lead scores improves alignment and collaboration between marketing and sales teams. After all, by jointly establishing an objective definition of a quality lead, sales and marketing can exchange better feedback on the quality of leads being passed to sales. Plus, lead scoring helps ensure that the best leads are followed up on immediately by prioritizing leads according to revenue potential and buying readiness.

Successful email marketing, demand generation, and lead management processes hinge on a modern strategy closely aligned to buyer needs and expectations across all phases of the buying process. Using a wide spectrum of digital channels, today's buyers employ an extensive network of tools and resources to make the most informed purchase decisions.

The game has changed. Your next customer will research and evaluate your products through websites and online networks long before your salespeople get involved. Just as consumers now search and buy online, B2B purchasing in an online world has transformed into an interactive process driven by the customer, not the vendor. In fact, a call to your salesperson may be the last step in the buyer's journey, significantly limiting their influence and expertise that has long driven the buying discussio

As more and more businesses produce content for customers, adding order to the process is critical. Here's some history, insights, and a wealth of practical advice.

You know what the typical day is like for marketers. Between brainstorming and strategy sessions, last-minute requests and impromptu meetings and trips to meet customers, you can barely find time to breathe-- never mind keep up with the last marketing trends. That's why Oracle Eloqua developed the Grande Guide series. The Grande Guides were developed to give you the opportunity to become proficient in a key marketing topic--in this case, B2B Blogging-- with a minimal investment in time.

In the traditional model, marketing tells a targeted group what to want. Then sales tells them why they want it and takes the order. This model is less effective now that buyers are more active in information gathering. They know what they want and why. When today's buyers have questions, they search for answers online instead of relying on information from a salesperson.