Demand Gen Report

When B2B marketers send out a typical paid tweet, they have to direct leads to a landing page with a form for their name, company, email and any other pertinent bits of data they want to capture. As any marketer knows, when prospects have to go to another site and fill out a form it increases the likelihood that they will just abandon the task.

That is all about to change with Twitter’s new Lead Generation Cards, which are being called revolutionary by some industry observers and could have an impact on how other social media outlets address the needs of B2B marketers going forward.

Marketers are expected to spend $118.4 billion on content marketing in 2013, so they need to make the most of this investment by reworking existing content in other formats. This infogaphic from Active Internet Marketing makes the case for taking a piece of content you’ve already own and giving it new life in a different media.

Salesforce.com — long thought to be in the market to acquire a marketing automation vendor since Oracle bought Eloqua — announced plans to purchase ExactTarget for about $2.5 billion. The move comes as a bit of a surprise to industry observers, who noted that Marketo’s recent successful IPO positioned the company as an appealing acquisition target for Salesforce.com.

The transaction, which has been unanimously approved by the Boards of Directors of both companies, is expected to close late in Salesforce.com's fiscal second quarter, ending July 31. The acquisition is expected to increase total revenue by $120 to $125 million in fiscal year 2014.

VisiStat, a cloud-based digital analytics service for marketing and lead generation, announced the launch of two major product versions — VisiStat 10.0 and LeadCaster 4.0.— that feature advanced lead search, comprehensive lead scoring, live leads, and lead history.

In this new release, all lead capture information is presented on one screen, bringing all data together for simple review and fast action by the user, according to company officials.