Demand Gen Report

Will Salesforce.com’s acquisition of ExactTarget fuel interest in marketing automation, or does it mean that the marketing automation function is going to get gobbled up by CRMs, the way Oracle swallowed Eloqua? While it is still early in the game, most experts who spoke with Demand Gen Report said the ExactTarget deal was a positive move for the marketing automation space. However, independent vendors will have to address other marketing functions such as budgeting, content planning and financial applications to remain viable in the long term.

“It is a brilliant move for [Salesforce.com] that gives entry into B2C markets, addresses a critical functional weakness in their own system, and gives them Pardot marketing automation for free,” said David M. Raab, Principal, Raab Associates. “Marketing automation sits right between email and CRM, so once you control those two, then marketing automation pretty much comes along for the ride. But I don’t think SFDC will shut out competitors, so it’s not an immediate death sentence for independent marketing automation vendors.”

Kapost announced an editorial calendar app for Eloqua users, enabling them to view their email and campaign activities on monthly and quarterly calendars directly within the marketing automation platform.

The free Kapost Calendar App Beta, which will be available in late June to all Eloqua 10 users, offers two views: Content and Campaigns. Respectively, they show sent and scheduled Eloqua emails on a monthly, weekly and daily basis; and activated and scheduled Eloqua campaigns on a quarterly basis.

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.