Demand Gen Report

Demandbase, Inc., announced today it has closed a $10 million round of financing to support accelerated growth of the Demandbase Real-Time ID Service. 

Sutter Hill Ventures, a venture firm with a 50-year track record of investing in technology based startups, led the round of funding. Existing investors Sigma Partners, Altos Ventures, and Adobe Systems, participated in the round.

The annual SiriusDecisions Summit has become the bellwether event to track the progress and maturation of demand generation practices in the BtoB sector. And based on the presentations from this year’s event, held last week in Scottsdale, AZ, major BtoB companies are now realizing significant payoffs from their investments in sales and marketing alignment and lead management tools and processes. 

The event provided three days of best practices, benchmarks, case studies and proof points, all demonstrating how Bb-to-B b companies that have made investments in integrated lead development, demand management and measurement are outperforming their competitors.

Silverpop recently announced the addition of several new product features deisgned to help marketers leverage social, mobile and local channels for a more connected marketing approach. Technology has enabled consumers to communicate on the go through social networking sites and access their email inboxes on-the-go. Silverpop said it will combine email marketing and social networking by launching its Share-to-Social feature, to help marketers become more “mocial” by integrating social, mobile, local and email.

Via new social-sharing options to the Silverpop Engage, marketers can allow recipients to promote messages to their Facebook friends via “like” and “recommend” buttons and can suggest a list of additional Twitter accounts for a contact to follow after they have shared content.  Silverpop has also added StumbleUpon and Xing to the list of networks to which email recipients can share content.

The majority of marketers are increasingly turning to virtual and hybrid events as part of an overall marketing strategy, according to Unisfair, an InterCall company and provider of virtual events and business environments. The company recently announced new research that shows virtual engagement are emerging as “the new normal” in marketing, training and collaboration.

Based on responses from more than 550 marketers nationwide, the second annual Unisfair survey reveals 60% of respondents plan to increase spending of virtual events and environments this year.