Demand Gen Report

SalesFUSION, a provider of integrated marketing and sales solutions, has announced a partnership with WebAttract, a webinar demand creation and management consultancy. In addition, SalesFUSION has released FUSIONcast, a web campaign management platform within the SalesFUSION event management platform.

FUSIONcast connects to the GoToWebinar and Webex webinar platforms. It enables users to build, track and manage webinar lead generation campaigns, while connecting webinar metrics to their CRM systems. 

As the marketing automation market matures, it makes sense for vendors to focus more heavily on specialized, industry-specific offerings. That's exactly what Eloqua is doing with its just-released Eloqua Asset Management solution.

Eloqua Asset Management, according to the company, is designed to help "mutual fund wholesalers, institutional asset managers, and marketers within the financial services sector to strengthen relationships while reducing overall marketing costs." The company also claims that its offering is the first of its type to target asset management marketers.

It's no secret that marketing automation is a high-growth industry. Yet it's also clear that many B2B marketers struggle to achieve the ROI they expected to get from their marketing automation investments: According to an often-cited 2011 Focus Research study, half of all companies say they haven't realized the full value of their marketing automation investments.

What separates the successful marketing automation users from the pack? According to many experts, it often boils down to a matter of timing – or, rather, of cadence.

"Cadence is commonly confused with frequency" in marketing campaigns, said Jessica Meher, Head of Enterprise Marketing at HubSpot. "Frequency is simply how many times emails are sent, whereas cadence is the 'pattern' of email – it includes the number of emails sent, the spacing between emails, the content sent, and the audience receiving the email."

More B2B marketers are investing in data cleansing techniques to segment their target audiences and help prospects through the buyer journey. According to Maribeth Ross, VP of Marketing for NetProspex, these techniques allow marketers to target audiences more effectively; as a result, they generate more leads and see improvements in marketing-generated revenue metrics.

During a recent webinar -- “To Buy or Not to Buy… That is the Question: When and How to list in your B2B marketing programs” -- Ross explained the right time to use a contact list and the number of contacts needed to get results. Ross also discussed key facts about the data-buying process, as well as the necessary steps marketers should take after making a purchase.

By offering a multi-touch program, marketers can connect with prospects throughout the buying process, while exposing them to relevant content that promotes them to “hand-raiser status,” noted Ross.

A new study finds that marketing automation technology is increasingly important to the SMB market – and that early adopters aren’t just the only ones benefitting from the trend.

The study, conducted by Techaisle, found that 28% of mid-sized firms with 100-999 employees currently use marketing automation technology, and 10% of small firms with less than 100 employees use marketing automation. Another 36% percent of the SMBs surveyed said they plan to use a marketing automation solution, and marketing automation is now one of the top 10 technology investments for SMBs.

Both small and mid-sized firms reported that they use marketing automation primarily to identify new customers, generate additional revenue from current customers and better manage their demand generation activities.