Infer Inc., a predictive sales and marketing platform, has launched the Predictive Ad Targeting Platform. The solution aims to help companies reach their highest-potential accounts and fuel deeper engagement through predictive analytics.

Content localization — creating content that is in your customer’s native language as well as culturally relevant — is critical to engaging your audience. In fact, almost 60% of global consumers say getting information in their own language is more important than price when making a purchase decision, according to research firm Common Sense Advisory (CSA). However, there’s more to the connection between ROI and translation for demand generation, and it may not be as apparent.

Even with the growing adoption of marketing automation, CRM and web analytics tools, most marketers are still challenged to clearly demonstrate the ROI of their campaigns. In a move to fill that gap, Left Brain DGA, one of the leading demand gen consultancies, has introduced MiDash, a marketing intelligence platform aimed at using historical data, predictive analytics and performance alerts to supplement the information available from marketing automation systems.

Founded in 2009, Left Brain DGA has developed the Left Brain Model, a framework for measuring marketing’s contribution to a demand generation program and to provide a structure for the lead nurturing and scoring activities that support this process. Left Brain Model user Lenovo was the winner of Eloqua’s 2012 Demand Generation Center of Excellence Markie Award for its collaborative go-to-market strategy, commitment to persona-based content and focus on metrics to drive campaign decisions.

Salesforce.com launched a Social Ads Platform for Twitter, enabling marketers to manage Twitter advertising alongside existing social marketing programs with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

With the new Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Ads Platform for Twitter, brands and agencies will be able to:

Yesmail, an Infogroup company which powers intelligence customer interactions, released a set of new platform capabilities as part of its product strategy to help marketers deliver optimized email campaigns.

In addition, Yesmail announced the launch of three new email marketing solutions:

At a DemandCon event session earlier this month, Jon Russo, Founder and CEO of B2B Fusion Group, asked a room full of marketers how many were still using Excel spreadsheets to track their performance. About 90% of them raised their hands.

Russo said he wasn't surprised at the show of hands. But he is definitely concerned about it.

"This is risky business for a marketing organization," he said. "Executives are now accustomed to seeing metrics integrated with tools like Salesforce. When they see these reports dumped onto spreadsheets, they're going to question the validity of the data."

Search retargeting – a tactic which employs a simple but profitable intersection of display advertising and search – has long been a popular marketing tool for consumer companies. Now, retargeting is also gaining traction in the B2B market.

While consumer-focused retargeting is relatively simple, however, for B2B firms it will be a more complex process.

“As a B2B company you want to be able to get to the customers that raised their hands,” said Chris Mann, VP of Project Management for Bizo. “For B2B marketers there will be a creative set of solutions to accomplish that.”

Mann is referring to the solutions required to overcome the reach and scale issues that until very recently made B2B search retargeting a lower priority.

Sitecore, a Web content management and digital marketing software company, has announced the results to its recent marketing industry study: “The Multichannel Maturity Mandate.” The report, conducted with Forrester, includes responses from more than 270 marketing professionals across a wide range of industries and geographic regions.

The study indicates that senior level marketers need to adopt a multichannel customer engagement model to increase marketing performance, according to a company release. Most (77%) of marketers agree they will drive more sales and profit by evolving into an effective multichannel organization, while a smaller but significant number (35%) said they have lost business because they are not able to integrate customer interactions across digital, social, mobile and offline channels.

Editor’s Note: The following article is the second in a two-part series highlighting how B2B companies are using social media from cold to close. This installment explores the use of social selling tools.

By Owen McDonald, Contributing Author

Marketing and sales teams today struggle to decode social media streams. They must decide how best to use the information they gather for social sources, and how to analyze its efficacy for their demand generation efforts.

But that cryptic area is now yielding its secrets. Business Intelligence, CRM and marketing automation vendors, as well as providers of social platforms, are refining their systems to monitor social media and to identify genuine prospects based on their social media behavior.

The benefits of integrated marketing automation are extending into new areas of measurement, according to new research from The Lenskold Group. In addition to having improved visibility into ROI metrics, the new study found BtoB organizations employing automated solutions also have a greater probability of having highly effective and efficient marketing strategies.

According to the 2011 Lenskold Group Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study, 39% of marketers that have implemented marketing automation with CRM or sales systems were overall more likely to report and forecast revenue metrics, such as ROI and net present value (NPV), versus 24% of BtoB marketers without marketing automation.