By Mike Shanker, CEO, Extraprise

Editor’s Note: The following is the first in a two-part series exploring the key considerations for when to outsource marketing, as well as the how to handle top marketing challenges.

Since Neil H. Gordon’s classic 1964 article, “The Concept of the Marketing Mix,” and E. Jerome McCarthy’s, “4Ps of Marketing,” much has been written about the basic elements of marketing. In addition to the standard Product, Price, Promote, Place attributes, the intervening years have seen many additions and variations: the 5 Ps and 7 Ps, among others.

By Peter Ghali, Senior Product Manager, iContact

With 800 million people using Facebook and hundreds of millions logging on to LinkedIn and Twitter, marketers are increasingly looking to reach their customers and prospects through these social media platforms.

But social media marketing isn’t without its challenges. According to a recent survey by iContact, a provider of social media and email marketing solutions, many businesses don’t have time for social media and can’t measure its impact.

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.

New Aberdeen Research found that BtoB organizations tapping information from BtoB directory ZoomInfo outperform other companies on key performance indicators (KPIs).

Date: Wednesday, May 25, 2011 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT

Who’s your buyer?  As more companies look to improve their flow of qualified leads, carefully defining segmentation and buyer personas have become a critical requirement for sales and marketing teams.

Join us for an informative webinar presenting best practices research as well as real-world case studies showing how companies are improving the ROI of their campaigns and increasing the efficiency of their sales efforts by investing in updating and expanding their database.

Key takeaways will include:

-   Strategies to get started with targeting and segmentation;
-   Examples of how organizations are using existing customer models to map out buyer personas and profiles
-   The payback companies are realizing by refining their databases and creating specific messaging that is relevant to unique markets

Featured Speakers:

Jim Lenskold, Founder & Principal of The Lenskold Group, Author of "Marketing ROI"
Sam Zales, President, ZoomInfo
Andrew Gaffney, Editor, Demand Gen Report

Register for "The ROI of Targeted Prospecting" Today.

New study: companies acknowledge negative impact of outdated BtoB data

By Kathy Greenler Sexton, Vice President of Marketing, ZoomInfo

Outdated BtoB contact data is pervasive — and, like a runaway train, it’s getting worse by the minute. In the time it takes you to read this, a couple hundred changes will happen in the business landscape that affect contact information (job changes, businesses starting and failing, etc.). Sales and marketing teams are hard pressed to keep pace with the changes. This is one of the findings of a just-published DemandGen Report study.

While marketers were already being asked to demonstrate the ROI of their investments, they are now being challenged to show their direct contribution top-line revenue. Given the increased scrutiny on revenue generation, marketers are quickly shifting their attention from impressions and leads to opportunities and closed deals. In this new paradigm, measurement is critical as marketers need to identify inefficiencies in their current spending. To learn more, Download Here.

An outpour of leads can be a bad thing—particularly when they are not qualified and/or relevant. Faced with the challenge of scaling quality, the marketing team at USA Financial was delivering hundreds of leads to sales every month—but had difficultly determining their worth.

Ada, MI-based USA Financial Marketing is an independent marketing organization that wholesales annuities and life insurance, and provides independent financial advisers marketing and financial adviser tools. The marketing technologies USA Financial employed provided no insight into its marketing programs’ effectiveness or the ROI of its marketing programs, nor were they integrated with sales technologies.

By Chris Frank, Director of Marketing, TreeHouse Interactive

There’s an old saying about marketing: “Marketing is the last in and first out.” What this means is that marketing is often the last team brought on at a company and the first to leave. It’s a scary thought in this economy. Maybe that’s why several conferences I’ve attended over the past year talk to the growing executive mantra of “accountability” when it comes to marketing and the need to show return on investment (ROI).