As marketers are being increasingly tasked to tie their campaigns and other investments to top- and bottom-line results, B2B organizations such as MarcomCentral and MakerBot are looking beyond basic activity metrics to understand tracking activity at different stages of the buying funnel. In addition to validating marketing’s impact, this push for deeper insights aims to enhance content and messaging in those stages, enabling marketing teams to provide more relevant and contextual experiences that accelerate deals.

After seeing mixed results with early forays into display ad retargeting, B2B brands are reporting significantly better success as they attach remarketing tools and tactics to more precise initiatives, such as account-based marketing (ABM) programs.

B2B organizations are beginning to see better engagement with their audience, whether it’s through marketing automation software, CRM or other channel-specific technology.

Teradata announced plans to exit the marketing applications business by the early part of 2016, a move intended to help the company focus on enhancing its data and analytics offerings, while also opening up an estimated $120 million in operating income for 2016.

Marketing attribution models and tools are emerging that enable B2B marketers to tie sales to specific marketing campaigns and initiatives that contributed to revenue, experts note. And while most companies are not there yet due to the complexity of full-funnel attribution, those who are doing so are seeing a significant payoff.

LinkedIn has expanded its Marketing Solutions portfolio with the introduction of LinkedIn Lead Accelerator, a lead generation and nurturing product designed to connect companies to the right professionals with the right content as they make their way through the purchase decision process.

This addition reflects the integration and enhancement of Bizo’s Multi-Channel Nurturing product, which LinkedIn acquired in August 2014.

More powerful targeting and segmentation capabilities, robust dashboards and a wizard for building email campaigns are some of the key highlights in the latest version of the Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud.

“Having spent a little time with it, I would have to say they are hitting all segments of their customer base, from the power user to the casual user, with some strong capabilities,” Tom Svec, Solutions Architect at DemandGen International, told Demand Gen Report.

Marketing used to just “throw leads over the wall” to the sales department and hope that a good number of them would stick. But now that marketing is responsible for a revenue contribution goal, the walls are tumbling down. It is no longer a question of how many leads marketing can generate, but how they can provide the right content and other resources to sales to ensure that as many leads as possible turn into deals.

The increased pressure to contribute to revenue, along with buyers delaying their engagement with sales until later in the decision-making process, has resulted in rising interest in sales enablement tools over the past six months, industry observers noted.

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."