By Jason Thibeault, Senior Director of Marketing Strategy, Limelight Networks
As discussed in Part 1 of this two-part essay, storytelling is reshaping marketing. Why? Because relationships are the new currency and you can’t build relationships through product messaging and bullet points. You need something more — like stories.
Marketo recently added sales process and personnel agency MarketStar and call marketing automation vendor RingRevenue to its LaunchPoint partner program.
MarketStar will also provide Marketo with skilled personnel who “understand the science of nurturing and who have the knowledge to invest in iterative improvements and adjustments over time,” said Vaughn Aust, VP of Digital Marketing Solutions at MarketStar, adding that these advisors will gauge performance by grading clients on categories such a customer engagement and sales expectations.
Adobe Systems Inc. agreed to acquire privately held Neolane, a provider of cross-channel campaign management technology, for approximately $600 million in cash. Industry observers say the acquisition helps to fill some gaps in Adobe’s Marketing Cloud but still leaves the company without a CRM platform.
The deal, which is expected to close in July, is the latest in a flurry of acquisitions of marketing automation firms, including Salesforce.com’s recent deal for ExactTarget and Oracle’s acquisition of Eloqua.
Design Within Reach (DWR), a retailer selling furniture online and through a contract sales force, has been using Salesforce.com to enable employees to connect and collaborate, and will soon be using the system to hone its quoting methods and targeted marketing efforts.
The company has been using the Salesforce Chatter feature to create an employee social network that has enabled the company to expand from individual sales to doing business with purchasing agents for major hotel chains, architectural firms and small interior design firms.
Bizo, a provider of business audience marketing technology, has raised $12.5 million in venture debt financing from City National Bank. This round of funding puts Bizo at approximately $30 million in total equity and debt capital. Bizo plans to use the funding to continue its expansion, further build out its technology platform and make strategic investments, according to company officials.
According to Russell Glass, CEO of Bizo, the financing ensures the company is “well capitalized to maintain its leadership position in the B2B online marketing space and is well-positioned to make strategic investments as we continue to build a thriving business.”
Salesforce.com and Oracle may be rivals when it comes to marketing automation, but they are now partners in the cloud. The two companies signed a nine-year partnership agreement encompassing all three tiers of cloud computing — applications, platform and infrastructure.
Salesforce.com plans to standardize on the Oracle Linux operating system, Exadata engineered systems, the Oracle Database, and Java Middleware Platform. Oracle plans to integrate Salesforce.com with Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud, and provide the core technology to power Salesforce.com's applications and platform. Salesforce.com will also implement Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Financial cloud applications throughout the company.
The Sales Enablement Portal from Brainshark now includes an interface that is optimized for access by iPhones and Android smartphones so that mobile sales reps can efficiently find, view and share content.
“With everything we work on, mobility is now part of the primary thought process,” Kristin Simonini, Director of Product Management, told Demand Gen Report.
By Jason Thibeault, Senior Director of Marketing Strategy, Limelight Networks
You might still be one of them. Broadcast marketers. The digital world was like a candy store for them — more ways to distribute more messages, faster. It didn’t take long, though, for those marketers to fill the digital world with a level of noise that has jaded customers to any sort of digital marketing.
Evergage offers a behavior-based web personalization platform that can help businesses obtain and keep more customers by generating greater conversion rates at every stage of the customer lifecycle. The platform enables B2B marketers to offer visitors dynamic, personalized experiences in real-time.
B2B marketers walk a fine line when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) tactics. In a world where B2B buyers are increasingly likely to use search as the first step in their research, understanding how to improve a brand’s search rankings is more important than ever.
“In B2B, you’re often dealing with leads that need a solution to a problem, but they don’t know what they don’t know yet,” said Corey Eridon, Inbound Content Marketing Manager at HubSpot. “When that happens, they go to a search engine and discover what they need to learn.”
