Virtually all B2B marketers now engage in content marketing, and the use of various content formats is up across the board, according to a new study.

The 2013 B2B Content Marketing study, conducted by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, and sponsored by Brightcove, surveyed more than 1,400 marketing professionals. More than 90% of the respondents say they use content marketing, and they spend an average of 33% of their budgets on the practice compared to 26% last year.

Marketo announced today the creation of its Marketo Program Exchange, a community-driven platform designed to support the company's marketing automation users and connect them with third-party tools and services.

Marketo Program Exchange is being positioned as the first major piece of Marketo's Marketing Nation – a unifying concept for the company's partner ecosystem, user community, application hooks and other components.

Optify, a provider of digital marketing software, today announced new lead intelligence capabilities for the company's suite of marketing automation products.

The company's new Optify Connect, according to a news release, will allow B2B marketers to capture and manage behavioral history and detailed information about leads from a single source. Optify Connect includes the ability to tie new contacts with anonymous web site visit history, customized fields in landing pages and email campaigns, and other custom intelligence.

Demand Gen Report, a leading digital publication covering the sales and marketing automation space, has released the findings of its third annual Bt2B Buying Survey. The report, underwritten by Act-On Software, and titled “Inside The Mind Of The B2B Buyer,” found the buying cycle is increasing in duration, buyers are conducting extensive research before reaching out to sales reps and are increasingly dissatisfied with the buying experience.

More than 170 B2B buyers polled were involved in the purchase of a solution in the past year, unveiling several noteworthy trends:

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."

Aprimo, a provider of B2B and B2C marketing automation solutions, today released an update to its Aprimo Relationship Manager, part of the company's suite of cloud-based Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) applications.

According to a company news release, version 6.6 of Aprimo Relationship Manager includes a number of user interface and technology integration enhancements. The update comes a week after the company announced its Digital Messaging Center, which will integrate with the latest update.

Salesforce.com today announced a major new set of social analytics partnerships for its Marketing Cloud, bringing together 20 social analytics vendors to help companies “accelerate the shift from passive social listening to driving real business results, turning insights into action.”

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud, announced during the company's Dreamforce event in September, aggregates technology acquired through its purchases of Buddy Media and Radian6 with its core CRM platform. The new partnerships, according to the company, will give customers access to analytics tools for identifying sales leads, discovering advocates, detecting trends for any topic or keyword, uncovering social influence and analyzing content in 17 languages.

'Lean Startup' Expert Eric Ries Joins HubSpot Advisory Board

On Wednesday, marketing automation vendor HubSpot announced that Eric Ries has joined the company's advisory board. Ries is a key proponent of the "lean startup" methodology, which emphasizes iterative development, short product-release cycles and aggressive experimentation as part of the startup process.

Ries has also served as a venture advisor at Kleiner Perkins, is the author of The Lean Startup, and writes the Startup Lessons Learned blog.

Microsoft announced yesterday that it has acquired marketing automation firm MarketingPilot for an undisclosed sum. The news was announced in a blog post on Microsoft's Dynamics CRM community site and in a statement on the MarketingPilot web site.

"MarketingPilot has a comprehensive vision for Integrated Marketing solutions that aligns closely to our vision," said Bob Stutz, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, in the blog post. "In addition, they have a talented management team and an innovative product suite built on Microsoft technologies available both in the Cloud and On-premises. We are committed to taking care of MarketingPilot customers, and we welcome them to the Microsoft family. We will be communicating directly with individual customers over the coming days and weeks."