Tag Archives: david raab

Top-10 Marketing Automation Blogs

UPDATE 7/14/09: I’ve now put all marketing automation blogs on a single page.

A couple of people recently asked me which blogs I’m frequently reading. So here’s the list. Please send me your favorite blogs, because there must be lots of great Marketing Automation blogs that I haven’t found yet!

BTW 1: Some of these blogs are more about lead generation, demand generation or inbound marketing, so maybe the title of this blog post is not ideal. But regardless of the terminology, these are the blogs that I enjoy most :- )

BTW 2: I have not included vendor weblogs: I will put those in a separate post.

In alphabetical order, these are the blogs that I read most frequently, and that I can heartily recommend.

(oops, that’s 11 blogs)

Let me know your favorite blogs, so I can put them in a follow-up post. Thanks!

Demand Generation – Week in Review

Unfortunately the flu got the better of me last week, so my blogging and Twittering came to a halt. But let’s make the best of it, and collect a list of news from the past week. Lots of interesting things happened, and insightful articles were published. I probably missed several things, but these are the highlights:

Top-5 B2B Marketing tips

Jon Miller at Marketo summarizes the key findings of several B2B marketing thought leadership interviews.
1.Start with a solid base
2.Use Push AND Pull Tactics
3.Integrate Your Efforts
4.Innovate
5.Test, Test and Retest

Market2Lead 4.0 released

Market2Lead has launched version 4.0 with a completely revamped user interface. I was planning to write a short review, but haven’t found time for this yet. To be continued…

B2B marketing is Obsolete

Laura Ramos has published the final piece in the “Obsolescence of B2B marketing” series.
1.Build a marketing-only database to capture buyer insight
2.Shift from simply generating demand to managing it
3.Combine digital and traditional tactics to build dialogue around needs and motivations
4.Embrace the groundswell and community marketing principles

Social Media and B2B Marketing

Steve Woods wrote this blog post that gives some great ideas on how to use social media for B2B marketing.
1.Set your information free
2.Focus on being credible
3.Understand their buying process
4.Match your marketing to their buying process
5.Keep interest high through nurturing
6.Only sell when they are ready to buy

10 Tips For Tweeting A Live Conference

Mike Damphousse wrote an interesting article for those who want to use Twitter for PR, in this case for the coverage of an industry conference (the Sales 2.0 conference next week in San Francisco). I will also attend this conference, so let me know if you want to meet up!

Vtrenz changes name to Silverpop Engage B2B

After being acquired by Silverpop, Vtrenz continued under its own name for a while, but now the name has changed to Silverpop Engage B2B. Which makes me wonder: do they rule out using Engage for high-value B2C sales processes? In any case, it’s good they make a clear choice and are developing a new brand for this established marketing automation product.

Marketo 3.0 First Look

David Raab got a sneak preview of  the new release of Marketo and writes about usability aspects of Demand Generation systems in general.

Genius.com announces Genius Enterprise

Apparently it’s the week for new releases: also Genius.com is preparing a new product: Genius Enterprise. Key new features are automated lead nurturing and lead scoring. David Raab again has the scoop.

DemandGen Report Sales & Marketing Alignment Awards

Last week I wrote about the Stevie Awards and complained that few vendors had submitted their customer case studies. This week the DemandGen Report announced the winners of their Sales & Marketing alignment awards. The winners are:

  • Enterprise Category: eTrique implementation at Cisco
  • SMB category: Eloqua implementation at Sourcefire
  • Fast Track category: Genius implementation at ADX

I hope this overview is useful. Please add a comment to give your feedback, or to report important events that I’ve missed. Thanks!

InfusionSoft Review – Great Marketing Tool for Small Companies

David Raab took a closer look at InfusionSoft and wrote about it today on his Customer Experience blog. I remember InfusionSoft mainly because of the convincing demo they have on their website: it makes an impressive claim that small businesses can double their sales with InfusionSoft.

infusionsoft logoThe key to their approach is an advanced lead nurturing engine, to avoid “follow-up failure”. They claim that the first sale usually takes place after 7 follow-ups, but that most sellers stop following-up after 3 tries. A convincing story, and thousands of customers are using InfusionSoft, so it must be working.

David looks at the feature set of InfusionSoft and concludes that it misses some key features that will be appreciated by larger companies, such as lead scoring and Salesforce.com integration. However, it does all other marketing automation tasks very well. David call it “Impressive Marketing Power for a Very Low Price”

Read David Raab’s blog post about InfusionSoft »