Online Marketing Blog

Marketing software can help companies scale and automate important marketing processes of all kinds, from lead nurturing to data analysis to sales process optimization and beyond. Regardless of the software company behind it, these solutions are typically designed to help companies save time, identify opportunities, and close the gaps internally or externally that keep them from achieving their goals.

The goal in most businesses is pretty straightforward: increase revenue and more importantly, profits. The process to get you there is nowhere near that simple. Marketing software is meant to:

• make it easier to increase multi-channel visibility,
• align sales and marketing efforts (often through CRM integration),
• reach the right people at the right place and time with enhanced targeting, and
• help nurture and maintain relationships.

Salesforce recently launched a WordPress plugin that allows you to add a form to your blog and capture lead details in Salesforce.

The good news here is that it’s easy to install, easy to set up a form, and integrates nicely into your WordPress theme.

You also have the ability to customize the form look and feel with CSS and you can put the form in a widget for your sidebar.

The downside is that there are no custom fields, no spam protection, and you can only create one form. I’m hoping these are limitations of the initial release and future versions will have more options.

I decided to do a little liveblogging at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum and picked this session: Why email CRM and social media have become the tools of modern B2B marketing where a case study was presented by Genworth Financial.

Joel Book from Exact Target introduced the case study:  Creating brand advocates is as important as creating brand awareness. [I would say more important. An advocate proactively shares the brand experience]. Funny, Google “brand tattoos” to see some serious brand advocate activity.

How are marketers using digital media to engage?

• email + crm
• email + social

Email and CRM help to automate interaction. Automation is the key because marketing staff and budgets are not increasing. In order to continue deliver personal and timely messages to customers, you need to automate.