• how it works
• how to use it
• using it effectively

Marketing automation has been a hot topic for companies in all industries.  As more an more marketing efforts move online through your company’s website, natural search, paid search and social media, your prospects and customers are more knowledgeable about your products than ever.  As a result, most prospects interact with your company before actively “raising their hands” for information — without assistance of involvement from your sales and marketing teams.  You need to deliver timely content across multiple channels: online, in-person, at industry events and everywhere else.  Marketing automation steps in to help you to track the effectiveness of all of your interactions with your prospects and customers, online and off.

We’re hosting a 3-part webinar series with our partner, Eloqua, marketing automation pioneer, and Barbara Anguis Saxby, Founder and Managing Director at Accelent Consulting – a strategic marketing firm that has worked with companies like Peoplesoft and Salesforce.com.

This 3-part series covers the basics of marketing automation, practical applications for marketing automation and how marketing teams can measure success.

The first session answers the most critical question:

What is Marketing Automation?

We’ll talk about:

• Measuring results across the entire customer lifecycle
• Building a better marketing funnel
• Improving trust between sales and marketing

If you are interested in registering for the first session on May 18, register here.

• Webinar Session: What’s Marketing Automation
• Date: May 18, 2010
• Time: 10A PST

Are you interested in more content like this?  Join our marketing automation email list.

Last week Eloqua announced a new social media toolkit and the SmartXchange community.

Here’s the scoop on these new marketing tools.

SmartXchange
This is the new best practices community from Eloqua (currently in beta).  It holds templates, and gives marketers a space to exchange ideas.  It is also a sneak peak of the new UI concepts.  SmartXchange preview:

Screenshot of the "Coverflow" in the SmartXchange

Social Media Toolkit
You can create “share this” style links in your Eloqua emails, giving your readers a shortcut way to share your content:

Social Sharing Screenshot

Social Media Reports
By building a Social Media campaign, it is much easier to attribute any traffic spikes, or new visitors to your social media outlets.  Here’s a sample:

Social Media Reporting

Learn more in the press release:

Eloqua Clears Path to Social Web

New Social Sharing and Reporting Tools Help Marketers Integrate Social Media into Marketing Mix

December 09, 2009
Vienna, VA, — Eloqua, the category-defining leader in marketing automation, today announced the worldwide availability of its new Social Sharing and Reporting toolset. The easy-to-use product allows marketers to harness the power of the social Web by pulling online conversations into their promotions, empowering fans to share marketing content with social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and track inbound traffic from blogs and social networks.

“We want to make social media marketing simple for our customers,” said Brian Kardon, CMO of Eloqua. “Our Social Sharing and Reporting tools are integrated into the same system marketers use every day, and they don’t require any special training. The social Web has become a huge influence on buying decisions. With just a few clicks, our marketing clients can trigger and leverage dialogues for their company, products and services.”

Eloqua’s Social Sharing and Reporting tools integrate with existing outbound marketing campaigns to enhance lead generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring and overall marketing effectiveness. Simply, the product allows marketers to go from zero to social in three steps:

Make campaigns shareable. Prospects can share marketing content and promotions with members of their social networks while marketers can embed third-party content, such as blog posts, directly into their email pushes and landing pages.

Track inbound traffic from social media sites/blogs. Capturing prospects’ relevant social media activities gives sales personnel immediate and unequaled insight into the interests and preferences of their potential customers.

Measure social media impact. Marketers can track which blogs and social networks are driving the most traffic to their Web site to better inform future media-buying decisions.

“Our new social media tools put our clients – the best marketers in the world – in the center of the conversation,” concluded Kardon.