Fastest Growing Lead Management Provider Marketo Predicts 2010 Top B2B Marketing Trends and Recaps 2009 Momentum

Smart Social Media Marketing and Lead Lifecycle Campaigns Provide Foundation for 2010 Growth

SAN MATEO, CA (December 16, 2009) –

As 2009 comes to a close, Marketo, the revenue-focused marketing automation company, celebrates its role in shaping and defining the top marketing trends in 2009 and empowering customers to achieve breakthrough success. Since the company’s inception, customers and analysts alike have praised Marketo for its B2B marketing thought leadership and ability to deliver on the needs of its clients. With unparalleled growth in the industry, Marketo has quickly become marketing automation’s “rising star” and game-changing innovation leader.

“2009 was a watershed year for B2B marketing, with more and more companies adopting marketing automation and lead management to improve their demand generation strategies,” said Phil Fernandez, President and CEO at Marketo. “Not only has Marketo redefined the requirements for marketing automation, together with our customers we are transforming the pace of marketing innovation.”
Top Marketing Trends in 2009

Building Brands and Generating Leads with B2B Social Media – Social networks are rapidly becoming an important channel for B2B companies to mine for prospects, demonstrate thought leadership, build community, and tap into existing customers’ satisfaction levels. Marketo’s integration with Salesforce for Twitter allows marketers to monitor conversations on social sites such as Twitter and to use that information in lead nurturing, lead scoring, lead segmentation and trigger-based email marketing.

Maximizing Revenue Opportunities with Lead Nurturing – As the revenue-focused marketing automation company, Marketo remains at the forefront of enabling B2B organizations to develop and execute lead nurturing campaigns that deliver measurable results. Marketo’s widely-read Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing has provided more than 10,000 organizations large and small with useful, qualitative insight from today’s marketing thought leaders, basic and advanced B2B marketing best practices on must-have campaigns, and worksheets for calculating ROI and measuring the impact of nurturing done well.

Improving Business Performance with Marketing and Sales Alignment – Achieving alignment and synergy between marketing and sales departments is the largest opportunity for improving business performance today. According to a CMO Council survey, well over half of sales, marketing and channel professionals lacked a formal program for unifying sales and marketing – a ‘partner or perish’ mandate. Marketo Lead Management and Marketo Sales Insight enable marketing and sales teams to unite around a single revenue cycle, creating dramatic improvements in marketing ROI, sales effectiveness, and most importantly top-line growth.

Lead Scoring for Higher-Quality Sales Leads – In 2009, today’s most successful B2B organizations embraced Marketo best practices in lead scoring to automatically measure a prospective lead’s interest, level of engagement and demographic profile. By delivering higher quality sales leads, Marketo customers achieved dramatic improvements in sales effectiveness, yielding a 40% increase in sales productivity with as little as a 10% improvement in lead quality.

Marketing Automation Gains Momentum – The demand for automated demand generation solutions skyrocketed in 2009. Marketo earned a disproportionate share of this expanded market, easily becoming the fastest growing provider of marketing automation and revenue-building best practices, serving more than 300 customers in 12 countries only 20 months after market availability.

“As we approach 2010, we look forward to continuing our relentless drive to deliver the industry’s most advanced B2B marketing and sales solutions,” continued Fernandez. “Whether it’s enabling our customers to fully leverage the intelligence gained from their social media and demand generation strategies, or facilitating advanced lead lifecycle campaigns, Marketo is once again poised to lead the market in terms of innovation, vision and execution.”
Predictions for 2010

Smart Social Media Marketing – Social media will increasingly help marketers purposefully listen for clues about customer acquisition and customer retention. Not surprisingly, Marketo has extended lead nurturing best practices to monitor and track social media cues, such as a positive Facebook comment or negative blog post, and trigger the appropriate follow-up by sales, support or lead nurturing campaign.

Improving Marketing ROI with Lead Lifecycle Campaigns – Lead Lifecycle Campaigns are developed to ensure that no lead gets left behind. 2010 will bring an enhanced focus on making the most of every lead with a renewed focus on lead handoff, lead recycling and highly targeted drip campaigns to strengthen rapport with existing and prospective customers.

Marketing and Sales Collaboration at Every Stage of the Revenue Cycle – Leading B2B organizations will continue to seek ways for marketing and sales teams to collaborate at every stage of the revenue cycle from the earliest stages of demand generation and lead management to the pursuit of revenue, customer loyalty and up-sell opportunities.

Lead Scoring Gets Social – Advanced lead scoring programs will leverage the insights gained via social networks to ensure that sales teams have a complete profile of their prospects’ interest and recent engagement. For example, when a prospect tweets a request for more information, Marketo can now track that Twitter conversation as a Marketo activity, give it a lead score, augment the lead’s profile, and ultimately trigger the appropriate follow-up and lead nurturing campaign – independent of a web site visit.

New Tools for B2B Mobile Email Marketing – With nearly two-thirds of B2B decision makers reporting that they “regularly view emails using a mobile device,” the success of email marketing programs is highly reliant on their ability to be viewed on a mobile phone. New tools and techniques will leverage advanced lead management principles to further support the success of mobile email marketing campaigns.

Source: Marketo

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