Eloqua Introduces AdFocus to Manage Display Ad Targeting

This morning, Eloqua announced AdFocus — a tool that allows marketers to manage their display ad targeting within Eloqua's marketing automation system. The release of AdFocus gives marketers a way to monitor and manage their paid marketing alongside other marketing efforts such as email and affiliate marketing.

The ability to monitor display ad targeting within Eloqua's marketing automation system is useful since display ads are a growing area of focus for business-to-business (B2B) companies. According to a recent Forrester report, this paid media is expected to make up 36 percent of all interactive media purchases by 2016.

As the focus on display ads grows, it will be important to narrowly target personalized display ad content to a niche target audience. And the using the data kept in a marketing automation system to personalize ads can help marketers pinpoint their target audience.

AdFocus Helps Create More Personalized Display Ads

Most display ads fail to reach their intended audience. A recent study by DemandBase, a personalization and targeting platform, estimates that 67 percent of all display ads are seen by the wrong audience. AdFocus is designed to help marketers reach their audience more effectively by using prospect data, such as their current lead score, already stored in the marketing automation system. Eloqua's AdFocus can use this information to serve up a personalized ad for the intended audience via DemandBase.

For instance, AdFocus allows marketers to display certain ads solely to prospects that are in the lead nurturing phase. For these individuals, marketers can display an ad with a call to action that is educational in nature and send them to an informational page rather than a sales page. Meanwhile, marketers can target existing customers with ads with an upsell offer rather than asking them to purchase a product they already own.

Screenshot of Eloqua AdFocus display ad rules.

AdFocus also allows marketers to directly display personal information about prospects (e.g. the Account Manager that operates their account) directly within an ad. This kind of individualized approach to display ad targeting provides a more direct approach to speaking to any prospect which, Eloqua believes, improves the success of lead generation efforts.

A final feature of AdFocus is that it allows marketers to automate their display ad targeting efforts. Traditionally, marketers have to go out and research websites and industry publications they'd like to use for their display ad targeting and then manually target those publications. DemandBase can automate this process by analyzing and selecting which websites and publications are the best fit for the prospect profile marketer wants to target. After that, marketers can use AdFocus to immediately start displaying ads based on the defined rules for the ad.

AdFocus Helps Compare Marketing Efforts in a Single System

By logging all of this information in a single system, marketers will be able to compare and contrast the return on investment of their marketing efforts side-by-side. With comparisons of earned, owned and paid marketing efforts in a single system, marketers can get a better grasp on what works for them and how their earned and owned efforts can work in conjunction with paid marketing efforts like display ads.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Aprimo Digital Messaging Center Provides a Single Location to Manage Cross-Channel Marketing

Marketing automation provider Aprimo has released its Digital Messaging Center, a cloud based hub for combining marketing tools with social media, analytics and CRM systems.

Aprimo announced the news at the DMA2012 conference in Las Vegas this week, and it offers real-time access to customer preferences and behavioral data from mobile, Web and integrated systems.

Another Step Toward Personalized Experience

Marketers want more information about potential customers, and putting disparate data together about the same person or company is getting easier. Harvesting tidbits from social media and using ever more powerful analytics systems is popular way of doing just that. Now companies like Teradata, Aprimo's parent company, are automating this tactic and pushing it out as an all in one, plug and play product.

The Digital Messaging Center provides automated processes for:

• Message Creation — Streamline content with an online library, functional messaging templates and display optimization.
• Deliverability — Increase inbox delivery rates for up to 10 million emails per hour with personalized rules, automatic bounce-back processing and list integration among others.
• Personalization — Tailor offers and other messages based on complex customer data.
• Recipient Management — Integrate big data/analytics.
• Tracking and Reporting — Break down what’s working for individuals and/or target groups.

The Digital Messaging Center is available as a standalone solution or as part of Aprimo's Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) Platform.

Aprimo News Recap

Teradata bought Aprimo in 2011, and earlier this year, bought up eCircle for its email and digital marketing expertise. The Digital Messaging Center is a culmination of that eCircle purchase. 

In August, Aprimo debuted its Real-Time Interaction Manager to improve customer experience. Then in September, Aprimo Service to Sales became available on the Salesforce.com AppExchange for better business intelligence.

The Digital Messaging Center is Aprimo's most robust integrated marketing management platform to date, and as Gartner pointed out in its eCircle buyout report, the move puts Aprimo in a good position among global digital marketing companies.

A Digital Marketer's Dream

There's a common theme running among vendors of digital marketing solutions, and that is the marketers want a single location to manage the cross-channel marketing they do and the information they have. We saw that with the acquisition of Pardot by ExactTarget last week, we saw it with Ektron's addition of HubSpot into its Digital Marketing Hub (DMH) and with Adobe's integration of AdLens with SiteCatalyst. Of course Adobe's integration is not a complete package, but it demonstrates the need for integrated solutions that make it easier for marketers to design, build and manage cross-channel campaigns. So we ask…who's next?

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

The Dreamforce Takeaway? Salesforce Gears-up to Takeover the Enterprise

And you say you want a revolution, we all want to change the world….

Once upon a time Salesforce.com was a startup that provided hosted Sales Automation solutions. Co- founded by former Oracle executive and Larry Ellison protégé, Marc Benioff, the company’s explicitly stated mission was “the End of Software.”

Today Benioff is credited by many, including Wikipedia, for “turning the software industry on its head” for using the Internet to “revamp the way software programs are designed and distributed.” Salesforce’s annual user conference, Dreamforce, which ends today, welcomed more than 90,000 registered participants (I suspect some of them virtual), displacing Oracle OpenWorld as the largest Enterprise software conference in the world.

Fait accompli Mr. Benioff?

Apparently not. A guy like Benioff, who walks over hot coals and jumps off tall bridges in the dark of the night, isn’t the type who rests on his laurels.

Last Tuesday, using a Show ‘N Tell keynote as his medium, Benioff declared revolution again.

If the Salesforce CEO has his way, a few years from now, information workers all over the planet will be working from his company’s “social stream”, Chatter, and their desktops might look like Enterprise versions of Facebook.

Altimeter Group founder and author of best-selling Groundswell, Charlene Li, summarized Benioff’s keynote in a tweet:

And if you look at everything that Salesforce has acquired of late and with how the purchases are integrated into Salesforce’s various clouds, it’s hard to argue Li.

Consider that since 2010 Salesforce has purchased:

• Sitemasher, now known as site.com
• Activa Live Chat, now known as Salesforce Live Agent
• Heroku, a Cloud Application Platform to deploy and scale powerful apps
• Etacts, a technology that connects with your Gmail account (using oAuth), and integrates with your inbox to build out your list of contacts. The service also allows you to connect your mobile phone and will track who you talk to frequently over the phone or SMS
• Dimdim which provides for real time, rich-media collaboration and meetings
• Manymoon (Fe) — now known as Do.com
• Radian6 which helps companies listen to what people are saying about them online and engage in those conversations across the social web
• Assistly, now known as Desk.com — Model Metrics which delivers applications and services as part of the Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service
• Rypple (now Work.com) an application for Social Employee Performance Management
• Stypi, a collaborative real-time text editor
• Buddy Media, the social enterprise software of choice for eight of the world’s top ten global advertisers
• ChoicePass, a customized corporate perks and employee rewards technology company
• Thinkfuse, an enterprise SaaS provider that integrates closely with email to streamline scheduled communications
• GoInstant, a co-browsing solution that allows two or more people to browse the web together in a real-time interactive session.

Much of the Dreamforce Conference was spent explaining how all of these acquisitions will be/have been integrated into Salesforce to transform the workplaces of today into the socially connected Enterprises of tomorrow.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Eclipse Corp Deepens Oracle Partnership Extending Document Automation Reach

It's quiet in the wake of Labor Day, but document automation vendor Eclipse isn't resting as it moves to Silver level membership of the Oracle Partner Network (OPN).

For clients of the companies involved, these kinds of partnerships are usually a good thing and generally result in better, or more, products. For the companies involved, it usually means extended reach into the markets they are operating in already, and the opening of new markets.

Oracle With Eclipse

With this partnership, Eclipse says that it will be able to add Oracle’s 1-Click line of products to its portfolio enabling what it describes as “competitive positioning” — which generally means better pricing — as well as, and probably more importantly given its products, increase its presence across the midsize market.

On top of that it will also be able to use the OPN portal tools and resources, as well as the expert help in the Oracle Partner Business Center, which it says will enable it to maximize customer offerings and customer retention as a result.

For Oracle, which is giving Eclipse access to its customer base, the principal benefits seems to be the fact that it will be also able to offer a new range of document solutions to its customers.

Eclipse Document Automation

Eclipse has an interesting set of solutions that build on the idea of Integration without Modification (IWM). This enables users to build all kinds of documents and forms without every having to go near the source code.

It also does away with the need for Change Management associated with document presentation and delivery.

Eclipse builds enterprise document generation software solutions and e-forms, specializing in the technology that enables companies to develop business documents.

According to Eclipse, all of its solutions come with Enterprise Cloud Fax Service that effectively does away with the need for fax servers, phone lines and physical fax machines.

The result is batch faxing that is not only up to 20 times fast than traditional faxes, but is also capable of sending 250,000 faxes in a single transaction.

Eclipse Corporation provides automation software solutions. It also provides consulting, installation, implementation and support of document automation and management software. A side note, it is not the same as the Eclipse Foundation, which is a community for individuals and organizations who wish to collaborate on commercially-friendly open source software.

More on the Oracle and Eclipse as releases happen.
 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Marketing Automation Provider Pardot Upgrades Platform for Personalized Web Experience

B2B marketing automation provider Pardot has upgraded its platform with features that it said makes sales initiatives easier. 

Zach Bailey, Pardot vice president of products, said in a statement that sales and marketing executives, in order to hit their numbers, “need enriched campaigns, tools that simplify campaign creation, and even more automated processes.” The platform, he said, has been updated “with these concepts in mind,” allowing users to spend more time being creative with their campaigns and “less time fussing with their marketing automation system.”

Enhanced Dynamic Content Builder

One of the updates is an enhanced and simplified dynamic content builder, whose revisions are intended to improve ease of use in the creation of personalized web experiences for buyers. New functionality includes the ability to customize blocks of content on a website based on known data about the sales prospect, such as job title, previous downloads or industry.

This enhanced functionality for dynamic content, the company said, could be used to promote calls-to-action that are based on a prospect’s interests, or to display images that relate to a prospect’s past purchases.

The Pardot landing page now has a brand-new interface, designed to enable the building of professional-grade landing pages within minutes. Users employ pre-defined templates, populated by their content via a drag-and-drop builder. The content can reside within Pardot, so no app-switching is needed, and advanced users can choose to hand-code the HTML.

Eventbrite Connector

A connector has also been added to Eventbrite, the cloud registration management service. This integration makes Eventbrite information about events available inside Pardot, so that digital marketers can plan accordingly.

The updates also include enhanced control of CRM data syncing, a more flexible conversion reporting, click-to-open rates and bounce reasons added to email reporting, and the ability to view historical import data.

Pardot’s B2B cloud marketing automation platform, targeted at small- and mid-sized businesses, includes CRM integration, email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring and ROI reporting. The new enhancements follow the release during this quarter of more than a dozen additional features for the platform.
 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Marketing Automation Provider Act-On Software Launches Partner Exchange

Marketing automation provider Act-On Software is launching a partner program, bringing together partners and customers.

The Beaverton, Oregon-based company said that the new Act-On Partner Exchange (APEX) offers a resource for its customers, which currently number about 1000 and which are constantly looking for new products and services from Act-On partners for their online marketing.

Three Act-On Partner Types

Act-On said its partners fall into three categories. There are Technology Partners, whose product integrates with Act-On’s marketing automation platform. Agency Partners can extend the Act-On platform with their expertise in marketing and creative services, and Referral Partners offer specialized marketing services while referring customers to Act-On for online marketing.

As an example of a Referral Partner, the company pointed to Portland, Oregon-based Albertson Performance Group. CEO Eric Albertson said in a statement that, with his company’s expertise in “helping technology marketers design and execute campaigns to get more leads with better quality,” the Albertson Performance Group can help Act-On’s customers “get the most out of their investment in marketing automation.”

Other partners include Cisco WebEx, Pipedream, Estuate and Port25.

Act-On Chief Revenue Officer Shawn Naggiar told news media that there has already been “an exponential increase” in customers working with APEX partners, since the program is designed to be a “simple and effective” way for partners to join the Act-On ecosystem and for customers to find products and services.

Marketing Automation for the Mid-Sized Org

Act-On was founded in 2008 by CEO Raghu Raghavan with the intent of providing what it called “an equalizer” for small- and mid-sized companies. Its cloud-based platform offers an email engine with one-click integration to web conferencing and CRM, as well as tools for website visitor tracking, lead scoring, lead nurturing and social media prospecting, and design tools for web forms, landing pages and emails.

The company’s platform is designed to enable those companies, which it calls the Fortune 5,000,000, to “easily and swiftly create and execute” multi-channel integrated marketing campaigns, find and nurture qualified leads, and conduct analytics.

While the company said its focus is on smaller businesses, it noted that its platform is also used by divisions of some large companies, including Motorola, Progressive, IBM, Associated Bank, InsideSales.com and Liberty Tax Service.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

The Path from Fileshare to SharePoint

One of the major complaints about SharePoint is that, while it contains the potential for expanded business productivity and automation, within many organizations it has become yet another file share. 

While that may be true, the primary difference is that, unlike those old file shares, SharePoint has the potential to be expanded upon. It is the sleeping giant in the organization. And funny enough, one of the major trends these days is movement of old network file shares and their vast volumes of unstructured data into SharePoint.

Let's examine why this shift is happening. For one, the adoption lifecycle for SharePoint as a platform is maturing, with over 80 percent of the Fortune 500 companies either owning 2010 or planning to move to 2010. SharePoint adds many benefits that file shares just can’t provide, including retention policies, taxonomy and metadata, business productivity through workflow and forms, and robust document editing and versioning capability, to name a few.

The number one reason organizations delay their file share migration to SharePoint is fear of the unknown — they simply don't know where to start.

Understanding the Options

According to my colleague Mark McGovern, the logical place to begin the planning process of moving network file shares to SharePoint is to do an inventory, and determine which types of file shares are appropriate to migrate and which are not:

Some questions to ask during this process are: What is the volume of content to be moved? How often is it accessed? Does it need to be retained for a set period due to compliance reasons? Are the documents highly collaborative? Lots of small documents that are modified frequently and need to be retained for a given period would be a great candidate for migration. It is usually a combination of factors that determines the decision."

The next place that many organizations get "stuck" is in deciding the method for the migration. Depending on the skillset on hand, the timeframe in which to move the content or the complexity of content (multiple versions, historical metadata or maybe just the sheer volume of content), administrators can attempt to do it manually, they can engage their developers to write some custom code or use PowerShell scripts, or they can purchase one of many 3rd party tools on the market that support the SharePoint environment.

As Mark points out, the answer to that question — as with all difficult decisions in the SharePoint world — is that "It depends."

Mark adds,

There are pros and cons of each method. For example, when uploading files manually, the CreatedBy, CreatedDate, ModifedBy and ModifiedDate are not maintained. For legal reasons, this loss of historical metadata may rule out this method. Fortunately, there are tools on the market that can retain this important metadata."

Migration Considerations

Most file shares have become a dumping ground for content. While there may be valuable content within your system, it is likely you also have massive amounts of duplicate, outdated and unnecessary content that should be purged from your system. As you prepare to move this content, some questions you should ask include:

• Do you know what content is out there?
• Do you know who owns the content, and whether it even needs to be moved? (maybe it can remain, but indexed and therefore searchable)
• Is the folder structure important?
• Do you need to maintain historic metadata?
• Is the plan to move the content as-is and decommission your hardware, or will you attempt to organize/clean up the content prior to your migration?
• Will some content remain on the old system? (it might be tied to other internal tools that are not yet ready to move to SharePoint, or may never move to SharePoint)
• Are you planning to apply metadata and taxonomy? (using the existing folder structure, or creating a new taxonomy)
• Are users driving the clean up and tagging process, or is it an administrative effort?

Whatever method you decide to employ, the single most important aspect of migrating file share content to SharePoint is the metadata applied. As much as possible, make sure that you tag your documents with metadata during the migration, as applying metadata later can be labor-intensive, and you may introduce a greater potential for human error (you miss some of the content, don't apply new metadata or content types everywhere). Adding metadata tags during the migration makes your content more “findable” and easier to surface through search or through SharePoint's social capabilities.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

InsideSales.com Raises $4M to Hone Predictive Analytics for Sales Force Automation

InsideSales.com, a provider of a Saas-based sales force automation platform, has completed a round of funding totaling US$ 4 million. The company says it will put the money toward accelerating growth into enterprise markets and developing predictive analytics capabilities.

The InsideSales.com platform takes what the company calls the “high velocity sales model,” which it says is a data-driven approach to sales. Using cloud-based technology, InsideSales.com seeks to improve productivity, visibility and analytics with a metrics-based “preferred inside sales model.”

This sales model leverages rapid lead response qualification and cold-calling teams paired with experienced closers who conduct sales using the phone and Internet, as opposed to the traditional face-to-face outside sales model that InsideSales.com says is more expensive and less efficient.

Engaging Modern Consumers

InsideSales.com is attempting to tackle what is becoming a widely-recognized challenge for today’s sales professionals — engaging a much savvier and more connected consumer. Dan Schleifer, EVP of sales enablement for enterprise sales collaboration software provider SAVO Group, recently explained in an interview with CMSWire how he sees Web-based communication technology as holding the potential to revolutionize sales in today’s environment.

Schleifer said by automatically collecting data in real time while a sales rep is making a presentation or pitch, via mobile device, sales enablement tools can eliminate organizational silos and fill the gaps in B2B sales data quickly enough for sales strategies to be altered as soon as problems can be identified. “The clinical moment of truth in any sales process is when the rep is sitting with the customer. Sales enablement allows you to understand that moment of truth.”

While InsideSales.com is geared more toward identifying leads for real-time sales calls than for increasing the personalization of site visits, the underlying strategy of automating a process and improving its effectiveness with real-time data and predictive analytics is the same. InsideSales.com generates and stores quantitative call data linked directly with qualitative lead process and flow information.

Some Days are Better than Others

As an example of how InsideSales.com’ technology can be applied, LeadResponseManagement.org used data from the InsideSales.com system to conduct a study into telephone sales issues such as what day of the week is best to call back a web-generated lead for optimal contact and qualification rates. The study determined Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to call for making contact with and qualifying leads (with Tuesdays the worst day for making contact and Fridays the worst day for qualifying).

This type of feedback can be invaluable for companies trying to successfully reach prospective customers who have become adept at both filtering out information and conducting extensive research on products, brands and services.

Hummer Winblad Venture Partners led the funding round, with co-investors including Josh James, founder and CEO of Domo and cofounder and former CEO of Omniture.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Sales Enablement - Unleash the Potential of Your Sales Team

Sales enablement is a hot topic lately, with an increasing number of CRM and sales/marketing automation vendors providing sales enablement solutions. However, according to Dan Schleifer, EVP of sales enablement for enterprise sales collaboration software provider SAVO Group, the full potential of sales enablement lies in revealing what happens in the middle of the sales process.

Sales Enablement in the Middle

“CRM is the accounting system of record for sales at the tail end of the process,” Schleifer said during an exclusive interview with CMSWire. “Email and social tools are at the top. But in the middle of the process, assuming sales reps don’t do decent jobs entering sales contacts into the CRM system, and they invariably don’t; you don’t get visibility into what is happening in the field when the sales rep’s lips are flapping.”

Thus, Schleifer said there is no single tool that provides sales visibility all the way down the sales pipeline, from initial prospecting to closing (or not closing) a deal. He continued,

Marketing automation is important but doesn’t close the deal. CRM backs in from the closed deal further into the selling process. But nobody is collecting data such as what PowerPoint slide the sales rep used at what stage of the sales presentation. We don’t know what objections were handled or what team members were pulled in.”

For example, Schleifer said that a project manager may have been called in to all the successful sales presentations for a specific service or product, but this data is not captured in the traditional marketing automation/CRM information-gathering process. “It’s the essence of what makes B2B sales tick,” he said.

From the Field to the Home Office

Therefore, Schleifer said the full potential of sales enablement technology lies in its ability to uncover what is really happening in the field, identify success factors, and then communicate those factors throughout the enterprise. In addition, he said properly applied sales enablement tools can provide “short cycle feedback” allowing adjustments to sales strategies as they are being enacted.

“As a sales executive I don’t want to wait for the CRM system to tell me that a new product release is not resulting in closed sales,” he stated. “The clinical moment of truth in any sales process is when the rep is sitting with the customer. Sales enablement allows you to understand that moment of truth.”

By automatically collecting data in real time while a sales rep is making a presentation or pitch, via mobile device, sales enablement tools can eliminate organizational silos and fill the gaps in B2B sales data quickly enough for sales strategies to be altered as soon as problems can be identified. They also allow senior management to quickly understand what makes top performers stand out compared to their peers.

“Any VP of sales can tell you who their top performers are,” said Schleifer. “But they can’t tell you why. Sales enablement technology allows them to collect and process data on their top performers and determine patterns of success that then be pushed to all sales reps through the right coaching. It changes the sales process.”

Ultimately, Schleifer said a sales enablement tool should work the way an assistant aiding a surgeon works. “The assistant hands the surgeon every tool they need,” he said. “That person knows everything — the surgeon doesn’t have to write it down.”

In the next few years, Schleifer sees sales enablement technology developing to the point it can provide senior management with real-time actionable feedback from the field, rather than short-cycle feedback. “Executives will get a real-time field view and be able to take immediate action,” he predicted. "It’s really just Big Data and analytics wrapped around the right data. Within days or even hours of a new product release, you’ll know if it’s working.”

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com