B2B buyers not only have to connect with buyers through engaging content, but they have to anticipate their future needs. That was one of the key points made by Lee Odden, CEO and Founder of TopRank Online Marketing in a session at the B2B Content2Conversion Conference hosted by Demand Gen Report.

 “Empathize with that customer journey and anticipate, maybe through search, what they’re interested and what they’re looking for,” he said. “Visual media is clearly something that is resonating with a lot of people.”

When sales and marketing fail to collaborate, it has a big impact on the bottom line. That was one of the key messages from the Sales Enablement Strategies panel at the B2B Content2Conversion event.

Moderator Jon Russo, Founder and CEO of B2B Fusion Group, told the audience that poor sales-marketing alignment costs $14 million a year at a $1 billion firm. “For every 650 leads, one deal is closed in 19 months and sales cycle times have increased by 10% over the past three years, from five months in 2010 to 5.4 months in 2012,” he said, citing figures from Gartner, IDC, Alinean and DiscoverOrg.

According to a report from Accenture, 40% of top marketing executives don’t feel prepared to meet their objectives, citing inefficient business practices among the top impediments to performance.

In response to these concerns, executives reported that they are shifting their investments to analytics to measure the changes in demand for multichannel marketing. Almost half (48%) of executives will be dedicating more funding to managing customer data, 40% will focus on web analytics, and 39% will invest in market analytics.

Salesforce.com launched Social.com, a service that allows users to advertise on Facebook and Twitter using real-time customer and social listening data. Social.com is the latest addition to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which includes Radian6 and Buddy Media. Fifty five of the Fortune 100 and eight of the top 10 global advertisers are current clients of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

 “Today salesforce.com is doubling down on social ads,” said Michael Lazerow, CMO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud at Salesforce.com. “Social ads cannot be disconnected from your business.”

Software-as-a-service marketing automation provider eTrigue Corp. announced the 2013 Spring release of DemandCenter, which includes updated dashboards and interactive grids for easier data sorting.

This release also features a simpler way to manage eTrigue’s unique 3D lead scoring with greater granularity, company officials said.

Silverpop announced that it has received $25 million in new funding in the form of venture debt from Escalate Capital Partners and Silicon Valley Bank.

Venture debt is a typical precursor to IPOs and acquisitions, leading observers to speculate that Silverpop plans to go public and is an acquisition target of Salesforce.com, Microsoft or another CRM provider. Marketo, another marketing automation provider, recently filed an IPO and is widely believed to bet on track to be acquired by a CRM vendor.

Bizo, a provider of business audience marketing technology, announced the launch of Bizo Data Solutions, an extension of the company's existing digital marketing platform to help B2B companies to better understand and more efficiently engage target audiences across their entire marketing funnel.

Bizo Data Solutions works with a number of marketing technology platforms, including specific integrations with Adobe AudienceManager, Salesforce, Eloqua, BlueKai, [x+1], Google Analytics and others.