Most B2B companies are investing in content marketing, in fact the Content Marketing Institute found that 91% are using this tool while 80% of business decision-makers said they prefer to receive information about a company in a series of articles versus an advertisement.

Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs and co-author of Content Rules, broke down the five steps to content creation for B2B companies in a recent interview with the consultancy Open Labs. Join Handley and other content marketing experts during the B2B Content2Conversion Conference on April 22-23 at the TimesCenter in New York.

The professional networking site LinkedIn acquired Pulse, a news reader and mobile content distribution platform owned by Alphonso Labs. The announcement comes at a time when users of Google Reader, which is being shut down this summer, are looking for an alternative application.

The transaction is valued at approximately $90 million, subject to adjustment, in a combination of approximately 90% stock and approximately 10% cash. The acquisition is expected to close during the second quarter of 2013.

Teradata Corp., a provider of analytic data platforms, applications and services, introduced Interactive Customer Engagement, an Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) offering that helps marketers leverage data from digital and traditional sources.

According to company officials, the offering enables marketers to engage customers and prospects with consistent, personalized messaging across multiple channels, strengthening the overall brand experience, building customer loyalty and driving revenue growth. Interactive Customer Engagement combines Big Data analytics, data delivery, behavioral and contextual data, comprehensive predictive analytics and real-time messaging.

INBOX25, a provider of cloud-based marketing automation systems, unveiled the latest version of its software that provides access to its marketing automation platform from within SugarCRM. It was introduced at SugarCon 2013, SugarCRM's annual customer, developer, and partner conference held this week.

INBOX25 4.0 integrates tightly with SugarCRM to enable marketing teams to leverage all of their CRM data, including leads, contacts, opportunities, tasks, quotes, contracts and more, company officials said. The new integration is designed to allow sales teams to focus exclusively on sales-ready leads, while automatically and simultaneously nurturing other potential prospects that may not be ready to purchase.

Marketo unveiled a new certification program at the 2013 Marketo User Summit this week to recognize expert users of the vendor’s marketing automation software.

According to company officials, key benefits of the new program for Marketo certified experts and users include:

Are marketing-generated leads really full of dreck, or is sales just unable to close deals? It is an age-old battle of wills that is getting more heated as the pressure is on both sales and marketing to meet ever-rising revenue targets. Many organizations are looking to Big Data and predictive analytics to help identify hot sales prospects, but weaknesses in their databases are hampering sales productivity.

More than two thirds (68%) of companies report struggling with lead generation, blaming marketing for not providing enough quality leads, according to recent research sponsored by Lattice Engines, a data analytics platform provider, and conducted by CSO Insights, a sales and marketing effectiveness research firm,

Content marketing leaders will come together this month at the B2B Content2Conversion Conference. Among them is Ardath Albee, B2B marketing strategist and CEO of Marketing Interactions Inc. Recently, Demand Gen Report had the opportunity to discuss current content marketing trends as well as tips on distributing content across social channels with Albee.

Albee will share insights on crafting a killer B2B content strategy during a C2C Power Panel featuring Joe Pulizzi, Founder of Content Marketing Institute and Ann Handley, author of Content Rules.