Just a few years ago, marketers were trying to grab as many new customers as they could. While no one is turning away new business today, the focus is shifting to customer retention and building loyalty, according to speakers at the Automating Customer Lifecycle Management event, which was recently held in New York and sponsored by Eloqua.

Andrew Gaffney, Editor of Demand Gen Report, kicked off the meeting with a discussion of the recent report, The Next Generation Of Customer Lifecycle Marketing. “Two to three years ago, marketers would have said that lead generation was their top priority,” he said. “Now they are focused on improving loyalty and doing better job of selling additional products and services to their existing customers.”

Addressing the unique needs of B2B marketers, this year’s Content2Conversion (C2C) Conference will offer three Power Panels, each targeted toplanning content campaigns at specific stages of the buying cycle.

The “Keynote” Power Panel is a rare opportunity to hear from key figures in the field as they tackle questions every B2B marketer should be focused on answering. Ardath Albee, Joe Pulizzi and Ann Handley will deliver a comprehensive look at planning content strategy; deploying content in the right formats; and amplifying content across all channels.

Oracle is reshuffling the responsibilities of some key Eloqua executives as the enterprise software management company prepares to make Eloqua’s marketing automation offering the centerpiece of its Oracle Marketing Cloud strategy, according to sources familiar with the situation. Eloqua declined to comment and a link to Eloqua’s executive team takes visitors to a link to Oracle’s management team.

Insiders said that Eloqua’s CEO Joe Payne has been offered a position in product development with no direct reports so indications are that he will leave the company.

With a small staff and limited marketing budget, officials at online video hosting company Wistia were looking for automated ways to nurture their leads.

“We have been around for six years and have a small sales and support team, so we have always been exceptionally low touch,” said Ezra Fishman, Director of Marketing for Wistia. The company offers a free model – where users can store five videos for free – and a tiered paid model approach in which users are charged for additional video storage and bandwidth.

Badgeville, a provider of gamification and behavior management platforms, has launched Badgeville for Adobe Cloud, a solution which enables digital marketers and analytics professional to gain insights from customer behavior data and enhance customer engagement across their entire portfolio of digital properties, according to a Badgeville press release.

SalesFUSION will use the $1 million in Series A-1 venture capital is has raised to quadruple its sales and marketing team and have a greater presence at industry trade shows, according Chad Ruff, founder and CEO of the cloud marketing automation software company.

“The marketing automation space has been growing at a dramatic pace for the past few years and we are poised to take advantage of the expanding marketplace,” Ruff told Demand Gen Report. “We have been doubling our revenue over the past several years, and this will allow us to expand our marketing and sales head count by 400%.” The company currently has seven people on the sales team and three people in marketing, he said.

More companies are investing in cloud-based applications, including marketing automation, to take advantage of the low cost, improved security and mobile accessibility. In fact, cloud computing is expected to stay in the double digits through 2016.

“Cloud computing continues to grow,” according to a recent TechRepublic cloud-computing report. “Companies implementing SaaS solutions are overwhelmingly pleased with their outcomes, with 91% reporting that their SaaS solutions met or exceeded expectations.”

While B2B marketers say they are mining their social networks for leads and opportunities to engage with customers, they continue to lag behind their B2C cohorts in this regard. That said, more B2B marketers are incorporating social media into their messaging mix as it becomes easier to track results and attribute leads to social media outreach.

“Social media is becoming less of a side game,” said Meghan Keaney Anderson, Product Marketing Manager for HubSpot. “Social media grew up alongside other marketing channels, and with the exception of social sharing/follow buttons on web sites and in emails, it has largely remained an isolated channel. With the maturation of integrated marketing software, marketers are starting to be able to bring social data much further into the fold of the rest of their marketing channel.”