Adobe Systems on yesterday announced the public availability of Adobe Social, the company's new social marketing software suite. Adobe Social, which was announced for beta testing last March, is the latest component in the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite.
Adobe Social is intended to provide a single platform for managing social campaigns, content delivery, monitoring and analytics. This includes:
Marketing automation vendor Act-On Software announced Wednesday that it secured $16 million in new venture financing. The Series D round of financing gives the Beaverton, OR based company a market valuation of approximately $150, according to news reports.
Norwest Venture Partners will lead the current funding round, with existing investors Trinity Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners and Voyager Capital also participating. Previous funding included a $10 million Series C round in June, 2011, and a prior $4 million round.
Brainshark today announced the launch of an iPhone version of its SlideShark app. The free app gives users the ability to view and show PowerPoint presentations on an iPhone or iPod Touch, and to share and track presentations, among other features.
SlideShark debuted last fall as an iPad-only app for viewing PowerPoint content while also providing a platform to distribute, track and manage content in the cloud.
Sales and marketing consultancy Corporate Visions announced Tuesday that it has acquired WhiteboardSelling, a provider of sales-enablement technology. The purchase price and other financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
WhiteboardSelling is a fairly unique company in the B2B sales enablement space. As the company's name suggests, it offers a cloud-based platform that sales reps can use to create on-the-fly, visual presentations. The company also provides training resources to teach sales personnel how to improve their visual storytelling skills and integrate whiteboard presentations into their existing content assets.
IDG Enterprise recently released the results of its 2012 Content Marketing Trends study. With more than 740 responses from B2B marketers, the study offers yet another set of data points for this fast-moving and constantly changing market. This Slideshare presentation offers a set of survey highlights, including a closer look at some of the key underlying trends.
By Jon Russo, Founder of B2B Fusion Group
Jonathan Becker (@jbecker), the CMO of SAP, presented at this year’s Sirius Decisions conference on how important it is in a B2B buying cycle to "market to people, and not market to buildings." Let’s take Becker's theme one step further and translate that approach to the CRM and marketing automation world.
Pardot last week announced a number of updates to the company's flagship marketing automation platform. This round of updates – which follow more than a dozen other new features released earlier this quarter – focus on the Pardot platform's landing page creating and web site personalization tools.
For landing page creation, the Pardot marketing automation platform features a new user interface designed to speed and simplify the page creation process. This includes a new set of landing page templates, as well as a drag-and-drop tool for adding external content to pages. HTML editing and hand-coding support is also available for advanced users.
Search retargeting – a tactic which employs a simple but profitable intersection of display advertising and search – has long been a popular marketing tool for consumer companies. Now, retargeting is also gaining traction in the B2B market.
While consumer-focused retargeting is relatively simple, however, for B2B firms it will be a more complex process.
“As a B2B company you want to be able to get to the customers that raised their hands,” said Chris Mann, VP of Project Management for Bizo. “For B2B marketers there will be a creative set of solutions to accomplish that.”
Mann is referring to the solutions required to overcome the reach and scale issues that until very recently made B2B search retargeting a lower priority.
A recent study conducted by email marketing firm Adestra offers some interesting, and perhaps surprising, insights into how email subject lines affect user engagement metrics.
The study, which involved a random sample of the firm's email campaigns, analyzed click-through, open and click-to-open rates for 932 million emails during a six month period. The study broke out specific market segments, including e-Commerce, event marketing, and charities; it also compared B2B versus B2C response rates.
HubSpot today announced the release of HubSpot 3, the latest version of the company's flagship marketing automation platform. The update was officially unveiled during HubSpot's Inbound Marketing event, being held this week in Boston.
According to HubSpot Product Marketing Director Rick Burnes, the HubSpot 3 release includes 10 completely new or rebuilt components. These additions will be fully integrated with the platform's existing blogging software, CMS, SEO and marketing analytics tools, in addition to third-party tools available through the HubSpot marketplace.
Burnes stated that closer integration between components was a key goal of the new design. "Many of these [tasks] required hopping around between multiple applications," Burnes said during a HubSpot product announcement call held last Monday. "HubSpot has now pulled all of these tools together into a single, integrated suite."
