Sitecore, a Web content management and digital marketing software company, has announced the results to its recent marketing industry study: “The Multichannel Maturity Mandate.” The report, conducted with Forrester, includes responses from more than 270 marketing professionals across a wide range of industries and geographic regions.

The study indicates that senior level marketers need to adopt a multichannel customer engagement model to increase marketing performance, according to a company release. Most (77%) of marketers agree they will drive more sales and profit by evolving into an effective multichannel organization, while a smaller but significant number (35%) said they have lost business because they are not able to integrate customer interactions across digital, social, mobile and offline channels.

Social business technologies are revolutionizing how enterprises can communicate and collaborate with their business networks. In fact, the market for social enterprise applications and related services is projected to expand to expand from $900 million in 2011 to $6.4 billion in 2016, according to a Forrester Research report.

Reflecting this trend, Jive Software, a social business company, has introduced an on-demand collaboration tool that offers team members the ability to connect and work together. The Jive for Marketing Teams tool is designed to decrease the amount of time it takes to get programs delivered to market while helping internal colleagues and external partners, such as agencies and contractors, drive leads, build better brand awareness and reduce operational costs.

The wait is over: Marketing automation is now a publicly traded technology. Eloqua (Nasdaq: ELOQ) went public on August 2 – the first such firm to do so – issuing eight million shares at an opening price of $11.50 per share.

The company's stock price climbed as high as $15 during the first week of trading and at press time was trading near $13.92 a share.

The initial public offering (IPO) places Eloqua’s market capitalization at $368 million, or 4.4 times its sales of $85 million in the 12 months through June 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The Wall Street Journal reported that Eloqua’s revenue increased 42% to $45 million this fiscal year, although the company reported a net loss of $5.5 million, compared with a loss of $3.5 million in the first half of the prior fiscal year.

Distribion, Inc., a provider of web-based marketing automation software, last week announced the release of a social media marketing tool tailored for enterprises working in highly regulated industries.

The Distribion Social Media Bundle is designed to work with the company's existing suite of distributed marketing automation tools. The platform offers marketers and local sales reps a single, shared platform for managing branded, compliance-ready content that can be distributed across email, print and social media channels.

More B2B marketers are investing in data cleansing techniques to segment their target audiences and help prospects through the buyer journey. According to Maribeth Ross, VP of Marketing for NetProspex, these techniques allow marketers to target audiences more effectively; as a result, they generate more leads and see improvements in marketing-generated revenue metrics.

During a recent webinar -- “To Buy or Not to Buy… That is the Question: When and How to list in your B2B marketing programs” -- Ross explained the right time to use a contact list and the number of contacts needed to get results. Ross also discussed key facts about the data-buying process, as well as the necessary steps marketers should take after making a purchase.

By offering a multi-touch program, marketers can connect with prospects throughout the buying process, while exposing them to relevant content that promotes them to “hand-raiser status,” noted Ross.

Infogroup Targeting Solutions yesterday introduced Sapphire, an integrated marketing database powered by the company's Data Axle real-time data platform. Sapphire is designed to provide B2B marketers with multichannel engagement tools such as analytics, email, online advertising and lead generation.

Among the Sapphire prospect data offerings are new selections including: buying authority, software on site, hardware on site, area of work and government level. Sapphire is derived from over 350 response lists that combine Infogroup Targeting Solutions' high-quality data with a variety of additional sources from premier U.S. data providers that have been handpicked and invited to participate.