Business must coordinate according to the target audience and must be aware of what the customers’ needs. Communication with your potential customers will enable you to create loyal fans, who will then become your most valuable brand ambassadors. Every business should put effort into exploring your CRM options. They are- Operational CRM, Sales Force Automation, Marketing Automation, Service Automation, Analytical CRM, and Collaborative CRM. In short, the idea to implement CRM is to automatize the overall communication with each customer. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/marketing-strategies/how-to-approach-crm-use-the-basics-70973

This New Year, let's look back at the marketing experiences throughout 2015. We have learned that the fundamental concept of digital marketing is unaltered, no matter which industry we target. But, it teaches us to adapt to changing habits and practices of customers. Here are 3 digital marketing truths you should keep in mind - 1) to grow our presence across different channels, mobile is the only channel that has grown so rapidly. 2) Removing barriers across different channels so that your customer is able to communicate better. According to customers different preferences it's necessary to use data management platforms for organizing information. 3) Use of automation to use right content at the right time. Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/digital-marketing/top-3-digital-marketing-truths-take-away-2015-01413555#Cll3tXd2oAKuqhgF.97

ERP solution takes care of most of back office needs, but organizations still need specialized software within infrastructure for sales, marketing and other departments. Some ERP solutions offer a complete all-in-one solution and include tools like CRM and marketing automation. Integrating ERP with marketing automation and CRM tools is one way to centralize your data and streamline business operations. Another major benefit of integration is improving your customer experience. There are drawbacks of integration. One major barrier to integration is getting a legacy ERP solution to work properly with marketing automation and CRM tools. Read more benefits and drawbacks of integrating marketing automation and CRM with ERP at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/inside-erp/should-you-integrate-your-marketing-automation-and-crm-tools-into-your-erp-solution-70406

Today’s sales organization depends on CRM systems. Marketing automation is gaining importance to deliver increasing value to marketing teams. Both departments are benefitting from automation, and analytics, but, they would benefit more if they both work together. Rose de Fremery (the founder of lowercase d consulting) writes in her article about some ways your sales and marketing teams can get on the same page, and then get to the next level using CRM insights. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/4-ways-your-sales-and-marketing-teams-can-collaborate-effectively-using-crm-insights-70207

Earlier, only sales team used to use CRM to track and organize their activities. Now, the marketing team is also using automation to enjoy better productivity. If we realize the true potential of marketing automation and CRM, then we can increase sales lies & leverage their joint strengths to build a coordinated strategy. This will in turn guide us to a profitable long-term relationship with your business. There are four ways you can maximize the strengths of both systems to boost your sales impact. They are: Building relationships with customers, delivering the right message at the right time, getting a complete view of marketing and sales impact, and maximizing resources for better strategic planning. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/4-ways-to-leverage-your-crm-and-marketing-automation-systems-for-sales-impact-69900

In the last nine months of 2015, we have seen a number of digital marketing trends emerge. Anoop Gupta (experienced in web marketing) writes in his article about the various digital marketing trends. They are:  Content Marketing, Conversion Optimization, Marketing Automation, Mobile & Responsiveness, and Social Marketing. Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/digital-marketing/digital-marketing-trends-emerged-2015-01333320

Marketers must focus on demand generation to increase revenue. This will in turn lead to more sales. Demand generation can re position your product or service. Shannon Prager (a valued contributor to Business 2 Community) writes in her article about some points that will help in demand generation. They are: Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Retargeting, Marketing Automation and Personalizing Message. To know more, follow:  http://www.business2community.com/strategy/5-components-of-a-successful-demand-generation-strategy-01318399

Companies are giving importance to their online presence. But, the online presence of any business must attract  prospective buyer. But, how a company communicates is important. Nowadays, marketers use different technologies like marketing automation, content management systems etc. to market themselves. But, still some marketing effort of some companies fails. Columnist Mary Wallace in her article writes about four of the biggest reasons why online presence is failing to drive sales. Read more at: http://marketingland.com/online-presence-failing-4-reasons-138017

Marketing automation is software and tactics that enable companies to nurture prospects with highly personalized and useful content that helps convert prospects to customers and turn customers into delighted customers. It therefore makes for a highly profitable investment when it comes to adding value to the existing CRM solution. Eric Scott Johnston, analyst with Studio B, in an article on Inside-CRM blog talks about the takeaways from automated content marketing:

• Improve lead quality by reducing the number of unqualified leads.

• Develop great customer insights

• and finally when all things fall in place, companies retain their customers. 

For more on this piece follow the link  http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/3-ways-automated-content-marketing-can-benefit-your-crm-solution-67854 

Marketing automation a newly developed idea in marketing industry, deals with concepts of data tracking for lead, automate personal marketing activities and generate detailed reports for marketing activities. It embraces three major approaches namely lead tracking, automated execution and closed-loop reporting. At initial stages, foremost entity to consider in marketing automation is to show its value to the people dealing with checks in your company. With its involvement, few beneficiary impacts that it had generated includes, more lead output with same budget, empowered marketers to build and promote cross-channel online campaigns for user satisfaction, helped in financial justification of tracking and reports on ROI leading to no further complications in qualification or handling them onto sales, thus a smoother approach to marketing solutions.

To know more about marketing automation, please follow the link:http://www.business2community.com/marketing-automation/what-is-marketing-automation-01247668

A famous marketing automation provider claims that the new analytics abilities of the company are helping consumers in retrieving marketing data and transferring it for 'deeper analytics' to business intelligence (BI) systems. The features include accessibility of configured datasets and integrations. Traditional marketing automation systems didn't give marketers enough flexibility and accessibility to their specific, desired data, also requiring them to use a specific BI platform only. Present automation systems not only give access to the specific, required data but it can also be analyzed using any tool ranging from excel to different other BI tools. Read more at:

http://www.cmswire.com/marketing-automation/act-on-debuts-data-studio-capabilities/

In an age, where a large proportion of email opens are done via mobile devices, marketers should consider responsive design, which allows them to control the email display, according to the size of the viewer's screen, adding flexibility to the content display of the mail. Email marketing solution providers are there to help. Pre-send testing is important, which makes sure that the messages look as good as desired across all devices ranging from tablets, mobile phones and desktops. To know more, please follow the article by Akin Arikan (Contributing Author) at:http://www.cmswire.com/cms/digital-marketing/the-age-of-mobile-moves-from-static-to-dynamic-029255.php

According to Chris Golec (founder and CEO of Demandbase), innovations in marketing technology are solving many critical issues of B2B marketers. These innovations are taking place in advertising, personalization, conversion and measurement which are helping marketers in driving and engaging present and potential customers. Future of B2B is maintaining continuous and long term relationships with customers. Three areas where innovation in B2B taking place:

• Accounting Based Marketing (ABM): It provides a vital strategy for companies that want to create sustainable growth and profitability within their most important client accounts. ABM focuses explicitly on individual client accounts and their needs. More importantly, it is a collaborative approach that engages sales, marketing, delivery, and key executives toward achieving the client’s business goals.

• “Always-on” advertising & subscription model: B2B organizations need to advertise on a regular basis and for attracting right companies, you need to have the right content on your website.

• Best of breed vs. Single vendor: Best of breed is better because it provides best solutions for each problem.

Read more at: http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/30/the-future-of-b2b-marketing/

A combination of customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation can make an organization understand how to make effective marketing campaigns and what needs to be improved to make them even more effective. Marketing automation is ineffective if the integration of CRM and marketing automation is not correct. For CRM–marketing automation integration to be successful, all the parties i.e. from the sales team to the automation vendor must be at par and if data are inconsistent or duplicated, it can create problem in a marketing strategy or campaign. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/3-factors-to-consider-when-integrating-marketing-automation-and-crm-66138

2014 was the year of personalization. But, 2015 will be the year of contextualization. Marketers want to deliver the right experience, at the right time, to each user. The digital engagement tools make contextualization possible by combining real-time segmentation and personalization technology which helps to answer many questions about consumers. Sharing and capturing data across data sources like CRM, marketing automation, e-mail marketing systems, etc. and touch points like web, email, social, call center, online store, offline database, etc. helps an organization to create visitor profile that will improve target based marketing. Read more at:  http://digitalmarketingmagazine.co.uk/articles/moving-from-personalisation-to-contextualisation/1506

According to a new research it was found that 26% of marketers have never heard of marketing automation, and a further 49% are only partly familiar. 60% revealed that implementation of an automated technology had a positive impact on their marketing communications. Read more at: http://digitalmarketingmagazine.co.uk/digital-marketing-news/more-than-a-quarter-of-marketers-unaware-of-marketing-automation/1451